Eating disorders and the intergenerational transmission of attachment

Over the past decade, results concerning the eventual associations between eating disorders (ED) and attachment styles (IWM) were very inconsistent and problematic. Definitions of the ED populations seldom took into consideration the distinction between diagnoses such as restricting anorexia, purging anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder. Rarely was the link between ED patients’ and their parents’ IWM studied, and in no study the match between the IWMs of a patients’ mother and father has ever been considered. The present study was designed to address these points by analyzing individual and parental attachment styles in both a set of ED patients and a control sample of individuals. The results obtained show that the two groups differed significantly in their attachment status distribution, with a high prevalence of ambivalent and avoidant IWM found in patients and their mothers, and a high prevalence of avoidant IWM found in the fathers. Furthermore, a different distribution of IWMs emerged in the four ED subtypes, with several HOMALS analyses revealing complex structures underlying the match between fathers’ and mothers’ IWM, as well as regarding the agreement between children’s and parents’ mental states. Such findings include: the ED population showed a greater mismatch than the controls; the disagreement between mothers’ and fathers’ IWM was greater in restricting anorexia; disagreements between subjects’ and mothers’ IWM were greater in Bulimia. All these findings are discussed in terms of the implications of an intergenerational transmission of attachment in the clinical psychology and research of ED.