ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I describe my thinking about the relations between quality of attachment and aspects of psychopathology from the perspective of mental processing of information. To do this, I retell the well-known story of attachment in infancy (Ainsworth, 1985) in terms of the process of learning to regulate mental and interpersonal functioning. Next I consider the effect of neurological maturation on the transition to preoperational functioning and sketch how this process may apply to later ages. Along the way, I integrate several theories, that is, evolutionary, learning, Piagetian, Vygotskyan, and information processing theories, theory regarding affect, and nonlinear probability theory, with attachment theory. I use these to generate a model of how the Ainsworth A/B/C patterns of attachment are differentiated with respect to mental functioning using two dimensions: (1) the source of information and (2) degree of integration of information. Lastly, I discuss the relation of this model to psychopathology.
