Attachment as a 4E System

Attachment patterns are naturally 4E—but why do they persist as stable shapes rather than dissipating as circumstances change?---Attachment is the original distributed cognitive system.Before the infant can think, reason, or even clearly perceive, they are coupled to a caregiver in a system that spans two bodies, two nervous systems, two sets of actions and reactions. The infant cannot regulate their own arousal—they depend on the caregiver to provide external regulation. They cannot make sense of their own experience—they depend on mirroring and attunement to organize their internal states.This is 4E cognition before there is a self to be cognizing. The attachment relationship is embodied in physiological synchrony. It is embedded in the caregiving environment. It is enacted through continuous interaction. It is extended across the dyad—neither participant is cognitively complete without the other.If ever a phenomenon should be claimed by 4E cognition, it's attachment. And in some ways it has been—developmental psychologists working in enactivist and embodied traditions have made important contributions to understanding early relationship.But there's a puzzle here that 4E frameworks struggle with: attachment patterns persist.The anxious attachment that developed with an inconsistent caregiver shows up decades later in adult romantic relationships. The avoidant attachment that developed with a dismissive caregiver appears in how the adult handles intimacy and vulnerability. The disorganized attachment that developed with a frightening caregiver manifests in approach-avoidance conflicts that the adult cannot resolve.4E cognition describes distributed, dynamic, context-sensitive processes. Attachment describes stable patterns that persist across decades and manifest in contexts utterly different from their origins.Why don't attachment patterns dissolve when circumstances change? What makes them stable geometric shapes rather than fluid adaptations to current conditions?---Attachment Is Thoroughly 4EConsider each dimension:Embodied. Attachment is written in the body. The secure infant has a body that can escalate arousal when needed and return to calm when the caregiver responds. The anxious infant has a body that escalates readily but calms slowly. The avoidant infant has a body that dampens arousal preemptively, showing physiological stress that doesn't match their apparent behavioral calm. These bodily patterns persist. Adult attachment is embodied in autonomic regulation patterns, physiological response to relationship stress, and somatic reactions to intimacy and separation.Embedded. Attachment is shaped by environment. The available caregiver, the responsive caregiver, the frightening caregiver, the absent caregiver—these environmental features shape what patterns develop. But attachment also transforms environment. The anxiously attached person perceives threat in partner behavior that the secure person wouldn't notice. The avoidant person creates distance that shapes how others respond. The environment isn't given; it's partly created by the attachment pattern that reads it.Enacted. Attachment is lived in action. The secure child explores freely because they know the caregiver is available—exploration and attachment are enacted together. The anxious child restricts exploration to maintain proximity. The avoidant child explores rigidly, without the freedom that comes from secure base. In adulthood, these patterns are enacted in how people approach relationships, manage conflict, and navigate intimacy and autonomy.Extended. Attachment is fundamentally relational. The infant's cognitive system includes the caregiver. The adult's regulatory capacity is supported by close relationships. We extend our cognitive and emotional resources through connection. Attachment is about how that extension works—whether it provides stable scaffolding or unstable foundation.By any measure, attachment is a 4E phenomenon. It spans body, environment, action, and relationship. It develops through embodied interaction. It shapes and is shaped by environment. It is enacted, not represented.---The Stability ProblemBut attachment also poses a problem for 4E cognition's emphasis on fluidity and context-sensitivity.The secure infant typically becomes a secure adult. The anxious infant typically becomes an anxious adult. The patterns persist across:Time: decades of intervening experienceContext: situations utterly unlike the original caregiving environmentRelationship: partners who are nothing like the original caregiverDevelopment: massive cognitive, social, and neural changes4E cognition emphasizes that cognition is context-dependent, environmentally-scaffolded, dynamically adaptive. If so, why don't attachment patterns adapt to new contexts? Why does the anxious pattern persist even when the current partner is consistently available? Why does the avoidant pattern persist even when the current context is safe?The standard answer invokes "internal working models"—mental representations of self and other that were formed early and now shape perception and behavior. But this answer sits awkwardly with 4E cognition's critique of representationalism. If cognition is fundamentally enacted rather than represented, what is being represented in internal working models? If the body-environment coupling determines cognition, why does early coupling persist in shaping adult cognition even when current coupling differs?The representational language of "internal working models" may be a placeholder for something 4E cognition needs but doesn't have: an account of what makes patterns stable.---Four ShapesAttachment research identifies four primary patterns, each with distinctive features:Secure attachment appears when caregiving is consistently responsive. The infant learns that distress signals produce caregiver response, that comfort is available, that the world is navigable. This produces a particular shape: flexible arousal that escalates when needed and settles when the need is met; exploration that ranges freely because the secure base is reliable; relationships characterized by trust and appropriate vulnerability.Anxious attachment appears when caregiving is inconsistent—sometimes responsive, sometimes not. The infant cannot predict when comfort will be available, so they maintain vigilant monitoring and amplified signaling. This produces a different shape: arousal that spikes easily and settles slowly; exploration that is constrained by the need to monitor the attachment figure; relationships characterized by preoccupation, fear of abandonment, and reassurance-seeking.Avoidant attachment appears when caregiving is consistently dismissive or intrusive. The infant learns that distress signals don't produce helpful response—or produce unwanted intrusion—so they dampen signaling and rely on self-regulation. This produces another shape: arousal that is suppressed at the behavioral level (though physiological arousal may persist); exploration that appears independent but lacks the freedom of secure exploration; relationships characterized by distance, discomfort with intimacy, and self-sufficiency.Disorganized attachment appears when the caregiver is both source of safety and source of fear—through abuse, severe mental illness, or frightening behavior. The infant faces an unsolvable problem: the attachment system says approach the caregiver for safety, but the fear system says flee from danger. This produces a fractured shape: no coherent strategy; approach-avoidance conflict; dissociative features; relationships characterized by chaos, fear, and contradictory behavior.These are shapes, not merely descriptions. They have geometry—characteristic patterns of arousal, exploration, proximity-seeking, and relationship behavior that recur across contexts and relationships.---What Makes Shapes Persist?Several features might explain why attachment patterns persist despite changing circumstances:Developmental timing. Early experience shapes a system that is still forming. The neural, physiological, and psychological architecture develops in interaction with the caregiving environment. By the time circumstances change, the architecture is already built. New experience is processed through existing architecture rather than replacing it.Self-reinforcing dynamics. Attachment patterns shape the environments they encounter. The anxious person's vigilance and reassurance-seeking can exhaust partners, producing the inconsistent response that confirms anxious expectations. The avoidant person's distance can produce pursuit, producing the intrusion that confirms avoidant expectations. The patterns create the conditions that sustain them.Perceptual bias. People with different attachment patterns perceive the same situations differently. The anxious person sees threat in neutral partner behavior. The avoidant person misses signals of available support. Perception is theory-laden; attachment patterns are the theory.Regulatory function. Attachment patterns serve regulatory purposes. The anxious pattern manages uncertainty through vigilance and proximity-seeking. The avoidant pattern manages overwhelm through distance and self-reliance. Even when the patterns cause problems, they serve functions that make them resistant to change.Embodied encoding. Attachment isn't just thought or felt—it's stored in physiological patterns, autonomic responses, and bodily habits. These are slower to change than beliefs or interpretations. The body remembers what the mind might revise.These explanations help, but they don't fully resolve the puzzle. 4E cognition still needs to explain how patterns can be both dynamically enacted and stably persistent—how cognition can be context-sensitive and yet not fully responsive to changed context.---Geometry, Not RepresentationThe language of "internal working models" suggests stored representations that guide behavior. But the persistence of attachment might be better understood in geometric terms.Attachment patterns are shapes in a space of possible configurations. The secure shape has certain properties: moderate arousal range, flexible response to separation and reunion, capacity for both intimacy and autonomy, trust calibrated to evidence. The anxious shape has different properties: elevated arousal baseline, prolonged response to separation, strong pull toward proximity, trust that oscillates with immediate feedback.These shapes are stable not because they're stored representations but because they're attractors—configurations that the system tends toward and returns to after perturbation.A ball in a bowl rolls back to the bottom after displacement. The bottom of the bowl is an attractor. The bowl's shape determines which configurations are stable.Similarly, an attachment pattern might be an attractor in the space of possible relational configurations. Early experience shapes the landscape—creating bowls and valleys that the system tends to settle into. Once the landscape is shaped, the system flows toward its attractors even when surface conditions change.This geometric framing has advantages over representational language. It explains stability without positing stored content. It's compatible with 4E's emphasis on dynamics and coupling. It allows for change—attractors can shift if the landscape is reshaped—while explaining why change is difficult.But 4E cognition doesn't provide this geometric vocabulary. The attractor language comes from dynamical systems theory. The landscape language comes from potential function mathematics. These tools aren't part of the standard 4E conceptual kit.---Earned Security and Geometric TransformationThe strongest evidence that attachment is geometric rather than fixed comes from "earned security"—adults who show secure attachment despite insecure childhood histories.Earned security happens. People with difficult early experiences can develop secure adult attachment. The patterns can change.But the change has distinctive features:It requires sustained different experience. Brief exposure to secure relationship doesn't transform attachment. Change requires extended, consistent experience that differs from original patterns—usually through long-term therapy, secure partnership, or other sustained relational contexts.It involves narrative integration. Earned secure individuals can tell coherent stories about their difficult histories. They haven't forgotten or minimized early experience—they've integrated it. The story holds together.It shows in physiology, not just behavior. Earned security involves autonomic changes, not just behavioral performance of security. The body has reorganized, not just the presentation.It's effortful and incomplete. Earned security typically shows some differences from continuous security. Under high stress, earlier patterns may resurface. The original landscape hasn't disappeared; it's been overlaid with new structure.This pattern suggests geometric transformation: the original attractor remains but new attractors have been created; the landscape has been reshaped but not erased; the system has expanded its repertoire of stable configurations.This is precisely the kind of account 4E cognition needs—but it requires geometric vocabulary that the framework doesn't currently provide.---What 4E NeedsAttachment is a gift to 4E cognition: a thoroughly embodied, embedded, enacted, extended phenomenon that has been studied in extraordinary empirical detail.But it's also a challenge: a phenomenon that shows stable patterns persisting across massive changes in context, defying the framework's emphasis on dynamic context-sensitivity.What 4E needs to engage attachment fully:A stability account. Not just how cognition is distributed but what makes some distributed patterns stable attractors that resist change. Why does the anxious pattern persist when partners are available? Why does avoidant pattern persist when intimacy is safe? What property of these patterns makes them stable shapes rather than transient configurations?A transformation account. Not just that patterns can change but what produces change. What kind of experience reshapes attachment? How does the landscape of attractors transform? Why is transformation effortful and partial rather than immediate and complete?A geometry of attachment styles. The styles aren't arbitrary categories; they're specific shapes with characteristic properties. Secure attachment has smoothness—flexible response to changing conditions. Anxious attachment has curvature—high sensitivity that produces large responses to small variations. Avoidant attachment has flatness—dampened response that maintains distance regardless of input. Disorganized attachment has discontinuity—fragmented structure that can't settle into coherent pattern.These are geometric properties. They could be measured. They could be modeled. They could connect 4E's theoretical insights to attachment's empirical findings.But the framework needs to develop them.---The Developmental LensAttachment also reveals something about 4E cognition's temporal assumptions.The 4E framework typically describes cognition in the present tense. The body shapes thought now. The environment scaffolds cognition now. Meaning is enacted now. Extension happens now.But attachment is formed then and shapes now. The developmental history matters. The present configuration cannot be fully understood without reference to its formation.This isn't anti-4E—embodied cognition has always acknowledged that the body carries history. But it requires more explicit attention to how present distributed cognition bears traces of past distributed cognition. How early coupling shapes later coupling. How developmental experience creates the landscape within which current dynamics unfold.4E cognition describes the stream. Attachment reveals that the streambed matters—the channel carved by earlier flow that shapes how current flow proceeds.---The Bridge NeededAttachment is naturally 4E—distributed across body, environment, action, and relationship. But it shows stable geometric patterns that 4E frameworks struggle to explain.What's needed is an addition: a principled account of what makes some distributed cognitive configurations stable and what produces transformation when it occurs.This addition would need to:Characterize stability in terms applicable to distributed systems—what properties make patterns persist despite changed circumstancesExplain the specific shapes that attachment research has identified—why secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized patterns have the particular properties they doAccount for earned security—how patterns can transform through sustained different experienceConnect embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended dimensions—showing how stability in one dimension reinforces stability in othersAttachment shows that distributed cognition can settle into stable configurations. Those configurations are geometric—they have characteristic properties of smoothness, curvature, flatness, and continuity.4E cognition describes the distribution. What it needs is the geometry of stable shapes.---Next week: Part 8—Neurodivergence and Precision Mismatch---Series NavigationThis is Part 7 of a 10-part series reviewing 4E cognition and its structural limits.4E Cognition Under Strain (Series Introduction)Why Cognition Escaped the SkullEmbodied Cognition and the Missing Stability ConditionEmbedded Cognition and Environmental FragilityEnaction, Sense-Making, and the Problem of CollapseExtended Cognition and the Scaling Problem4E and Trauma: The Unspoken Failure CaseAttachment as a 4E System ← you are hereNeurodivergence and Precision MismatchLanguage, Narrative, and the Limits of Sense-MakingWhy Coherence Becomes Inevitable