REFLECTIONS: THE CLINICAL RESEARCH CONFERENCE, 2000

Claudia Bepko

What could be more idyllic? A mellow fall weekend, a five-star hotel overlooking Lake Ontario, a small, other-worldly town fastidiously perfect as only Canadian towns can be, first class theater within walking distance, the company of friends, and 14.25 hours of high quality, intellectually stimulating presentations on the intricacies of attachment. Surely, for the lover of ideas, aesthetics and comfort in all of us, this had to be heaven. We listened, we talked, we walked, we shopped, we ate (was it my imagination or did we, in fact, eat the same meal reconstituted for three days?), and in the off moment when Howard Liddle failed to appear, we raced to Niagra Falls.

Sue Johnson did a masterful job of pulling together a conference rich with both new and familiar voices who spoke a language often unfamiliar to many of us. As one of the presenters remarked, "clearly psychologists don't read family systems literature and family therapists don't read psychology literature." So this was virgin territory for those of us who had little more than a passing awareness of Bowlby's work and the evolution of attachment theory since. The presentations were uniformly excellent. The presenters were uniformly challenging and personable.

We began with biological and ethnographic discussions of attachment behavior. On Thursday night, Stephen Suomi talked so fast on attachment in primates that he managed (intentionally) to pack four hours worth of material into one riveting hour. One more day's worth of this intense pace would have been exhilarating, but by the end of day two, my head was overheated. We had wound our way through seven more major presentations, poster sessions that were as stimulating, if not more so, than the talks, and running until 7pm on Saturday night, a panel discussion in which each of the four presenters tried valiantly to do a full length presentation of his or her work in 15 - 20 minutes. (One of these was the only presenter on attachment in gay couples). The next day we woke to Virginia Goldner. Her brilliant discussion of attachment in violent couples was completely mesmerizing, even on a Sunday morning after the two and a half exhausting days before.

And yet, the topic itself, attachment, in a room full of family systems therapists, could not but raise a certain level of controversy — much of it, I felt, left unspoken and unprocessed. The only problem with this whole idyllic conference was my nagging sense that it was almost as if we were back in the AFTA of the 80s. Was this part of the same group that had struggled through the Feminist Critique? Had some of us really been through the pain of Women's Institutes and Men's Institutes as they struggled to enunciate every nuance of systems theory's, as well as AFTA's gendered insensitivity until it reached a crystalline pitch? Had we really sat through those diversity plenaries with Monica McGoldrick and Ken Hardy and Rhea Almeida, to name a few? Hadn't we participated in group sessions where we stood to testify to our homosexuality, our religious and ethnic identities, our inclusion in or exclusion from privileged groups and classes? Could this possibly be the same AFTA, I wondered; AFTA before postmodernism and Narrative Therapy? Was I in a time warp where we got to go back to the modernist, almost regressive past that bordered on being non-systemic? Remember how simple life used to be when we looked only at dyads? This was the attachment conference. In this most stimulating of conversations, there was no color, there was no gender, and there was almost nothing not heterosexual. Maybe this is why it seemed so idyllic.

Here is my dilemma. If I am to become more effective as a clinician, and as a program/ theory builder, I need a way to think about the complexity of human attachment. I need a way to understand the influence of relational trauma — the impact it has on families, on children, and on society. I need to know what attachment theory can tell me about the pervasive breakdown of connectedness in modern culture. I need to know more about the ways that a failure of relational connection sets the stage for abuse of substances, abuse of women, abuse of sex, and the violence that permeates our lives.

But I need to know it in a way that includes men and women both as actors in complex systems of relationships, one that takes cultural differences into account, and that does not implicitly continue to blame the assumed caretaker, mother, for the evolution of a child's attachment style. (Having close male friends who, as gay partners, parent an adopted female who they brought home at two days old, I wondered how the research might address attachment in this context.) And finally, I would like to know much more about the neurobiology of attachment. Here, we've only scratched the surface.

I learned the basics of attachment theory at Niagra on the Lake. But the systemic thinking that could build on it was not fully in evidence. Perhaps it hasn't yet been written. Goldner, who suggests that we need more conceptual clarity in "layering" our thinking about attachment, begins to get at it. Safir and Sargent's Family Attachment Measure may approach a systemic application of it. That family systems and attachment theories are still new and strange bedfellows is all too apparent. I would have liked someone to provide a Feminist critique. I would have liked a presentation on "Attachment Patterns in Men and Boys," "Men as Caretakers," "Internal Working Models — the Homosexual Perspective." "Attachment Patterns in African American Families." "A Cross-Cultural Study of Attachment." Or, "The Dynamics of Family Attachment," just for instance.

Like most of our early working models of psychology, attachment theory was developed by white men and women in predominantly middle or upper class cultural groups. The research numbers were small, the groups highly homogeneous, and the validity of the coding potentially unreliable. The assumption that a child develops an "internal working model" of anything is simply that — an assumption. Whatever "it" really is remains a construction in language of a process that seems to be observable, depending on what you're looking for. What an internal working model might mean in a non-white context is a mystery. Solomon and George (1999) conclude in a chapter in the much mentioned Handbook of Attachment (Cassidy and Shaver, 1999) that in studying cross cultural validity, "ecological factors may have a powerful effect on the patterning of young children's secure-base behavior in the home" (308). And in general, contemporary researchers still struggle even to extend the assumptions of attachment theory beyond the second year of life.

I want to say that this conference was idyllic from the perspective of offering a meditative environment that provided the time to delve into a topic in depth, with a small group of compatriots. It was a much-needed intellectual retreat, and certainly AFTA should continue to provide this kind of experience that goes on without the hustle and bustle and the many competing demands of the annual conference. It was exciting and informative to hear the work of presenters outside the field of family therapy. Much will be useful in my work. Since I now develop programming for juvenile offenders, adolescents with serious substance abuse problems and children with mental health problems that result from serious trauma, I was particularly interested in the work of Marlene Moretti, who has been part of developing systems oriented, attachment -based programs for just such populations. I was disappointed that Howard Liddle didn't come — I need to know about his work.

But I was dismayed that no one talked about fathers. While one presenter was quick to assure me that the "caretaker" could be a father, in her research they mostly interviewed mothers because " it's easier to get women in, and men, you know, are less comfortable getting down on the floor to play with kids." I kept wondering how it must feel to be a man at this conference and have one's participation in child rearing and in helping to form a child's secure base of attachment completely ignored.

So I hope, in the future, that this particular conference doesn't become a forum in which AFTA's commitment to Diversity and to thoughtful critique on issues of gender, race and class gets put aside. It was difficult to tell whether the topic itself set the stage for the relative absence of these debates, or whether the clinical research conference constitutes a small splinter group that has become a sanctuary from the fray.

These worries of mine aside, this conference on "the typography of close relationships" was a unique and rich experience — sometimes a sanctuary is a fine place to spend a weekend.

Claudia Bepko, LCSW is the Assistant Director of Outpatient Services at Sweetser Family Institute in Portland, Maine. She is the author of several books and articles on family therapy, the latest, co-written with Thomas Johnson, is "Gay and Lesbian Couples in Therapy — Perspectives for the Contemporary Couple and Family Therapist" in the October 2000 issue of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy.