Adult Assessment of Attachment - The Adult Attachment Interview

The Adult Attachment Interview is a procedure for assessing adults' strategies for identifying, preventing, and protecting the self from perceived dangers, particularly dangers tied to intimate relationships. The course offered by Dr. Crittenden is based on an expansion of the Bowlby-Ainsworth theory (Crittenden, 1995) and an extension of the Main and Goldwyn procedure (Main & Goldwyn, in press) as applied to the Adult Attachment Interview (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1986, 1996).

The dynamic-maturational approach to the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is both a useful research tool and also a potential guide fr psychotherapists. Therapists, in particular, learn not only new ways to conceptualize disturbed development, but also ways to identify in adults' distortions of the mental processing of information, particularly information relevant to disorders of feelings, thought, and behavior. The techniques for interpreting speech can be useful even if the therapist does not formally use the interview itself in practice. For those interested in research applications, the 18-day training is usually sufficient to establish reliability on the major classifications and subclassifications.

The Dynamic-Maturational method (Crittenden, 1999) for analyzing Adult Attachment Interviews differs from the Main and Goldwyn method (in preparation) in several ways:

Attachment at other ages

Courses in Attachment

Source: http://www.patcrittenden.com/courses.html