Anxious attachment as a determinant of adult psychopathology

Traditionally, an excess of interpersonal dependency has been used to characterize disturbed interpersonal relationships in adults. This approach stands in sharp contrast to that of attachment theorists who conceptualize attachment as functionally distinct from dependency. Attachment theory focuses on anxious attachment in the definition and dynamics of disturbed adult interpersonal relationships. The purpose of this study was to examine the relevance of anxious attachment to the differentiation of psychiatric outpatients from nonpatients. Empirically, three scales (feared loss of the attachment figure, proximity seeking, and separation protest) measure the components of anxious attachment as defined by Bowlby. The scales were administered to two research samples. Sample 1 was composed of 136 respondents to a survey within the Calgary community. Sample 2 consisted of 110 psychiatric outpatients drawn from the psychotherapy clinic of the Calgary General Hospital. The results indicate that the three components of anxious attachment offer a clinically relevant system for differentiating between psychiatric outpatients and nonpatients. Of these three components, feared loss has the predominant effect. The implications of this finding for the delineation of disturbed interpersonal relationships in adults is discussed.