The coherence of a parent’s narrative, not its content, predicts infant attachment security

Evidence

What Main discovered — in a series of papers beginning in the mid-1980s — was that what predicted infant attachment security was not the content of the parent’s childhood history but the form of the parent’s narrative. Not what had happened to them, but how coherently they could talk about what had happened to them. — , The Rod and the Child, 8581

Categorization

• XREF: Surprising and counterintuitive — this reverses intuition that severity of history matters most. Extends the Sroufe-Egeland narrative-coherence finding into formal attachment theory. — connects to: Narrative coherence about one’s own childhood predicts whether maltreatment is transmitted — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 8572; Emotional disclosure without narrative integration can increase distress instead of healing — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 8713; Understanding is narrative closure, not cumulative addition of data — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 162

Related

• Narrative coherence about one’s own childhood predicts whether maltreatment is transmitted (similarity 0.85)
• Emotional disclosure without narrative integration can increase distress instead of healing (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Emotional disclosure without narrative integration can increase distress instead of healing #corroborates (0.60) — , The Rod and the Child, 8713