Exploring Attachment as a Triadic Process: The Family Attachment Interview

Attachment theory offers a profound conceptual shift in moving beyondindividualised explanations to relational ones. With its battery ofassessments based on understanding parent-child interaction andrelational narratives, the field has built a considerable evidence base forunderstanding problems as residing between people rather than inpeople. In this paper, however, we suggest that this very success hasled to such understanding ossifying at a dyadic level – a child’srelationship with a specific parent, neglecting the impact of co-parentingrelationships on child attachment. For this reason, we sought a means ofmoving attachment assessment to a triadic level, exploring a child’sattachment to his parents’ relationship not just his parents asindividuals. The essential dyadic nature of current attachment interviewssuch as the Adult Attachment interview (AAI) and the ParentDevelopment Interview (PDI) we argue, means that key aspects ofpotential attachment self-protective organisation may be missing. Forthis reason, we developed out of these interviews, a Family AttachmentInterview (FAI), that explores both childhood attachment and currentcaregiving in triadic terms. We suggest analysing this interview using themethodology derived from the AAI and the Meaning of the Child Interview(MotC; a systemically aware way of making sense of caregivingdiscourse), as a means of making sense of family relationships ratherthan yielding classifications. We illustrate how this could work using acase of a couple in therapy struggling with their couple relationship andparenting, who were given the FAI. The approach is novel and indevelopment and we invite collaboration in taking these ideas forward.