PSYCH 645 Week 1 Psychodynamic and Attachment Theories Example

A Band Director Who Waits for Everyone to Leave: Reading One Case Through Psychodynamic and Attachment Theories

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University of Phoenix

PSYCH/645: Personality Theories

Week 1 Assignment

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[Date]

Elena Ruiz and her history are a composite case written for a model paper; theories and research findings come from the sources listed.

Personality theories try to explain why people behave in consistent ways across situations and time. Psychodynamic and attachment theories locate the roots of these patterns in early relationships and in processes outside awareness. This paper applies both to a composite case and evaluates what they can and cannot explain.

The Case

Elena Ruiz is twenty-nine and directs the band program at a public high school in Glendale, Arizona. She is admired by students and colleagues, organized and tireless; her marching band won a state title last fall. In her personal life, a pattern repeats. Over eight years, she has had four serious relationships. Each ended the same way: as the relationship deepened, typically around the time a partner suggested moving in together or meeting extended family, Elena grew irritable, found faults and ended it. Afterward she felt relief, then loneliness, then regret.

Elena's parents divorced when she was seven. Her father moved to Tucson, visited unpredictably and sometimes missed planned weekends without calling. Her mother, who worked two jobs, was loving but stretched thin and expected Elena to care for her younger brother. Elena describes herself as "the responsible one" and says she learned early "not to count on anyone."

Psychodynamic Ideas and Their Legacy

Freud's psychodynamic theory proposed that much of mental life is unconscious, that personality develops through childhood experiences, that people use defense mechanisms to reduce anxiety and that conflicts among desires, morality and reality shape behavior. Later psychodynamic theorists placed more weight on relationships and social needs.

Westen (1998) sorted Freud's ideas into those modern laboratories have confirmed and those they have not; the oral-anal-phallic timetable fell in the second pile, but a surprising number of broader claims landed in the first. Supported propositions include that much of mental life, including thoughts, feelings and motives, is unconscious; that mental processes operate in parallel and can conflict, producing compromise solutions; that stable personality patterns begin forming in childhood; that mental representations of self and others guide interactions; and that development involves learning to regulate sexual and aggressive feelings and moving from immature dependence to mature interdependence.

A Psychodynamic Reading

A psychodynamic reading of Elena focuses on conflict and defense. She wants closeness, yet closeness threatens repetition of her father's unreliability, arousing anxiety she may not consciously connect to him. Ending relationships before partners can leave may function as a defense that converts feared passive abandonment into active control. Finding faults could reflect devaluation, a defense that makes leaving easier. Her identity as "the responsible one" may also reflect reaction formation against dependence: she becomes the person others rely on so that she never has to rely on anyone.

These interpretations fit the pattern but are hard to test. The same behavior, ending relationships, could result from incompatibility, from career demands or from simple preferences. A responsible psychodynamic interpretation treats these as hypotheses, not conclusions.

Attachment Theory

Bowlby proposed that infants are biologically predisposed to seek closeness to caregivers for protection and that, from repeated experiences, children form internal working models of whether others are available and whether they themselves are worthy of care. Ainsworth's laboratory observations identified patterns of secure, anxious-ambivalent and avoidant attachment in infants.

Hazan and Shaver (1987) extended attachment theory to adult romantic relationships. In newspaper and student surveys, adults chose descriptions of how they felt in relationships that corresponded to secure, anxious-ambivalent and avoidant patterns, in proportions similar to those found in infants. Adults' attachment styles were related to their descriptions of their most important love experiences and to their recollections of childhood relationships with parents. Later researchers described adult attachment along two dimensions, anxiety about abandonment and avoidance of closeness, rather than as categories.

Elena ends relationships at exactly the moment they ask her to rely on someone.

An Attachment Reading

Elena's pattern suggests high scores on both attachment anxiety and avoidance, sometimes called fearful avoidance. She longs for closeness and fears losing it, yet she withdraws when closeness grows. Her father's unpredictable visits fit research linking inconsistent caregiving to anxious attachment, and her mother's stretched availability, combined with early caregiving responsibility, may have taught her self-reliance as protection.

How Stable Are Attachment Patterns?

Attachment theory is sometimes described as claiming that early patterns are fixed. Fraley (2002) meta-analyzed longitudinal studies of attachment security from infancy through early adulthood and tested competing models of stability. The data fit a model in which early representations exert a lasting, moderate influence, a prototype, while later experiences also shape attachment. Stability was moderate rather than high, meaning that early experience matters but does not determine adult patterns.

This finding suggests that Elena's pattern can change through new relationship experiences, especially with a partner who remains reliable when she withdraws, or through therapy.

Other Psychodynamic Voices

Later psychodynamic theorists offer additional angles. Karen Horney described basic anxiety, a child's feeling of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world, and three strategies for coping with it: moving toward people, moving against them and moving away from them. Elena's pattern blends moving toward, in her intense early investment in partners, with moving away, when closeness grows. Erik Erikson placed intimacy versus isolation as the central task of young adulthood, built on earlier resolutions of trust and identity. Elena's difficulty with trust in childhood, and her strong occupational identity, fit his sequence: she has built a secure sense of who she is at work, while intimacy remains unresolved.

What the Pattern Costs and Protects

Defenses persist because they work in the short term. Each breakup spares Elena the anxiety of waiting to be left and gives her a sense of control, followed by relief. The costs arrive later: loneliness, regret and a growing belief that she is "not built for relationships." Understanding both the protection and the cost is central to psychodynamic thinking, which treats symptoms as compromises rather than simple errors.

What the Theories Suggest About Change

Shedler (2010) reviewed outcome research on psychodynamic psychotherapy and concluded that its effects were as large as those of other empirically supported therapies and that benefits tended to persist or grow after treatment ended. Shedler described distinctive features, such as focus on emotion, exploration of avoidance, identification of recurring patterns and attention to the therapy relationship.

For Elena, a psychodynamic or attachment-informed therapy would explore her recurring pattern, connect it to early experiences and use the therapy relationship itself, in which she might feel the urge to quit as therapy deepens, as a chance to experience reliability.

Limits of These Theories

Both theories emphasize childhood, which risks underweighting Elena's adult circumstances, such as a demanding job with long evenings and weekends. Psychodynamic interpretations are difficult to falsify. Attachment research relies heavily on self-report in adults. Later weeks will examine traits, cognition, humanistic needs and culture, which may explain parts of Elena's pattern these theories miss.

Conclusion

Psychodynamic and attachment theories offer a coherent account of Elena's pattern: early experiences of unreliable care may have shaped expectations that closeness leads to loss and defenses that end relationships before that can happen. Modern research supports core ideas such as unconscious processes and moderately stable attachment patterns while rejecting determinism. The theories are most useful as hypotheses to explore, not verdicts on a person.

References

Fraley, R. C. (2002). Attachment stability from infancy to adulthood: Meta-analysis and dynamic modeling of developmental mechanisms. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6(2), 123-151. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0602_03

Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511-524. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511

Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 65(2), 98-109. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018378

Westen, D. (1998). The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 333-371. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.124.3.333