Magazine "Research" · Reading time approx. 9 min

Both ask what gets passed down across generations. Both work with family history. Why they still don't do the same thing — and what that means for practice.

Two Paths to the Same Question

How is relational experience passed down? Attachment research and genogram work both ask this question. Their answers, though, come about in very different ways.

Attachment research traces back to Bowlby and Ainsworth and has produced a highly standardized instrument, the Adult Attachment Interview. Genogram work comes out of family therapy and works with a map drawn together, by hand.

Anyone familiar with both quickly spots the overlap. Anyone who treats them as interchangeable makes a mistake.

What the Adult Attachment Interview Is

The Adult Attachment Interview, or AAI, was developed in the 1980s and described in detail by Erik Hesse — among other places, in the Handbook of Attachment (2008).

It is an interview with a fixed set of questions about one's own childhood. What gets scored, though, is not primarily what someone says. It is how they say it.

Does the account stay coherent? Are difficult experiences named without the narrative falling apart? Do general statements contradict specific memories? A classification emerges from features like these.

Scoring requires dedicated training and takes hours. In 1996, Hesse also described, in the Infant Mental Health Journal, a category for cases that cannot be clearly classified. A more recent paper by Duschinsky and colleagues (2023) discusses how unresolved loss and trauma are captured in the AAI.

The AAI, then, is a research instrument with a solid psychometric foundation.

What the Genogram Is, by Contrast

The genogram has no comparable foundation. It is not a standardized instrument, how it is elicited varies from practice to practice, and it produces no classification.

What it can do instead is make structure visible. Who were the attachment figures? Who was absent? Where did relationships break off, where did new ones form? A genogram puts all of that on a single page.

That is less precise than an AAI classification, and often more useful in counseling. A genogram takes shape in a single session; the AAI needs trained coders.

Where They Overlap

Both approaches are interested in repetition across generations. Attachment research has shown that a mother's attachment representation is linked to the quality of her child's attachment — in some studies, measured even before the child was born.

A genogram makes exactly this kind of transmission visible. If the mother died young or was absent in each of three generations, the pattern sits right there on the page.

The connection is a natural one to draw. It gets discussed in the literature. It has barely been studied systematically.

Where Conflating the Two Gets Dangerous

This is where caution is needed. A genogram supports no claim about attachment patterns.

You cannot infer from a drawn relationship line whether someone is securely or insecurely attached. An AAI classification arises from how a person narrates, not from family structure. Two people with nearly identical genograms can end up classified very differently.

Writing in a report that the genogram "shows an insecure-avoidant pattern" uses a technical term beyond what it can support. This is not a matter of form. Attachment classifications can carry weight in expert assessments and care plans that they do not earn in this context.

Hypothetical case: A counselor draws up a genogram with a young father. It shows that his own father left the family within the child's first year, and that the grandfather too was barely present. The counselor is tempted to write, in the report, of an "avoidant attachment pattern." Instead, he records what he actually saw: in two generations, the father was absent during the child's first year, and the client describes feeling unsure with his own infant. That is verifiable, useful going forward — and claims nothing the genogram does not support.

How the Two Fit Together

For practice, a simple division of labor emerges.

The genogram supplies the structure: who, when, for how long, in what constellation. It is the frame within which questions arise.

Attachment theory supplies hypotheses: which experiences might have been formative, and what is worth paying attention to?

What the genogram does not supply is the diagnosis. That would require the AAI or a comparable instrument — and the training to go with it.

This division takes nothing away from genogram work. It protects it from making claims it cannot back up.

What Would Be Worth Doing

It would be interesting to ask whether structural features in a genogram correlate with AAI classifications — and how strongly. Studies of this kind barely exist so far.

If the connection turned out to be weak, that would be a useful finding in itself — it would confirm the separation proposed here. If it turned out to be strong, we would have a more accessible route to questions that currently require elaborate procedures.

Until then: two tools, two purposes, one shared interest in understanding.

Sources

  • Hesse, E. (2008): The Adult Attachment Interview — Protocol, Method of Analysis, and Empirical Studies. In: Cassidy & Shaver (Hrsg.), Handbook of Attachment, 2. Auflage, Guilford.
  • Hesse, E. (1996): Discourse, memory, and the Adult Attachment Interview. Infant Mental Health Journal 17(1).
  • Duschinsky, R. et al. (2023): Trauma and loss in the Adult Attachment Interview — unresolved state of mind in disciplinary and social context.
  • McGoldrick, M., Gerson, R. & Petry, S. (2020): Genograms — Assessment and Intervention. 4. Auflage, W. W. Norton.