Behavior genetics, attachment, & transference

• Granddad: Exercises for Skeptics by James Brody, 3/12/97
  
  

I have enjoyed reading these messages about hereditary influences (with some EP speculations) on behavior. I would like to add that behavior genetic findings give strong support to both genetic and "environmental" sources of variance. For example, Bouchard (1994), in the journal Science, summarizes various twin studies of person ality and reports that genetic influence is 40%, shared family variance is 7%, and non-shared family variance (individual, idiosyncratic) is 25% of the variance. Thus, personality traits are influenced in a major way by genetic transmission and by "non-shared family influences." Both sides of the house are very important. One could take this a step farther and argue that the non-shared family influence is part and parcel of what the psychodynamicists speak of when they invoke the early history of the individual as formitive in personality. Indeed I have taken this farther step in a paper in progress in which I take an evolutionary psychological view of transference. The attachment behavioral system (a la John Bowlby) is an evolutionary product designed to assure survival of the infant by promoting proximity to the caregiver. The attachment system is considered to involve a subjective side called the internal working model, which is like a cognitive representation of what "works" for the child in eliciting caregiving. There is a large body of research on attachment sytles; the point being there are dynamics to the formation of different styles (using conditonal behavioral strategies to cement the bond) and it is an individual difference variable. The conditional strategies of the child to cement the attachment bond require excessive attention given to the caregiver, resulting in what the psychodynamicists (Alice Miller, D.W. Winnicott) would call development of the "false self". Recent work (Kraemer, 1992, Behav.Brain Sciences; Amini, et al, 1996, Psychiatry)have creatively linked the domains attachment, cognitive models (working model), and the biology of affect in a psychobiological integration that may help to explain the origin and nature of our internal working models/transference patterns. This kind of integration makes the distinction between biology and psychology shade into one another, and allows for key roles of genetic and psychological transaction with environmental experience. This perspective also ascribes to transference psychobiological origins, effects, and even treatments (see Amini, et al 1996, Psychiatry) although it is usually regarded as a purely "psychological" unconscious system. The relevant point of this rather rambling discussion is to state that I believe that the intergenerational transmission of behavior traits and quirks occus along simultaneous pathways of behavior genetics and the development of the attachment system which gives rise to the unconscious enactment of internal working models of relationships that we acquire in a variety of ways but which exist as a function of our evolutionary past. You might say that both Darwin and Freud were "right," as well as Mendel.

Mark Waugh

• A Theological Reply by Ed Riemann LCSW, 3/30/97
• Behavior, Genetics, Variance, & Individual Traits by James Brody, 4/1/97