Hostile–Helpless Relational Models and Disorganized Attachment Patterns Between Parents and Their Young Children: Review of Research and Implications for Clinical Work

In this chapter, we begin to elucidate the lawful relations between frightened, frightening, or contradictory maternal caregiving behaviors and the infant’s disorganized behavioral responses to this caregiving. In the study results, two profiles of parenting behaviors were identified among mothers of disorganized infants that we describe as “hostile” and “helpless” subgroups. Parents with the first profile tended to override the infant’s cues with a combination of negativeintrusive and role-reversed, self-referential behaviors. Students of the attachment literature will recognize that this combination of parental behaviors combines attachment cues that are both involving and rejecting of infant approach behaviors. We termed this group “hostile-self-referential regarding attachment.” Not surprisingly, the correlations between infant and parent behavior showed that infants of these parents combined avoidant and resistant behaviors with other disorganized behaviors toward the parent. These infants were classified as disorganized, with a subclassification of insecure (D-insecure, see Main & Solomon, 1990, for subclassification procedures).