Exploring attachment as a triadic process: The family attachment interview

Attachment theory offers a profound conceptual shift in moving beyond individualised explanations to relational ones. With its battery of assessments based on understanding parent-child interaction and relational narratives, the field has built a considerable evidence base for understanding problems as residing between people rather than in people. In this paper, however, we suggest that this very success has led to such understanding ossifying at a dyadic level – a child’s relationship with a specific parent, neglecting the impact of co-parenting relationships on child attachment. For this reason, we sought a means of moving attachment assessment to a triadic level, exploring a child’s attachment to his parents’ relationship not just his parents as individuals. The essential dyadic nature of current attachment interviews such as the Adult Attachment interview (AAI) and the Parent Development Interview (PDI) we argue, means that key aspects of potential attachment self-protective organisation may be missing. For this reason, we developed out of these interviews, a Family Attachment Interview (FAI), that explores both childhood attachment and current caregiving in triadic terms. We suggest analysing this interview using the methodology derived from the AAI and the Meaning of the Child Interview (MotC; a systemically aware way of making sense of caregiving discourse), as a means of understanding family relationships rather than yielding classifications. We illustrate how this could work using a case of a couple in therapy struggling with their couple relationship and parenting, who were given the FAI. The approach is novel and in development and we invite collaboration in taking these ideas forward.