https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=yGHS2194WmI
Welcome everyone to another episode of the Cognitive Science Show. This is episode 7 of Psychopathology and Well-Being. I’m here with Greg Enriquez and Gary Hovnissian. Say hi, please gentlemen. Hey. Good seeing you all again. We’re going to continue this journey. This is episode 7, so I’m not going to attempt anything like an introduction to the series. Please go back and see episode 1 if you’re just joining us, work your way through, or this won’t make too much sense to you. So last time, Gary was shepherding us through the discussion, and I’m going to turn things over to him now. Great. Thank you for that. So just to recap where we’re at right now, the argument that we’ve been building so far is that recursive relevance realization lies at the core of the different normativities that psychologists talk about, particularly in personality theory. So far, we’ve looked at the Big Five Theory of Personality and we’ve reviewed the inactivist Big Five Theory that John and I published on earlier or later last year. And the claim there was that there’s relevance, there’s recursive relevance realization happening within each of the traits and between each of the traits. And you see recursive RR taking place across the entire personality hierarchy, such that at the highest level between the two meta traits, stability and plasticity, you have, again, RRR happening. And we talked about RRR as a kind of optimal gripping process where when relevance is being realized, that’s when the system has an optimal grip over its world. And just a brief example of that was, let’s say, trade extraversion, which is reward sensitivity. So people who are high in extraversion, they tend to be very opportunistically minded. They tend to be very enthusiastic and excitable. If they hear that there’s a party going on next door, they might get like very, you know, up and going about it. In contexts where risks are relatively low and rewards, the possibility of reward is high, extraversion is going to be adaptive by this logic. But in contexts where the opposite holds true, such as, you know, a pandemic situation, let’s say, where there’s physical distancing measures in place, then being motivated by extraversion, extraverted behaviors, or behaviors that are motivated by extraversion might actually be maladaptive. And so there will be a lack of optimal grip, right, because you’ll go out and interact with others and then contract the coronavirus and everything’s bad. So by the end of the meeting last time, we started to segue into attachment theory. And the argument that we want to build up to today is that at the highest level of personality from the Big Five point of view, right, which offers a structural functional account or EB5T offers a structural functional account of personality, you’ve got the same kind of opponent processing happening between stability and plasticity or security and exploration as you find taking place in attachment formation and styles from the attachment theory perspective, which provides an account of significant developmental aspects of personality. So what we want to do today is really explore that confluence between that thematic confluence and convergence between the structural functional account of personality offered by EB5T and the developmental account offered by attachment theory and try to ground attachment theory in relevance realization, recursive relevance realization, and then link it to an activist cognitive science as well, because those are really inextricable parts of one another in a deep sense. And by the end of it, we’ll also look at some of the, well, the main cross-cultural critique of attachment theory. We’ll call it the ethnocentric critique. And that’s just a foreshadow of what we’re going to talk about. So, okay, anything you’d like to add? Yeah, please, please. So first of all, I want to also remember two things. One is the mapping of all of that into Greg’s framework, really bringing out the recursive in the recursive relevance realization, and he giving us an ontogenetic phylogenetic hierarchy, which adds deep time and deep development to the model we’re building. So I wanted to emphasize that. And secondly, we were talking about recursive relevance realization theory of the traits also as something that’s applicable not only within individual cognition, but also working within distributed cognition. In fact, that might be one of the primary functions of the personality traits is to optimize for distributed cognitive, optimize the functionality of distributed cognition, giving us hyper agency for dealing with hyper objects. So I just wanted to bring out those two things. Yeah, lovely. And I’ll just say in terms of the stack and the way I think about it, phylogenetically, so we have organism into animal into mammal, and we can see approach positivity behavioral activation stuff that has to then be regulated with behavioral innovation, avoidance of danger that grounds your extroversion neuroticism in the animal mammal structures. Okay. And then in social mammals, you get agreeableness. We can argue that this creates a sort of the ground then of agent arena, agent other arena relations in general. There’s definitely some hints of things like openness and conscientiousness, but I would say those are sort of then seeded at the human person level and the process of socio cultural acculturation socialization processes can be then framed at the human person level whereby conscientiousness about order, openness about exploration. And so we can see that stacking, you have that conversation really interesting conversation about agreeableness. It’s got the self other function. But also when you do other you’re going to orient towards some sort of conservativism, social stability organization there when you do sort of disagreeable, you’re going against the group, you’re exploring, you’re edging yourself out. So there’s clearly some of that so that agreeableness would be more a stability function probably and disagreeable more of an exploration function. But there’s also this whole self other dynamic. And we sort of made the claim that that’s a little bit murkier than extroversion versus neuroticism or openness versus conscientiousness in this stability plasticity dynamic. Right. I think it brings out another dimension of optimal gripping that’s not really talked about well in the existing papers, which is the self other dimension very much. I think that’s a very, I think that’s an excellent theoretical point. I would love to explore ways of linking that with attachment theory actually. Yes, so we will. Yeah, let’s keep that on the back burner as we move into star a little thing called the influence matrix and we’ll bring a lot of this together. Okay. Excellent. Okay, so thank you for filling in those gaps. So now that we have a relatively rich picture of the problematic, let’s move into it. So last time we ended by talking about or introducing attachment theory, at least in the historical sense of what what inspired it how it came about what the main rationale was and maybe we can start by resuming some of that. Before we get into the theoretical assumptions, or actually theoretical formulations, sorry, of attachment theory. So at the time. You know, attachment. It was a concept and topic that was discussed by psychologists, but the predominant understanding which was known as the secondary drive theory of attachments was that all attachment behaviors like clinging suckling crying right calling following. Following that they are a consequence of a certain kind of associative learning between knowing, on the one hand, that the caregiver is. The source of food, basically right from the child’s point of view, and on the other hand, having. Right, coupled in a really behavior sense right the fact that here’s the caregiver. Here’s the food that’s there. And here are all the behaviors I need to do in order to. Actually get my hands on the food, which is the milk or or whatnot. And over time you get attached to your caregivers because you learn that that’s where you get food. That was the basic understanding, and this is the understanding that Bowlby essentially undermined with his theoretical framework. The idea there was that we don’t actually learn. attachment behaviors, but that we’re sort of born with them, they they’re constituted by a kind of behavioral instinctive behavioral system that has been inherited. As a consequence of our evolutionary history. Yeah, we went over that last time. The the you need something like attachment to deal with the co evolution of big brains and bipedalism. Right right so so examples and you know the reason for that is that statistically speaking right as helpless as you are as an infant. If you’re too far from your caregiver at any given point in time and something goes wrong, then you risk death basically that’s a poor evolutionary strategy right so. attachment evolved to so this was the definition that that Bowlby gave for attachment behaviors. Attachment behaviors are all and any behaviors whose predictable outcome is proximity with the caregiver. And so this is where control theory sort of comes in and his anti teleological approach to attachment comes in look at the wording right. he’s not saying that attachment, the function of attachment is to you know, bring about proximity. between caregiver and infant he’s only saying that the the with any attachment behaviors the predictable outcome is proximity between caregiver and infant. yeah I find that a bit of a metaphysical sleight of hand I don’t think he’s really doing what he thinks he’s doing, but we don’t have to get we don’t have to dig into metaphysics around that. yeah so some examples of attachment behaviors again right. When when the infant is. Cold or frightened or in pain or hungry, for example, or tired all these things are going to. sort of cause in some sense right then to cry or to get fussy let’s say and what happens when we hear baby crying. there’s a part of us that’s that it speaks to that that it calls right, we have to get close to it and make it feel better, we have to soothe it. Right and what happens when we’ve got an infant or sorry a toddler let’s say who is now exploring the proximal environment and then. Before we know it we’re in the kitchen and while we’re cooking we look around and we don’t see our toddler around. it’s crawled away from where we can see it right, what do we do we say johnny johnny or Ted Ted right we call the toddler and. What what’s that meant to do that’s also an attachment behavior from on the part of the caregiver again the predictable outcome of these kinds of behaviors from both these point of view is proximity between caregiver and infant so. The interesting observation is so how does this sort of work and come together, how is attachment formed from from the early developmental point of view. Back when bolby was doing the studies and all the studies and literature that he was considering the idea I don’t know if this has been updated, by the way, it probably has, and if you know this literature literature, please. fill me in on this, but. What I read was that at around 15 weeks of age. So at around five or six weeks of age infants start to more or less randomly smile. But it’s like it’s random it’s arbitrary they see people’s faces and there’s like a half smile that cracks and. there’s something like that beginning to emerge in form but it’s not quite stable, but at around 14 weeks of age there’s a shift that takes place developmentally. But at around 14 weeks of age there’s a shift that takes place developmentally that they begin to selectively smile at people’s faces but. Any person’s face it’s indiscriminate you see right as an infant at around that age, you see any person’s face you’re going to crack open a smile. And that’s because there’s again, these are evolutionary heuristics that we’ve inherited right we were in here. The human environment is an inherently social environment and that’s the environment that we’ve adapted to across evolutionary stretches of time, and so. The logic here is that we’ve got this basic attunement this instinctual attunement to faces right the face to face interaction. Now, the thing is that over time, the smile of response to people’s faces becomes more and more discriminant. Such that by around. Five six months of age. Infants smile at familiar faces, but their response to unfamiliar faces is one of fear. Yes, and an anxiety and so. And so, Bobby’s point was that by around five six months of age in normal settings so non institutional settings, for example, like i’m thinking of like orphans. You know infants and things like that, but around five six months of age infants are already discriminating between familiar and unfamiliar faces and. Right they favor they prefer they want to be close to those who are familiar and when confronted with the unfamiliar they. The natural responses fear right right fearful withdrawal, so to speak, and so his claim was that if by around eight months of age you haven’t formed a stable attachment so. There aren’t any familiar faces or familiar figures that you can reliably go to when confronted with the unfamiliar with the unknown, then. The likelihood that you’re going to form healthy and stable attachments drops to virtually zero and the likelihood that you’re going to experience problems socially cognitively emotionally and whatever else it skyrockets. So over time, essentially there’s a couple of things happening on the one hand there’s the growing understanding and sense of familiarity right the capacity to discriminate the familiar and unfamiliar. And what allows for the formation of stable attachment between yourself and your caregivers the familiar presumably the familiar faces is, on the one hand, the reliability of. Their responsivity right to your attachment behaviors right when you cry, for example, right when I when i’m in distress I. I want to know that the world will be there for me to fall back on and the world for me as an infant is my parents right that that’s the core of my world. So I come to know the world as a trustworthy place or not through my relationship with my parents so that sort of sets the template for my relationship to the world in the broader sense after I get socialized. That might have a long term thing that this hasn’t been adequately explored, but human beings seem to carry around a a good world hypothesis. Which causes them no end of trouble in various kinds of existential situations absurd loss and. vicious hate and all kinds of things that human beings do run up against and. The good the good trustworthy world hypothesis that can actually ultimately be significantly maladaptive when you hit so those crooked guardian limit situations. And so I just wanted to note that as something I just I want to I want to keep open the constant theme that that which makes us adaptive also makes us susceptible to self deceptive self destructive behavior. lovely. I’m really curious, not that this well, this might take us off on a bit of a tangent, but what is the most important thing that human beings do to protect themselves from the world? Well, this might take us off on a bit of a tangent, but what’s the literature that takes a look at that because that’s very similar to some of the psychoanalytic literature, especially. Connect I do not know of any literature that takes a look at that connection I just positive. But you have you have sort of the eric sony and you know developing a basic trust on one in one body of literature and then you have the other literature about how people. really wrestle with the good world hypothesis in in existential limit situations I know great familiar with probably both of these literature I do know you have any literature that tries to bridge between them know. yeah i’m not richly familiar, I mean there’s Jan off boldness just world hypothesis and relationship to the fundamental assumptions and how people hold on to those particular kinds of assumptions what happens when they get shattered. In particular ways that that that’s certainly the primary literature in terms of from an empirical perspective. From an eric sony and perspective in relationship to whether or not individuals are able to achieve a sense of generativity. A fundamental sense in which they can participate in a generative way or ultimately see their life and relationship to despair, meaning their efforts were fundamentally broken. And they weren’t able to materialize their potential, as it were, but those are just some of the certainly concepts that would resonate from an eric sony and or Jana bullman just world frame that would relate to this. I was just wondering, though, I like, and you do have more familiarity that I. The just world hypothesis, which of course is more contian, but we can put that all aside. But I don’t know of any literature that like tries to link this these two together via attachment theory. That we may have built up a you know secure attachment gives us an orientation to the world that is very largely adaptive but can be maladaptive when we hit. And we discovered that in some fundamental ways, the world is not a just place, it is not a trustworthy place. Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. Unfortunately, yeah, I do not. I’m not familiar enough that those literatures are big enough. So I’m sure people at least raise those kinds of questions. I put money on that they haven’t given the way that well. Given the way that psychology is capable of siloing itself and fragmenting itself something you might have thought of at one point. Anyway, yes. I want to make it clear to everybody listening, this is just conjecture at this point, but of course, one of the functions of science is to raise. And ask questions that seem plausible and relevant to ask so but I going to turn things back over to Gary now. Okay, okay, so thanks for that and the last point. That I was making was that what tends to reinforce attachment behaviors. The last point that I was making was that what tends to reinforce attachment behaviors. Like crying calling suckling etc etc and what allows for the formation of attachment styles which we’ll get into in just a moment. On volbie’s account or is two things one how readily the caregiver response to the infants cries and to how readily the caregiver initiate social interactions with the infant. In other words, coming in making faces right singing babbling etc etc holding and then playing with toys these sorts of things. Because really that that for from the infants point of view, if you try to imagine right as an adult, albeit. If you try to imagine what that’s like right it’s it’s there’s there’s something important happening that you can’t understand, but it nevertheless grips your attention. Which is the emergence of a face that you can get dynamically coupled to in real time, and there are studies demonstrating the power of right and also the necessity and really the power of. These dynamical coupling patterns that unfold between right infants in the pre verbal stages and. In their interactions with caregivers or with others and maybe i’ll actually cite one of these studies because it’s like super interesting, at least to me. So, if you put infants in front of their caregiver like just in front of their face they’re going to prefer that obviously over a recording of their caregivers face if you. Do away with the visual the visuals of it, and you just put a recording of the caregivers voice they’re going to prefer the visual over the caregivers voice, however, if you. create like a like a. If you put the caregiver online right with a microphone and a speaker right such that they can enter into a conversation right a behavioral sort of conversation with the caregiver. Right, so if they enter into a conversation right a behavioral sort of conversation through just sound they’re going to favor that over either the visual recording right or the auditory recording. yeah I just want to comment on that. And first, I, and you know, and the fact you know that that. You know, I think there’s a lot of times when we have caregivers who are in a conversation, and they’re really good caregivers enter into ghostly dialogue with their children, they they they speak both sides of the dialogue. Which is a really strange behavior and we just do it naturally, whether thinking about it, nobody. What do you mean, what do you mean. I was to me today timmy’s really happy. And I’ll go in and I’ll teach and I’ll address a question to the students and then answer it on their behalf. I’ll say you oh you may all be thinking this and then you’d be thinking, and this is how I respond and if I found I haven’t done a scientific study on this, but anecdotally. If I do ghostly dialogue that really primes actual dialogue for the students they’re much more likely to feel comfortable of entering into actual dialogue with me. Certainly. That yeah. So anyway, one of the. Just gonna say one more thing and then I’ll let you go great and I’m thinking here and this somehow so first of all the the the the primal algae, the primordial nature of the logos of that kind of dialogue dry trying to draw personhood out from the person how primordial it is. And, and then all of seagulls work showing that the capacity that predicts whether or not parents can enter into that is a capacity for a fluent and coherent autobiography. Their use of a narrative for themselves predicts how well, but if they have like. And this is, and this helps explain why things get passed on, but if their autobiography is broken by trauma or by repression right and it’s a broken fragmented one, then they have that that predicts that they’re less capable of good attachment with their children. yeah I recommend seagulls work on this he’s got a very broad integrative view of interpersonal. Yes, yes. Good way and his conception of the mind as energy information flow as a lot of resonance so what actually what I was thinking was so as a therapist one of the. predominant sort of styles that I developed I end up calling directive empathy. And so, and it’s an intersection of Rogers with the idea of empathy where i’m going to track the organismic valuing process of the core. experiential self system sort of like how is the body into the animal into the mammal primate getting organized in a nonverbal way. track that and what it’s seeking and what it’s fearing in relation and then organize your relationship to the ego narrator and then enter into the side relationship to the ego narrator and. shine a flashlight from my perspective as a psychological doctor that says hey it seems to me that your experience in self maybe feeling this. For example, you know hey you’re really you’re trying to achieve if we go back to the example last time you’re trying to both achieve order and explore and have all these aspirations, the same time you feel really defensive at your core. Okay, and this creates an enormous amount of psychic tension that you’re pressing upon yourself and as things get troubled you get stuck and rigid and frustrated and then that creates actually more intense. systems and then i’ll know that people are like when they’re in it they’re like oh my God that’s right right they’ll just fall out of them and basically like. So john your comment and relationship to what parents are doing you know Tommy feels happy actually in many ways there’s a lot of parallels there and I just a higher level of complexification. As i’m going to try to shine the light onto the psychic structure and bring a little bit of narrative coherent order to it that they might not have accessible to them. So we’ve got we’ve got this happening at the level of the parenting I taken it into pedagogy with ghostly dialogue and you’ve taken it into therapy with what you call it directed empathy. directed or directive empathy and it just it’s the the line again is relationship for Rogers so Rogers obviously adopted a very non directive approach. The argument for Rogers was that the organic valuing process would invariably seek coherent integration, as long as it wasn’t judged and was given the freedom of just reflection okay and then that would create a coherent integration. I think there’s there’s validity to the fact that we want to empathize with that value and process, but the simple idea that you would be able to wind its way through. A coherent integration at a very complicated society without helping guide actually what are the justifications for what’s actually going on, and that people have a lot of. misconceptions like rigidly beliefs about just world or any number of types of things that a wise sage might be able to not that i’m putting myself in that but just acting in that particular role be able to. delineate and provide twist to and then afford a more flexible adaptive rich narrator that they can bring experience into order in that regard. Right. So, so what we’re all exploring here in a really powerful way is deeper connections between attachment theory and communication theory which that’s also very, very interesting I hadn’t thought about those connections. Wow. yeah that’s right communication as it pertains to. His communication is right it’s a two way street in a sense, and one of the things that we’re always in some sense faced with is the potential with communicating with the unknown. Sending them right action reaction there’s me and the world and the vast majority of the world is actually unknown to me. The rest of it is just like my finite limited models of how the world works and the different zones right of reality, where I feel relatively stable and ensure myself, but if. If there’s a lack of security that one has within oneself then that’s likely going to discourage oneself from communicating with the unknown. From interacting with the unknown, which is necessary for like stable healthy adaptive. Being, I would say, in the world. So. One thing i’ll just add to that is at least from a utah perspective, we want to have really four lines of communication in the human person layer meaning there’s the primate line in fact i’m petting my dog Benji right now I took them to get his nails cut okay. So you walk him into the the and he doesn’t like that. So all of a sudden he gets anxious and start pawing on me and i’ll try to hide behind me and stay in proximity to me. Because he’s got the attachment behaviors and then I care and I use hey it’s okay try to sue all of that’s happening at the mammal level, you know it’s proximity it’s attachment it’s grooming okay it’s hugging and then for us. we’re down narrating a person culture, justificatory level the propositional networks that bring to bear and certainly for me a lot of human psychology is in this interface between our primate. In this interface between our primate embody perspectival participatory procedural knowers that are embedded and enacting and then our propositional justifying knowers and a huge amount of. Well, either misguided hell or good coherent integration happens in relationship vertical and horizontal flow across maybe those four lines of communication. Greg Do you think one of the things that seagulls work is pointing to this is a question is that one of the things that the net narrative might do, especially autobiographical narrative. is get the proper alignment of the four P’s so as to facilitate better attachment do you think that that might be. Actually, what I would think he says actually what affect does is actually does that across all systems but narrative provides the context in which affect can be actively integrating. I see I see right right right that’s better. That’s better have a narrative that thing can basically like hey I was humiliated okay what the narrative does is the ego then shines the light and affords a propositional network that then enables the system to be. If i’m a man and I would never be humiliated. ego structure, then how can you possibly create a flashlight that would afford that and then this thing stays in the shadows. And then the actual experience of humiliation in that moment can’t be brought to the stadium of the mind, as it were, and get integrated but instead stays in the shadows of it, but still has significant impact. IE gets to a fragmented vulnerable structure of insecurity, because the system of justification is trying to maintain its structure through dissonance. But it’s not able to metabolize it and create the affect which then brings to bear this energized motion across the stack. And says oh here’s my embodied narrative way of being in the world that affords clarity about what happened to me and what I might want to do about it. And then you want to regulate what you might have to do about it in a direct way because you’re as a person you got to do it over time, but I would say that that’s the narrative structure when done right affords the affective structure to really integrate across the stack. That’s good. And you could conjoin that with Hutto’s idea that narrative helps improve our mindset abilities to track from behavior into intention. That’s why we’re always doing narrative. And then your arrow has the idea that narrative gets us our cognition functioning in this really complex recursive self organizing way that helps us track dynamical systems. So we can get a lot of convergence around why narrative might improve attachment then. And I would just say that the narrative really serves the integrative function across time. Okay, so the egoic structure is across time. In the moment structure, the embodied structure of the coherent integration is the affect. So it’s based on what’s the cohere and then it wants to extend across the person. Yeah. Plane and narrative does that and affect does this and we want actually good vertical and horizontal coherence along those lines. Yeah, yeah, the situational interaction theory that narrative affords us being temporally extended cognitive agents. Because it affords non logical identity movements for us. Yes. We talked about that in the elusive eye, right? We did. Okay, so there’s a lot of why narrative would back into attachment is very, very cool. Totally. Very interesting. And yeah, maybe I’ll just make one comment about this and then let’s let’s get get more directly into the attachment stuff. What happens in the absence of narrative? It’s like affective chaos in a sense, right? Because the world becomes in the temporal sense, the future becomes relatively unpredictable. And so one of the things that narrative protects us from is the chaos of the unpredictable future. And it’s interesting how attached people become to their own narratives and their own belief systems. You think of like, you know, ideologues, for example, like people who are very, very dogmatically rigidly attached to their beliefs. And also what happens during psychosis, for example, where the delusional belief systems are formed as a way of stabilizing the person’s inner being, right? Because in the absence of such narrative structures, delusional belief systems are formed in the sense that they are not necessarily delusional as they might be. The world still becomes too overwhelming to contend with in the affective sense, perhaps. But how this relates to attachment is, again, the same sort of theme where we need we need a kind of security in place from from the unpredictable and intolerable unknown, let’s say, such that will encourage us to face it and to actively engage with it and make sense of it. And so I just want to comment on that, because I like what you just did, how narrative is a way of temporally extending the way Greg was talking about our security zone. And of course, it goes awry in conspiracy theory and magical thinking, as you said. But I would also note that cultures have ways of undermining the rigid grip of narrative. You have coans, you have parables, you have people that move and give priority to dialogue over narrative. I’m engaged in some of those practices. You have people where you have contemplative practices that try to get us beyond narrative frameworks. So there’s also a lot of mechanisms that are. And I think one of the things religions do is they try to get the narrative and the trans narrative into some kind of optimal relation. Our culture is really messed up on this. And so we oscillate between being completely irreverent cynicism and conspiratorial narrativity. And that’s where we live right now. And the fact that we oscillate so violently with so much volatility between those is how much the opponent processing is really breaking down. So I just wanted to put that in. No, that’s a great, great point. I love that. So so let’s talk about this dynamic between security and exploration. Yeah. Which is what this really seems to be about. And, you know, in an opponent processing fashion, especially like the dynamic seems to be organized according to the opponent processing principles that. The theory of triple are really describes and talks about. So I’m thinking of two things. One of them is one of the situations, one of the scenarios that Bowlby described in his first book of the three part volume of on attachment and loss where. Essentially, the scenario is you’ve got like a toddler and their caregiver in a room that’s like really big like it’s really big. And what they do is like there’s toys and there’s different parts of the room that the toddler can in principle go to. And if you just observe the the behavior of the toddler and the caregiver, it goes something like this. Toddler starts close to the caregiver, then sort of like crawls around and then looks back at the caregiver’s face to see. This is social referencing, tracking how the caregiver is responding to different objects in the environment. So if the caregiver freaks out, let’s say the infant is going to notice this and crawl back to the caregiver. But if the caregiver is relatively stable and calm, then the infant is going to feel that way, too. And it’s going to keep crawling around. And then what you do is you you measure the distance between infant and caregiver as infant keeps crawling around and over time it grows. Now here’s here’s a really cool thing. If you take this up phenomenologically right. All this social referencing stuff happens between the infant and caregiver. And as that’s happening, the distance keeps growing. And so the zone, right, the physical region in that objective space that is the room that constitutes safety or security from the infant’s point of view also ends up growing. And there was an upper limit that they discovered, I think, at a certain age. What, eight months or 10 months or 12 months, whatever it was, but it capped it capped out at like 100 meters. It was something like that. Past that limit, infants wouldn’t like infants wouldn’t go past that except like one or two infants out of a sample of like 50. So those were really the exception to the norm. So what you see is this dynamic right forming where I’m close to my caregiver to begin with. And then I look around and then I kind of venture out by a few steps in the unknown. And then I look back to see if everything is fine, to see if I can maintain security in a sense or a feeling of security. And if the answer to that is yes, then I keep crawling around and exploring and expanding the zone of of what I know. Right. So through this process, you see, on the one hand, security being established such that when it’s present, it elicits exploratory forms of behavior, which allow the infant to transform unknown and unfamiliar stimuli, right, into familiar or known stimuli. So that’s one of the paradoxes of exploration. It functions to transform the unfamiliar into the familiar. And when that happens, what happens to you? You sort of get bored. And where does your mind go again towards the unknown? So there’s a natural impulse, a built in impulse to turn towards the unknown. And you can only explore it and thereby transform, therefore transform it into the known if there’s sufficient security in place. That was the mechanism that Bowlby and his protege, Einesworth, really, really studied and researched. So let’s get into attachment styles and Einesworth’s paradigm of the strange situation. Right. When does it get translated? Is it Fisher or who translates it into romantic relationships and the idea that the attachment style between parent and child is predictive of your attachment styles within romantic relationships and significant friendships? Because that’s that’s another theoretical move. Who I like who who makes that move of of saying, look, once we figure out what somebody’s attachment style is, we can predict how they’re going to act in romantic relationships. Maybe Greg knows. I mean, the development of the adult attachment interview and I am blanking on that name right now, unfortunately, is really the you know, they really systematize that. And embarrassingly enough, I can’t recover that. I’ll get that in a second. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. You know, now I don’t know. Your knowledge is vast and impressive. But anyway, yes, that was a very important shift. Go ahead. Yes, yes. What was the name? Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary. That was certainly the name I was seeking for the adult attachment interview transition. Because one of the things one of the things I’m doing is trying to get adults who are presumably watching this. I don’t think there’s many young children like why might this be relevant to you now? And my colleague at the University of Toronto, Jeff McDonald, who talks about this and he says, if you want to understand romantic relationships, attachment theory is the way. The truth and the life of relationships. So I know he does a lot of work on that, but I was trying to and I recommend his work. But so why this might be relevant to you right now, adult viewer is all of this attachment stuff makes very powerful predictions about how you’re going to show up and act out potentially. Within your romantic relationships. And I imagine that you’re in your deep friendships and I imagine that your romantic relationships in your deep friendships are extremely relevant to you. So attachment theory goes to the guts of the meaning and happiness of your life as an adult. It’s not just a story about your past. Right. And I actually I’ll just drop a little hint and then we’ll elaborate on this. So from a unified theory perspective, essentially the control function that’s operative in the psyche is the extent to which the infant and then we feel seen, known and valued. So essentially, we can certainly objectively measure it in relationship to proximity and from an evolutionary perspective, there’s a proximity instrumental aspect. If mom and caretakers around that’s key, but as you get more and more complex in relationship to a participatory dynamic tracking system. What you’re doing is a lot more than just proximity, like you may do that as a as a bird doing imprinting. Okay. But when you’re a primate in general and a hominid primate in particular, you have a lot more capacity to track whether or not you’re known and valued. Okay. And then the eye sinking and the participatory dancing that takes place at a very nuanced facial expression level. Is all about then this capacity to sink and the capacity to track affective valence in relationship to that sinking. Okay. And those are indications of the subject of mom subjectivity and the valuing of the infant and in reverse. And it is that fundamental structure that’s according to unified theory tracking your relationship system. In other words, the architecture of the relationship system is really centered around to what extent are you seen, known and valued by important others. So now, if you want to make that relevant, just go back in your life and ask to what extent is being seen, known and valued. Think about all your memories, people, you know, all the life memories. Well, many of them, maybe some tragedies involving accidents and other kinds of things, but your core autobiographical life memories are going to be tied up with being seen, known and valued or frankly, the reverse. Yes. Okay. When you’re devalued, not seen, not known, this becomes an architectural core structure. And certainly in psychotherapy of all the concerns that people bring to what extent am I seen, known and valued and how I navigate that is central to the human condition. You see this even in the center of sacred texts where St. Paul aspires hopes has faith that he will know as he is known. That he will be able to know God the way God sees and knows and values him. So it’s right there made into the center of a sacred way of life. So, yeah. But actually, I supervised it was on a dissertation that then looked at attachment theory and theological relations to God in an interesting way. Oh, and explore. Oh, I hadn’t thought about that. So, yeah, of course. We can like, do people have avoidant or anxious or secure attachment? Oh, my. Oh, wow. That is. Oh, at some point we got to talk about that at length, because that is super cool. I hadn’t thought about that, but that makes perfect sense. Take study issues to a whole new level. I mean, obviously, right. The psychoanalytic conception of God itself essentially is this compensatory structure, this infantile compensatory projection structure. I mean, that’s way more pejorative than I would go. But Freud was pretty harsh atheist. They would go. So anyway. So let’s talk about attachment styles at this point through Einsworth’s studies, actually, and talk about how it links to these essentially like trust issues if we talk about it in a very pejorative or like colloquial sense. Right. But it’s so the way this was measured was typically with one year old infants who sorry, one year old children who were already toddlers, and they were brought into a strange room with their caregiver. And again, there were toys around and there was even a stranger sitting right across from them, obviously a non hostile stranger. So as you observe the behavior of the infants, again, they first start off as cautious and they’re like clinging to the caregiver. Then they see the toys that are right at the caregivers feet and then they get kind of curious and then they they like reach towards the toys and then the caregiver places the kid on the floor and then the child starting to play with the toys. And before you know it, right, while the caregiver is there, the child’s already lost in this world of play. And then the stranger also joins in and the first again, the child is kind of cautious, like, who the hell are you? Like, why are you getting so close to me? But then, you know, after some social referencing, looking back at the caregiver, seeing everything is OK, the child’s now playing with the stranger as well. Then suddenly the caregiver is instructed to just get up and leave the room. The moment the caregiver gets up before anything else has even happened, the child immediately notices this. And what happens? Well, an attachment behavior is immediately triggered. It starts to crawl towards the caregiver and it starts to cry. Two things from the Bolbian perspective, right, whose predictable outcome is proximity with the caregiver. But then the caregiver is again instructed to ignore this and just to exit the room. As this happens, right, the stranger tries to console the crying child that doesn’t really work and the toys don’t matter anymore. This is no longer fun or funny or interesting in a playful way. The world has become a completely different place from the child’s point of view. The world has lost the very thing that keeps it stable, right? So then after a few moments, the caregiver is instructed to return. As the caregiver returns and picks up the crying child, three possible things happen. This is what Einsworth observed. Either the child stops crying soon enough and then can continue exploring, right? It can go back to playing with the toys and the stranger, right? In other words, it’s relatively easy to reacquire or reestablish a sense of security so that the child can continue exploring. Or it becomes difficult in two ways. One of which is that the caregiver comes back and the child just gives the caregiver the cold shoulder, pretends that it doesn’t even care. And more than that, it actually stays kind of distant from the caregiver. For example, by interacting more with the stranger that’s there rather than its own mother or father. Typically, it’s with the mothers that they run these studies, as far as I’m aware. The other possible response, and by the way, that’s what Einsworth termed the avoidance style of attachment. Because what’s happening there is you’re giving the cold shoulder to your caregiver and thereby you’re sort of dismissing the fact that you need them in some important sense and you’re swallowing your needs. And in order to contain or manage the distress of separation, you’re deactivating from the top down. You’re trying to down regulate the entire attachment system within you. But the fact of the matter is that it still causes you distress. You just don’t show it. And the reason why you don’t show it is because you don’t want to put yourself through that situation again, to make yourself vulnerable, to go through the same traumatic experience in the future. That’s the fear there. That’s the way in which the fundamental sense of basic trust that, you know, if we think about it in the Arizona in terms is lost or compromised from that particular type of infant’s point of view, which again, Einsworth referred to as being avoidantly attached. Now, with the other style of attachment, the remaining style, there was a fourth as well. Which was sort of talked about as disorganized, but we won’t get into that. The other style, the third style is the anxious preoccupied style of attachment. And upon the caregiver’s return, what the infant does here is not just stop crying or give the cold shoulder, but double down on crying. Even as the caregiver is trying to console and sue the infant by holding it, by kissing it, by petting its head, rubbing its tummy or whatever, the kid’s not happy with this. And it’s doubling down on crying because it’s trying to get the message across with that much more effort that you weren’t here, you need to be here when I need you. Why weren’t you here? Again, there’s a kind of loss of trust that’s operating there that you left when I needed you, now you’re back, but I don’t believe that you’re going to stay. So I’m going to do whatever I can to make sure that you know that you need to stay here close. So from an adult point of view, and this is something that the adult viewer might be able to relate to, right? The second two styles that we were just discussing, those are from the attachment theory perspective, the insecure styles of attachment, two types of insecure styles of attachment. Why is that? Because in both cases, the relationship with trust, right, with security is compromised. And in the absence of security, you don’t get proper exploration. And exploration is necessary. If your capacity to explore the world is compromised, you’re going to be compromised in some basic sense, psychologically. So okay, with these two styles of attachment, I’ll just make a couple of phenomenological maybe comments about this and then open it back up if that sounds okay. The insecure, so the anxious preoccupied style is when you’re doubt, so you’re there with your partner, and then your partner keeps looking at their phone. And you don’t know what messages are popping up there, but now you’re curious. And then later in the day, you’re walking outside, you’re let’s say at a restaurant, and then you notice your partner looking at somebody else in a way that again makes you doubt if they are interested or if their attention is going elsewhere. And then if you’re anxiously preoccupied in your style, what you’re going to do is you’re not going to let go of that. That’s going to be on your mind sort of haunting you. And you’re going to probably bring it up to your partner. Oh, who’s texting you all the time? Aren’t you popular today? Or you see that, let’s say the waiter is like, you know, taller than you or more fit, you’re going to be like, oh, you know, back in the day when I was going to the gym, I could bench press like 200 pounds or make these kinds of comments. Trying to elicit and bring out right to reveal right where and to whom the partner is being present rather than you, because you want their presence in the emotional and sexual and romantic sense, let’s say. With the avoidance style of attachment, you see something like that going on, you’re not going to bring it up, you’re just going to find ways of giving them the cold shoulder. What you’re going to think is, okay, you pull up your own phone, and you sort of go on your phone and you you stop being as responsive as you may have initially been. And your partner is going to pick up on this, what are they going to think? Well, that really depends on their own attachment style as well, at least in part. And you can tell how, you know, the picture gets very, very complicated, very fast, because you’ve got different attachment types interacting with one another, such that your relational dynamics with other people are being significantly mediated by the kinds of attachment styles that are manifesting and being enacted between yourselves. And what the secure type of attachment really does for a person is that without getting too afraid, or what, no, too disorganized in the face of fear and anxiety, rather, right? It’s not about not getting afraid, it’s about being able to, pardon my language, hold your shit together, even when shit’s hit the fan, right? It’s about being able to tolerate and withstand the fear and anxiety that emerges in light of the unknown. You might be able to talk about the thing that’s on your mind without being feeling too ashamed of it, right? Or being able to at the very least tolerate the shame that does come from talking about, from naming your fears directly to the other person. And when the conversation comes to an end, you can feel confident that it has been resolved, and then feel relatively stable in your relationship again. And next time your partner’s phone rings several times in the span of like 30 minutes, you’ll not make much of it, perhaps. Which is not to say that objectively that means that nothing is going on, but psychologically, your relationship to that type of experience has now changed in a way that allows you to feel relatively stable and secure such that you can think about things that actually deserve your attention and intention rather. So let me pause there. What do you guys think and how does this connect so far? I deeply believe in attachment theory. I have an anxious attachment style, and so I have to, because of the way I had very much an absent father and a mother who was, I was born, I was conceived out of wedlock and my birth destroyed two marriages. I did not find out about this until I was an adult and my mother carried this against me in certain ways. So I have a very anxious attachment style, and I have to be aware of that all the time. I have to bring a lot of mindfulness to bear on my interactions with my romantic partner and my friendships precisely around that. And so for me, this is not theory. I live this out in the guts of my romantic relationships and my deep friendships, my, and my relationships to my, my family. I live it out every day. I live it out even now as I’m interacting with my partner’s family. And yeah, so phenomenologically, this is not theory for me. This is, this is a profound and sometimes challenging. And this is part of what I meant when I told people one of the functions of virtue is to cultivate character that can be compensatory for constitutional deficits that you happen to find yourself with. And so part of the reason why I pursue a Socratic way of life is I’ve come to realize, and now I more explicitly try to aspire to this, is because it helps me to compensate for an anxious attachment style. So I do not, I do not regard this as in any way a theory in the pejorative sense. I regard it as a theory in the scientific sense. I think not only is it very well empirically confirmed and it shows predictive fruitfulness, all the good measures of the theory, it’s one of those theories that I find in the very guts, the warp in the woof, the fabric of my phenomenological existence. I really appreciate that, John. I appreciate the vulnerability and your deep friendship. I’ll say that I’m fortunate sort of in the other way, in the sense that my mom was an early childhood educator. I got born, got a doctorate, Disney Teacher of the Year. I get born into a pretty secure family system. And certainly I’ve had my trials and tribulations in relation, as everybody has, but I’ll give you an example of what it’s, I am built around a pretty secure attachment. So a story I like to tell my students about what that means, because I obviously work as a clinician all the time with people or not. It’s not hard for me to empathize with it, but I feel very fortunate that I, when I shift into my primate self, a lot of shit’s got to be happening for me to really start feeling wobbly. So I’m fairly secure. The story I tell of this, which is kind of humiliating, but I’ll tell it anyway. So when I was in the 10th grade, I was attracted to this woman, beautiful woman, I thought I was, you know, all that and I wasn’t, but I went up to her and I gave her a rose and a bag, okay? And this was at break and this was between second and third period. And I, it’s a little note of rose and I said, Hey, would you go out to dinner with me? Okay. And then we fast forward to cafeteria. And I happened to sit down, I get there early before my friends, my little friend pack is there, and two tables over with all the cheerleaders is the girl that I just asked out. And they’re all laughing and giggling. And one moves to the side and guess what’s right in the middle of their laughing and giggling, looking over at me, but my rose, my bag and my little card. Oh, right. Okay. So there you are. You’re in 10th grade, all popular, good looking girls are two tables away laughing at you. All right. That is seared into my consciousness. I’ll never forget that. Okay. But the nice thing about a secure attachment ultimately is as you feel that humiliation and shame, you go down into a grunt. And ultimately I landed, actually you’re making a mistake. That’s an error on your part. You should, you should go with me. Okay. So there’s a fundamental then sort of felt sense, even in the enactment of kind of a humiliation kind of dynamic, I dropped, I’m able to drop into a base of like, no, I’m lovable and competent at a core, you know, and that this, this is an error on your part. I trust me and I trust my capacity to find grounding in relation, even in the face of pretty strong evidence. Maybe I shouldn’t, maybe I had a, I got a just world confidence in myself that it’s misplaced. But fundamentally that’s the difference then between somebody that’s actually anchored. If I had an insecure attachment in that place, that would, I mean, that was a very strong situation to pull vulnerable insecurity. And if you’re grounded or not grounded in a particular place, then you’re either going to get very dysregulated. If I like the term hyperdependent for the anxious, okay. At least there’s a hyperdependent signal that says, oh my God, I need proximity. I need care. I need fusion. Also I’m going to get, okay. And then there’s the dismissive counterdependent and the general insecure state is a very strong splitting between a counterdependent runaway avoidant runaway and a hyperdependent signaling of need. And that polarizing structure, okay. Then the two major disorganized attachments then center on one or the other. I mean, the two major insecure, the disorganized actually can’t tolerate and fundamentally vacillates in a very erratic and problematic way. But all the insecure structures are pulled in a very dangerous dialectic of this one side or the other. And to have virtue, you have to figure out how to have a healthy opponent process. And then if you’re built on this kind of structure, you need additional work to maintain a healthy opponent process between these dynamics to achieve what I call a healthy autonomous interdependence, at least on this, on the green line of the matrix. An autonomous interdependence affords a realization that, hey, I need you and I’m me. And it’s the proper opponent process between both needing you and being me and trusting that I’ll do what I want to do from a self-determined perspective in a healthy way versus, oh my God, I totally need you and I’ll fuse with you and I will punish you if you try ever try to leave me or fuck you. I don’t need anybody. That’s a hyper, that’s a counter dependent strategy. And the insecure folks get basically pulled very strong into one of these other strategies and then trying to regulate that is a very, very difficult thing. Yeah, I appreciate you elaborating that picture theoretically a little more in terms of the two kinds of vectors that are at play within attachment structures. On the one hand, there’s the avoidant bit, which is that I’m okay, you’re not okay. And then there’s the anxious bit, which is that you’re okay, I’m not okay. Whereby with the avoidant bit, it’s like, I’m going to hold the world on my own. I don’t need you. Whereas in the anxious bit, it’s like, I can’t do this without you. Unless I have you, then I lose my world. And it’s interesting how, so what I’ve noticed is that you can be in the secure sort of zone more or less, but you can be tilted in one or the other direction in different contexts in your life. So for example, yeah, like in romantic relationships, for the most part, I’m within the secure range, but tilted more towards anxious preoccupied. It’s very important to me to know that I have my partner. And the pathological end of that is jealousy, let’s say, or inability to tolerate certain forms of distance or whatnot. Though over the years I’ve worked on it, and I’m relatively content with where I’m at. With the friendship side of it, I think it’s a little more toward the avoidant, but probably equal, right? But within the secure zone, I would say, but more tilted toward the avoidant. And with respect to parents, well, it depends on the parents, but again, I think again, it’s tilted more toward avoidance. And when I think about how these styles that I’ve acquired in the past, because of my history, my relationships, things like that, how they factor into my character structure and my interests and my approach and style to doing academic work, for example, I tend to feel like, I don’t know if you two knew this about me, I think John, I’ve talked to you about it quite a bit, but Greg, we haven’t had a chance much. But I immigrated to Canada when I was eight, so English isn’t my first language. So for a long time, I struggled to communicate. I struggled with feeling like I’m going to be understood. And the kind of feedback that I would get on assignments and things like that, I was a really a pretty bad student, I would say. And it always felt to me, right from my point of view, that no matter what I do, I’m not going to be able to secure what I want, in terms of grades, at least. Whereas in Armenia, which is where I’m from, I was an A plus student. And so I always felt secure and confident when it came to that. I come to Canada, and there’s a sudden, right, what fall from paradise, let’s say. And what I ended up doing was what Greg did, actually, I dropped into this zone of like, I’m okay, you’re not okay. And I’m not going to evaluate or assess my myself and my worthiness based on grades, let’s say. But that also became a kind of self deceptive strategy for a long time, which led me to build up like really poor work ethic and work habits. And procrastination was definitely a thing. And I withdrew into the world of gaming for a long time. And by the way, John, maybe you’ll be happy, or maybe you’ll be proud to know this. But it’s because of your courses and undergrad that I came back into this part of myself that I withdrawn from for a long time. I remember at the point that we met, I was actually doing jujitsu. That was that’s what I wanted to do, like three times a week for two and a half hours a session. And I was only thinking about jujitsu, martial arts, but then philosophy of psychology, second or third year, it was I started to care in a way that I hadn’t. Well, I didn’t know that. But I’m glad. Thank you for sharing that. You encouraged me to explore not just the subject matters and this world, but parts of my own self. And as a consequence of that, I’ve gotten to where I currently am. So I’m very grateful for that. More than welcome. Wow. So I think you’re making here one of the things I’d like. So I think we’d all agree that the primary lens we want to bring to these things is a transjective, dynamic participatory view. Okay, that these things are not well framed or as effectively famous, just essentialist categories that we just inevitably bring around. Okay, so I am this kind of attach. Yes, I’m disorganized on this. It’s yes, you can have certain kinds of internal working models, behavioral repertoires and dispositions that set you in to be in channeled a particular way. Okay, but we’re unbelievably dynamic learners. Yes. And we’re going to look for particular paths of investment. And we can be thrown into different situations that open up different kinds of transaction participatory structures. And the argument certainly I’d have is that there’s a circle of dancing that’s happening both in our specific relations. You do it with your mom, you do it with your dad, and you have your whole family, then you do it with your peers. Okay. And the possibility of different kinds of trajectories is very high. You know, what we are able to see, and this is the adult attachment interview that Maine developed and others is that yeah, these patterns are very meaningful, just like trait dispositions. And these are useful categories for adopting aggregate patterns. Okay. But don’t mistake them for essentialist categories inside the individual. Think about them as agent arena transjective participatory dynamics. Right. And then we can capture that. And especially if we have a good sort of evolutionary and developmental frame about why these patterns are functionally tied to each other, then we can actually say, oh, and that’s really what the influence matrix in the relationship system is. Hey, you know, you used the word teleology before. It’s like, yeah, I’m like, okay, we want to regulate our relational value and social influence. And then we’ll have templates for high relational value, high sub-floor influence, and we’ll have templates for low relational value, low social influence. Those will be embedded in our structure because the goal states, the agent arena relation or agent other relation are absolutely central when we’re in one of those structures or the other. The implications are tremendous and we’re tracking that. And this issue of engagement or the green line is absolutely central. How are we going to negotiate our levels of social exchange and dependency or independency in relation? And they’re constantly iterative, i.e. there’s constant recursive relevance realization in relation to each other. And it’s that process that we are attuned to across time to cultivate the paths of investment that we are at least trying to maximize our relative to effort, the outcomes that we’re trying to achieve. And that puts it in this very, very, we can abstract to afford these sort of categories, but we need to be very careful about abstracting them and turn them into essentialist things like they do with trait theory. The personality traits are what personality is, not at all. So if you listen to it, you can hear the themes, but if you put it in, you forget and think that’s the thing. The patterns we’re extracting in the dynamic participatory way, and we have to understand that functional relation dynamic. And as a clinician, I do that all the time, which is I’m going to put you into an idiographic particular contextual historical developmental pathway. You know, and then track you in that process. And that affords actually a lot more nuance, it affords a lot more complexity, affords a lot more dynamic responsivity. And I think that’s the frame we need to be bringing. So in that invoking, and I think you did that beautifully and brilliantly, the transjective evolving nature of this then allows now we can make it take it back process into the theoretical, why you could see attachment theory in relationship to recursive relevance realization. So maybe Gary, you want to speak to that? We’re almost out of time. So maybe just sort of tee it up and then we can we’ll take it take we’ll talk more about it next time. Sounds good. Yeah, so two things are coming to my mind. One of them is the opponent processing between security and exploration that we see on the one hand. So it’s sort of like this. You need to have security so that when you’re faced with the unknown, your response, your natural impulse will be to explore. In the absence of security, exploration is inhibited. So in the absence of novel, sorry, in the presence of novelty, exploration is the main response, if there’s security. And in the absence of novelty, exploration is also inhibited, even if there is security. It’s a bit of a complex set of propositions. But it’s something like if I have security in place, and I’m faced with the unknown, my impulse will be to explore. In the absence of security and the presence of the unknown, my response will be to seek security by withdrawing from the unknown. That’s the main opponents see that’s going on there. The other opponent processing that I’m that I’m picking up on here is that if you’ve already formed a kind of attachment style, which you have as the adult listener, at least for the most part, with respect to certain classes of social stimuli in your in your life, then think about it like this. If your main tilt is toward avoidance, let’s say, I’m okay, you’re not okay. And in cases where were you to enlist somebody to collaborate with you to be there for you to for you to be able to depend on, and to have by your side, in cases where that would actually be successful, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage. Like, that’s the sort of self sabotaging that’s happening there. In cases where you can’t have anybody like reliable to depend on, and that’s how you’re relating to them, then you’re not putting yourself at a disadvantage, you sort of are at a disadvantage for reasons that are beyond your control in some sense. So it’s like, if people will actually betray you, then the right thing to do probably isn’t to trust them. So if, on the other hand, people are receptive, but only after being prompted to, to like, listen and hear you out, then having a bit of an anxious preoccupied tilt will probably be beneficial in some ways. On the other hand, if you’re in a culture, for example, where predominantly people are like tilted more toward avoidance, and if you come in with an anxious preoccupied style, you’re going to appear as too much. And so you lose social status, standing credibility, things like that. And that’s quite the punishment. And so the kind of opponent processing that’s going on here is really between or rather optimal gripping, if we talk about it like that, is the kinds of attachment styles that are being, that are seen as the norm, predominantly by the culture that you’re in, the cultural context that you’re in, and the kind of attachment style that you tend to come in with in your interactions with strangers and friends and whatnot. And so this takes us back to the ethnocentric critique that I want to name at least in our discussion today. That the idea was that if you go to cultures where there’s a strong tilt toward, let’s say, anxious preoccupied. So for example, with, I think with Japanese infants, exploration is not actually encouraged very much. And it’s very much about security, such that confronting any unfamiliar faces, even if the mother is there or caregiver is there and the infant is holding on to them, that’s not going to be enough to soothe them through the experience. There’s just a fear response for the most part. So if you’ve got a culture, if you’re coming out of a culture like that, and if you’re put in a culture where the predominant style is avoidance, for example, the problem isn’t the culture and the problem isn’t you, right? You’re going through a culture shock because there’s a lack of fit between you and the culture that you’re now in. But that’s not to say that if we don’t put you back into your own original cultural context, that you won’t be a well-functioning citizen or member of that society. There’s just a lack of fit between you and this current cultural context in some sense. So the idea here was that it’s a fallacy to judge certain people as insecure, insecurely attached when given their own cultural context, they would be well adapted and well-functioning citizens of their own societies. So there’s something about the the typology of attachment theory in the original sense that’s biased, that presupposes a particular kind of cultural context, the one that Bowlby himself came from. Western Anglo-American context. Weird context. So the proposal was really to instead of talking about it as secure or insecure styles of attachments, which we can still do as long as we know the people we’re talking about and the cultural and if their cultural context is the one that attachment theory itself was sort of nested in and grew out of. Instead of talking about it in terms of secure and insecure styles, let’s talk about it in terms of adaptive and maladaptive styles, where we need to approach that with the kind of cultural sensitivity, whereby what matters is knowing what the demands of the culture are and how and whether and to what degree an individual can meet those demands in a way that seems reasonable or relatively healthy or adaptive and that’s going to vary from culture to culture. So it’s not about… It’s also going to vary across historical periods within a culture. Yes. It’s even going to vary across environmental conditions within a culture. So think of Christianity in Northern Europe versus Christianity in Southern Europe, the cold ice people and the warm Mediterranean people. I’m being playful by the way, don’t take that seriously, but that’s sort of what I’m saying is the inner doctrine that geography matters, right? It really matters. Sure. So just to wrap up on this point, right? If we think about the value of reconceptualizing the typology from insecure to secure, insecure and secure to adaptive versus maladaptive, we bring context back into the picture. We also invite culture, the cultural dimension into the picture of attachment. And so there’s something very, very amenable about that to our transjective understanding of subjectivity. And so what we’ve kind of explored is the kind of continuity or convergence between personality theory from the big five point of view with personality theory from the developmental side of it through attachment theory, where at the highest level of personality hierarchy, we’ve got security and exploration being played off against each other between the two meta traits, stability and plasticity, which is shared by, right, the bait, which manifests in the basic dynamic in attachment formation and styles between the get security and exploration. And there’s an opponent processing relationship going on within both the big five, as we’ve understood it, and attachment theory here, as well as the transjective and inactive dimension of both of these things, where, I mean, that in my mind is at least the beginnings of a kind of theoretical integration between these two major paradigms in personality psychology. Okay, so very good. Yeah, well, I look forward to picking that ball up and we’ll see where we can run with it then. Great, great. This was amazing. So thank you very much, gentlemen, and I look forward to our next meeting. And thank you. I think it’s appropriate to say thank you for your friendship. Yeah, thank you. Thank you.