in fact, as the avoidant baby sits perfectly still, playing with blocks, his or her face placid, on the inside a physiological storm is raging. It was these avoidant babies that Mary initially and wrongly called “not yet attached,” including the babies in Uganda who didn’t seem to know their mother from a stranger.
Which is to say, these babies are inhibiting—pushing down, avoiding—their inborn urge to seek comfort when under stress. They are cutting off their attachment behavior, which actually echoes what Bowlby had described six years earlier in his seminal 1958 paper: “When, however, the [attachment] response is not free to reach termination [i.e., is not responded to]…we experience tension, unease and anxiety.”
In the end, Mary and her team in Baltimore divided their twenty-six cases into three classifications—56 percent were deemed secure, 26 percent were avoidant, and 17 percent were resistant. Her Uganda babies (twenty-eight individual infants, but twenty-six dyads because of the two sets of twins) were divided into almost exactly the same numbers for secure infants, but the insecure classifications needed refining: 57 percent (sixteen pairs) were what she called “secure,” 25 percent (seven pairs) were what she called “insecurely attached,” and 18 percent (five pairs) were “not yet attached,” which correlate more closely with avoidant babies. Eventually her Baltimore team added five subgroups to the three classifications of A, B, and C. And, “to Ainsworth’s amazement, these eight groupings she created would hold up for twenty years and thousands of children.”
In the 1980s, after hundreds more Strange Situations had been done, Mary’s student Mary Main noticed that there was a group of Strange Situations that didn’t fall neatly into the eight classifications. These involved babies who, upon reunion, behaved in unusual, sometimes bizarre ways that didn’t seem to be part of any of the three patterns of attachment organization. They remained perfectly still, appeared to zone out, looked at the wall, or sometimes crawled or walked in circles around the mother, like the boy in the first Strange Situation that I saw with Dr. Steele. Main would soon find that these behaviors—statistically speaking, and not on a case-by-case basis—sometimes appeared when children were maltreated and perhaps felt afraid of their attachment figure. Main’s husband, Erik Hesse, and Main call this dilemma “fright without solution.” And from an attachment/behavioral system’s standpoint, it makes sense that this fear is difficult to tolerate. Consider Mary’s bird at the window, munching away when a person—a threat—appears on the other side of the glass. Suddenly torn between feeding and fleeing, little does the bird know, or care, that that scary person was the same one who filled up the feeder. But when a baby finds herself in such a situation, it’s trouble.
In other words, if a baby’s attachment figure is a source of both comfort and fear, the baby finds itself in a serious psychological and physiological dilemma when it instinctually wants to turn to its attachment figure for safety and solace—because that person is also dangerous. It’s a truly lose-lose situation.
This “disorganization” of the attachment pattern can also appear in cases where the parent is dealing with unresolved grief or trauma to such a degree that he or she is intermittently completely unavailable to the child—as in cases of dissociated affect, in which a parent seems to mentally disappear or wander off into some other place. Over time, even subtle forms of unpredictability can affect a child’s faith in her caregiver’s ability to tune in to her.
While it would take some time for Mary to accept this new “D” category, accept it she would. Today, disorganization is usually considered an element of one of the other patterns, though it is possible for an attachment relationship to be considered disorganized (D) as a primary classification. In other words, as researcher Barry Coughlan and his colleagues put it in a recent article, “disorganized attachment behaviors are not necessarily pervasive and may only become apparent for brief moments during the [Strange Situation Procedure]. As a result, children who receive a ‘disorganized’ primary classification also receive, where possible, a secondary alternate ‘organized’ classification.”
By the end of my week of Strange Situation training, I had become pretty comfortable with the three main classifications, though training in the D category takes an entire week of separate training to master. I was even beginning to be able to