Microanalysis as a Social Microscope: Illustrating with Drawings of the Origins of Disorganized Infant Attachment

Because face-to-face relating is usually too fast to fully capture with the naked eye, microanalysis research is uniquely positioned to help us see more of the details of the process of mother–infant communication. When we slow it down, or look moment-by-moment, we see subtle, complex patterns of relating that we cannot otherwise grasp. This moment-to-moment process is largely out of awareness, but it has tremendous communicative power, providing an essential means of sensing the partner. In this chapter, I illustrate our approach with drawings of some of the findings from our research on the 4-month origins of 12-month infant disorganized (vs. secure) attachment. When we went back to the original videotapes to see where our findings were visible, we found patterns that we did not know about, such as various maternal threat faces in response to infant distress: disgust, searing disapproval eyebrows, or open-mouth bared-teeth faces. To illustrate our findings, a talented artist (Dillon Yothers) drew some of the film frames to disguise the mothers and infants to preserve their confidentiality, but to retain the emotional and bodily expressions. In the origins of secure attachment, we saw how a mother’s rapid, subtle recognizing and empathically joining her infant’s distress enabled the infant to quickly recover. In the origins of disorganized attachment, we saw interactions that made us gasp, such as a maternal bared-teeth bite-face to her infant who was frantically distressed. Thus, the data analysis taught us to see more. When we translate the action sequences revealed by microanalysis research into words, we can become more aware of them, think about them, understand their relational function, and use them in clinical intervention. Video microanalysis, or slowed-down video, provides a powerful social microscope that can transform our approach to mother-infant treatment.