Introduction to the special section on attachment and psychopathology: 2. Overview of the field of attachment.

J. Bowlby (1969) proposed that the child's insistence on maintainance of proximity to protective (parental) figures was attributable to the activities of an attachment behavioral system which regulates primate safety and survival. M. D. S. Ainsworth, M. C. Blehar, E. Waters, and S. Wall's (1978) Strange Situation procedure later delineated 3 categories of 1-year-old response to brief laboratory separations from the parent (secure, avoidant, and resistant), each found systematically related to parent-infant interaction, and predictive of favorable versus unfavorable sequelae in middle childhood. Recently, a fourth, disorganized-disoriented infant Strange Situation category has been identified, and infant attachment has been found to predict child narratives. Additionally, an Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and corresponding system of discourse analysis has been devised that assesses variations in the ability to maintain coherent, collaborative discourse while discussing early relationships and their influences. Among parents, differences in patterning of AAI response predict corresponding forms of infant Strange Situation behavior, both concurrently and before the birth of the first child. Parents who are coherent-collaborative in discussing even highly unfavorable histories have infants who are secure. A strong majority of clinically distressed individuals are insecure with respect to attachment, and special vulnerabilities are appearing in disorganized-disoriented children. Relations to behavior genetics, family interaction patterns, psychophysiology, and treatment outcome studies are emerging or are anticipated.