ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters the concept of ‘internal working models’ according to the attachment theory of Bowlby (1969, 1973) was used in order to imagine the effect of narratives on the development of a child. This effect is further investigated in this chapter. Internal working models include representative information on patterns of relationships and caregiving, and enable a child to endure states without a mother. They contain inner expectations and patterns of meaning. Working models offer to process cognitive information. Attachment theory proposes thus a bridge between psychodynamic theories and cognitive sciences, argues Jean Knox (Knox, 2003). Internal working models influence far more than just cognitive processes; they also influence perception and the behaviour of a child to significant others. They are often unconscious since they are anchored in implicit memory. Parents communicate their internal working models mostly unconsciously to their children, which has led to the famous statement by the psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg and her colleagues:
In every nursery there are ghosts. There are the visitors from unremembered past of the parents, the uninvited guests at the christening. Under all favorable circumstances the unfriendly and unbidden spirits are banished from the nursery and return to their subterranean dwelling place. . . . This is not to say that ghosts cannot invent mischief from their burial places. Even among families where the love bonds are stable and strong, the intruders from the parental past may break through the magic circle in an unguarded moment, and a parent and his child may find themselves reenacting a moment or a scene from another time with another set of characters.
