Abraham Sagi

Multigenerational Perspectives on Coping with the Holocaust Experience: An Attachment Perspective for Understanding the Developmental Sequelae of Trauma across Generations

In this paper, we advance a new approach to the intergenerational transmission of Holocaust experiences, by focusing on attachment theory. The approach is used as a framework for interpretation of the results of three studies on Holocaust survivors and their offspring, from different countries (The Netherlands, Canada, and Israel), and based on different conceptual approaches and methods of data collection (quantitative as well as qualitative). The literature is divided with regard to the extent and depth of long-term effects of the Holocaust. Attachment theory allows the integration of the phenomena of attachment, separation, and loss, which appear to be core concepts in the three studies presented here. The notion of insecure-ambivalent attachment sheds some light on the observed preoccupation with issues of attachment and separation in the second generation. Furthermore, the theme of “the conspiracy of silence” is discussed in the context of attachment disorganisation. Attachment theory transcends the traditional boundaries between clinical and nonclinical interpretations, in stressing the continuous and cumulative nature of favourable and unfavourable child-rearing circumstances. In this context, insecure attachment should be regarded as coping with suboptimal child-rearing environments.

Security of infant-mother, -father, and -metapelet attachments among kibbutz-reared Israeli children.

Although the Strange Situation procedure was developed two decades ago, it was until recently used exclusively in the United States. Only in the late 1970s did researchers begin using the procedure in other countries, notably, Sweden (Lamb, Hwang, Frodi, & Frodi, 1982), West Germany (Grossmann et al., 1981; Grossmann et al., in this vol.), andJapan (Miyake et al., in this vol.). What follows is a report of our attempt to use the Strange Situation procedure to explore the effects of kibbutz rearing practices on

Shedding further light on the effects of various types and quality of Early Child Care on infant-mother attachment relationship The Haifa Study of Early Child Care

The Haifa Study of Early Child Care recruited a large-scale sample (N = 758) that represented the full SES spectrum in Israel, to examine the unique contribution of various child-care-related correlates to infant attachment. After controlling for other potential contributing variables--including mother characteristics, mother-child interaction, mother-father relationship, infant characteristics and development, and the environment--this study found that center-care, in and of itself, adversely increased the likelihood of infants developing insecure attachment to their mothers as compared with infants who were either in maternal care, individual nonparental care with a relative, individual nonparental care with a paid caregiver, or family day-care. The results suggest that it is the poor quality of center-care and the high infant-caregiver ratio that accounted for this increased level of attachment insecurity among center-care infants.

The Hebrew Communicative Development Inventory: Language Specific Properties and Cross-Linguistic Generalizations.

Cultural, linguistic, and developmental evidence was taken into consideration in constructing the HCDI, a Hebrew adaptation of the MCDI. The HCDI was then administered to a stratified sample of Israeli mothers of 253 toddlers aged 1;6 to 2;0 (M = 1;8.18). Hebrew results are presented and compared with scores from the original MCDI sample (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Bates, Thal & Pethick, 1994). The HCDI is a reliable and sensitive measure of lexical development and emergent grammar, capturing wide variability among Israeli toddlers. In comparison with English, the relation between vocabulary size and age, as well as the shape of the growth curves for nouns, predicate terms, and closed class words relative to size of lexicon, were strikingly similar. These results indicate that conclusions concerning cross-linguistic similarities can be best documented by using parallel methods of measurement. The HCDI results support the claim that early lexical development in Hebrew and in English follow remarkably similar development patterns, despite the typological differences between the two target languages.

Mothers’ empathic understanding of their preschoolers’ internal experience: Relations with early attachment

This study examined the links between mothers’ empathic understanding of their preschoolers’ internal experience and early infant-mother attachment. The empathic understanding of 118 mothers of 4.5-year-olds was assessed by showing them three videotaped segments of observations of their children and themselves and interviewing them regarding their children’s and their own thoughts and feelings. Interviews were rated and then classi” ed into one empathic and three nonempathic categories, and mothers’ misperceptions of the observations were coded as well. Infant-mother attachment classifications obtained using the Strange Situation when infants were 12 months old were also available. Results showed associations between mothers’ empathic understanding classifications and children’s attachment classifications as well as differences between mothers of secure and insecure children on one of the two interview composite scores. Also, mothers of insecurely attached children had more misperceptions than those of securely attached children. The contributions of this study to the work on mothers’ representations of their children are discussed.

School competence in young adolescence: Links to early attachment relationships beyond concurrent self-perceived competence and representations of relationships

Predictive associations of infant attachment to mothers and fathers with later school functioning, beyond the contribution of contemporaneous representations of relationships and circumstances of caregiving, were examined in 66 young adolescents who were raised in infancy in Israeli kibbutzim with collective sleeping. The Strange Situation Procedure was used to evaluate early attachment to mother and father, the Separation Anxiety Test was used to assess contemporaneous representation of relationships, and teachers’ reports evaluated school functioning. Circumstances of caregiving included parental reports of quality of marital relations and a change from collective sleeping to home sleeping for children. Results showed that infant attachment to mother, but not to father, contributed significant additional variance to the prediction of children’s scholastic skills and emotional maturity beyond the contribution of concurrent representations of relationships and changes in circumstances of caregiving. The results support the secure base construct as an organising concept of longitudinal investigations of attachment.

Ecological Constraints for Intergenerational Transmission of Attachment

To determine whether the transmission of attachment across generations is free from contextual constraints, adult attachment representations were assessed in two kibbutz settings, home-based and communal sleeping. It was hypothesised that under extreme child-rearing circumstances, such as the communal sleeping arrangement, the transmission of attachment is not evident, whereas in the more regular home-based environment the expected transmission of attachment will be found. The participants were 45 mothers and 45 infants, about equal numbers of boys and girls, from 20 kibbutz infant houses with communal sleeping arrangements, and from 25 kibbutz infant houses with home-based sleeping arrangements. Mothers were administered the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), and infants were assessed through the Ainsworth Strange Situation. Among the home-based pairs, a correspondence of 76% was found between AAI and Strange Situation classifications, whereas the correspondence was only 40% in the communal sleeping group. It is argued that living in a communal sleeping arrangement reduces the expected transmission of attachment.

Attachment Theory and Research from a Cross-Cultural Perspective

Two sources of information are used in this paper to examine the question of culture-specific versus universal aspects of attachment theory. The first source is our work on Israeli kibbutzim and the o

Disorganized Reasoning in Holocaust Survivors

In 2 related studies of nonclinical Israeli samples, the long-term sequelae of traumatic Holocaust experiences were investigated from an attachment perspective. In each study, Holocaust survivors were compared with participants who had not experienced the Holocaust, and their attachment style and state of mind with regard to past and present attachment experiences as well as their state of mind regarding unresolved loss were assessed. In both studies, the Holocaust groups were found to be significantly more inclined to show disoriented thought processes around trauma than were the groups without Holocaust background. From an attachment perspective, the authors showed that even after 50 years, traumatic traces of Holocaust experiences are present in the survivors.

Primary Appraisal of the Strange Situation A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Preseparation Episodes

Studies in various countries–among them Germany, Holland, Israel, Japan, Sweden, and the United States–have reported Strange Situation distributions that differ markedly across and within cultures, thus raising doubts as to whether infant behavior in the Strange Situation can be regarded as a valid index of the security of attachment, at least in a cross-cultural context. It is proposed here that a fuller understanding of infant behavior in the Strange Situation requires an assessment of what Connell and Goldsmith (1982) have referred to as the infants primary appraisal of this procedure. A crossnational comparison of data from seven laboratories ( N = 498) was carried out in order to determine (a) whether the preseparation episodes made any difference in attachment classifications and (b) whether infant behavior in different countries was indeed the same before separation from the mother. Furthermore, procedural variations have been taken into account. Using multivariate discriminant function techniques, information obtained during preseparation episodes was found to discriminate between attachment classifications. At the same time, however, in a series of multivariate analyses of variance, a relatively small number of cross-cultural differences in preseparation behavior were found. With the exception of the Israeli kibbutz and Swedish infants, our data suggest that infants in different countries make similar primary appraisals of the Strange Situation.