Attachment, Violence, and Culture: Virginia Goldner and Vivian Carlson Speak at the AFTA Clinical Research Conference, October, 2000

Peter Fraenkel, Ph.D.

In introducing the program for final morning of the AFTA Clinical Research Conference, I suggested the informal title, "It's More Complex Than That." First Virginia Goldner, then Vivian Carlson, provided perspectives that deepened the dialogue on the place in systemic theory and therapy for the concerns upon which attachment theory revolves — those most profound levels of connection, need, vulnerability, and care.

Virginia spoke on the topic of intimate violence — specifically, relationships in which men batter women. Noting first the challenge even of naming this topic in a manner that captures its complexity and visceral reality, she pointed out how easy it is both for couples and therapists to indulge the natural tendency to avoid direct talk about it. Drawing upon the seminal ideas of psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin regarding domination and subordination in intimate relationships, her own classic work in feminist family therapy, and the in-depth clinical studies of the Ackerman Violence Project, Virginia spoke of how intimate violence represents a more extreme version of the problematic interface of gender, dependency, and power that "shadow(s) all adult relationships." In the generic script of gender relations, maleness is equated with unquestioned power and agency, and defined away from dependency and vulnerability; femaleness becomes the container for these latter needs and sensitivities, as well as synonymous with the absence of will and desire. As a result, males are perpetually engaged in a process of reducing and eliminating signs of their own and women's subjectivity, leaving a world of persons as objects to be manipulated (even if benignly at times), while women's intrapsychic and interpersonal "job" then becomes to restore the disowned inner world of felt need and softer sides. As the feminist lens has highlighted, through the influence of multiple institutions and beliefs promulgated in the wider culture this distinction between objecthood and subjecthood, and parallel distinctions between agency and passivity, separation and connection, then become organized hierarchically, with subjecthood subjugated to the forces of the objectifying gaze. And when the man's need to deny dependency, passivity, and connection is extreme — because of a history of abuse or shaming at the hands of a father, or a history of watching this father abuse a mother, the conditions are set for battering. Despite hidden sympathies for his abused mother, or the direct sharing of her experience of victimization if he too was abused, the boy in becoming a man is drawn to emulate his father and, like him, to deny feelings of vulnerability and need associated with the shame of being "like a woman."

Virginia supported these psychological and sociocultural observations with recent research findings on the epidemiology of violence. Data indicate that:

The majority of violent acts across cultures and classes are perpetrated by men

Intimate violence is the greatest cause of injury to women, more than the total number of car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined

One-third of all women will be physically assaulted by an intimate male partner at some time in their lives

Men are at greater risk of violence from strangers than from intimates; the reverse is true for women

Women who separate from their violent partners are six times more likely to be victimized by them than those who stay

Likewise, 50% of a large sample of murders of women by their partners were precipitated by the men's rage over actual, impending, or perceived estrangement from the women, and another 20% were rooted in the men's beliefs that the women were having affairs

In drawing the shared contours of the portraits of many of the women who stay in relationships with violent men, Virginia concurred with the common assumption that many of these women experienced sexual or physical violence or witnessed it perpetrated on their mothers, and through these experiences became socialized into the role of victim. However, she emphasized a more striking common pattern — that these women were typically emotionally neglected and devalued as children, ignored or put down when they tried to "make a claim for themselves," longing to be heard. As a result, they are compelled to stay with violent men not because of masochism, but because they see these men's dependence upon them, revealed around the edges and between the cracks of their violent episodes through the intensity of their possessiveness, their apologies after the beatings, their pleadings not to leave — proof to these women that they matter.

Virginia closed by offering, both in words and in a videotaped segment, a glimpse of the therapist's experience of witnessing and working with these couples in which men batter women, and outlined the therapeutic premises and processes of this work. Frankly, at this point, the quality of Virginia's prose moved from merely elegant to truly poetic, and I feel I can barely do her justice with my attempts at paraphrase. For instance, at one point she said, "The couple, then, is always poised on the knife edge of being lost and found. Indeed their implicit contract is that the relationship must always be a safe-house for these two lost children, bonded like Hansel and Gretel, making their way through the dream-infested forest of their actively, dangerously unsettled families. The magical reparative fantasy of this kind of romantic interest is ultimately coercive — 'you'd better be in my dream, or I'll ruin yours.'" She also drew a chuckle from the audience as she spoke about the "allure of romanticism" and the fantasy that it will cure the hidden attachment injuries of childhood, noting that, "as Freud observed long ago, romantic love is at best, a good knock off of the real thing that never was."

Virginia spoke of how the partners' protectiveness toward their relationship can send confusing signals to those poised to offer assistance, often resulting in extreme reactions towards them. She emphasized that the critical axis of treatment involves "holding the tension between psychological and moral discourses…" In other words, the therapist must work with the couple to understand the psychological sources of the violence and the interpersonal patterns that ignite it while maintaining clarity about the wrongness of the violence and the man's complete responsibility for it — including in the frequent cases in which the woman, rather than being the stereotyped passive victim, is an angry, vocal, attacking victim. As Virginia summarized, "The work of treatment, I now believe, is to convene a conversation around these matters, and to keep it going until safety, equity, remorse, and reparation are achieved, or until it becomes clear they cannot be."

One of the pleasures of this clinical research conference was that in bringing together the two heretofore mostly separated traditions of systemic theory/therapy and attachment theory, some of the human beings attached to those respective approaches came along, too! In other words, we made new acquaintances and friends. Vivian Carlson, a research psychologist with a long history of work with developmentally disabled children, is certainly one such new friend and valued colleague. In a clear, empirically-grounded presentation, Vivian addressed some of the concerns that several AFTA members had raised throughout the conference: namely, whither the role of culture and diversity in understanding parent-child attachment patterns? Vivian began by drawing a distinction between the project of achieving "cultural competence" and the stance of "cultural reciprocity." She described the cultural competence approach as a hierarchically-structured process in which professionals from dominant societies or groups attempt to familiarize themselves with the defining features of another (usually subordinate) society or group, typically resulting in stereotypical, simplistic, and static descriptions. All too often, the cultural competence model ends up wittingly or unwittingly highlighting that group's deficits in comparison to the "home" culture. In contrast, the cultural reciprocity approach involves recognizing from the outset one's own assumptions and beliefs, how these influence one's perceptions of another culture, and attempts to "bracket" or suspend these biases as one endeavors to understand the inner logic of the other culture's premises, goals, and practices.

The implications of choosing one or the other approach to understanding culture and difference are large, as different research questions and associated methods emerge depending on whether one seeks to assimilate the new culture into one's existing frameworks (cultural competence model) or seeks to understand this culture more on its own terms (cultural reciprocity model) in ways that might then transform one's own cultural understandings. Vivian demonstrated this point by reporting on emerging findings from a longitudinal study on parenting and subsequent child attachment style that she and her colleagues at the University of Connecticut are conducting. In this study, mother-infant dyads from middle class Anglo families in rural Connecticut were compared to a matched group of mother-infant dyads from Latino families from the same social class and similar living context in Puerto Rico. Comparison of videotaped home interactions found the Puerto Rican mothers engaged in far more "physical control" and active structuring of their infants' behavior (as operationalized by an Anglo-based attachment coding system) than did the Anglo mothers, who tended to encourage more independent exploration. According to Anglo-based attachment theory, such high physical control (typically labeled "intrusive") is believed causative of pathological avoidant or even disorganized attachment styles, in turn associated with later psychological and interpersonal disturbances.

However, it was the lack of a more open-minded, respectful view of the parenting styles of other cultures that resulted in the omission of the critical distinction: whereas high control in Anglo families is typically associated with low parental warmth and responsiveness (leading to negative outcomes in children), in Puerto Rican families, it is most typically associated with warmth and responsiveness (resulting in secure attachment and other positive behaviors in these children). Moreover, this study, and others like it (including one appearing in a recent issue of the American Psychologist that documented radically different associations between parenting styles and attachment behaviors in U.S. versus Japanese families) point to differing parenting and socialization goals for children in different societies. Whereas the dominant groups in U.S. society seek to produce autonomous, competent, self-reliant children, many other cultures within the U.S. and in other countries seek to produce obedient, interdependent children.

At the more micro level of research methodology, Vivian's work and that of her like-minded colleagues demonstrates the need for a broader taxonomy of parenting styles, one that is informed by both the positive and negative child outcomes relevant to each particular culture in which the taxonomy is utilized. At a middle level, her work challenges some of the most basic assumptions in traditional Anglo-based psychological theory and research about what constitutes good parenting. At the broader, more profound level, Vivian Carlson's work challenges the field to consider the possibility (nay, the reality) that there are, as she says, "a variety of pathways to developmental competence," and that maybe those cultures subordinated by what I call "psycho-imperialism" have much to teach dominant societies about what it can mean to be more fully human.

Peter Fraenkel is Associate Professor of Psychology, Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology, The City University of New York, and Director of the Center for Time, Work and the Family, Ackerman Institute for the Family.