Attachment History Reconstruction: Clinical investigations and research perspectives

In the “modular cognitive psychotherapy” (Aquilar, 1994), the first proposed therapeutic module is generally the Attacchment Story Reconstruction (RSA10; Aquilar, 2000, 2004, 2005). This therapy has several features which could make it advantageous. It is a time-limited therapy, which requires ten sessions, and so is attractive to funding agencies; it is highly structured and prescriptive, therefore it could be manualized and be used in psychotherapy research; it enables therapist to use techniques with which that are familiar within an overall framework that has a clear rationale and outcome objectives. In this ten-session therapy, the patient is asked to tell his or her life history, year after year, and to bring family photographs and talk around them. The therapist looks in detail at the different incidents and anecdotes which come up in the course of the sessions and, with help from the supervisor, try to formulate hypothesis about patient’s attachment style and about presenting problem, within cognitive-evolutionistic theory (Liotti, 2001). The methods of RSA10 include the analyzing in detail family photographs (Berman, 1993), within which a particular attention is devoted to analysis of facial expressions (Ekman & Davidson, 1994; Russell & Fernandez-Dols, 1998; Manstead, Frijda & Fisher, 2004) and to nonverbal language (Argyle, 1992; Aquilar, 1996). The objectives of this module are mainly to reactivate the episodic memory, to restructure the semantic memory and to evaluate possible discrepancies between two modalities of memory; to reduce possible processes of relative figures’ “hagiografyzation” (Aquilar, 2000); to recognize unexpressed emotions, connected to recalled episodes. In this paper, the authors will show specific features of RSA10 and preliminary results of psychometric analyses made pre and post treatment.