ABSTRACT
Infants with secure attachment have mothers who are secure and autonomous with respect to their adult functioning and their experience of their own attachment relationships. Parents of ambivalent infants have a preoccupied state of mind, so called because their past unsatisfactory attachment experiences continually intrude upon their present life and relationships. The capacity to know the mind of another is a prerequisite for living in an intersubjective world. When the mother–infant dyad is misattuned, the infant's representations become "expectancies of misregulations". William Blatt's theory attempts to incorporate Otto F. Kernberg on boundary articulation, Margaret Mahler on separation–individuation, Daniel Stern on the development of the self and processes of intersubjectivity, and Piagetian concepts with respect to the cognitive components of development. John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, who formed a life-long research partnership, were key figures in the development of attachment theory. Bowlby argued that psychoanalytic theories needed to be scientifically investigated using the research methods of the natural sciences.
