Introduction

Even though global processes currently taking place in Western cultures involve major changes in the family domain, including progressing individualisation and loosening of family ties, it is unquestionable that emotional security is and will be in the future the key dimension of the individuals’ and family well-being (Kapella et al, 2011). Attachment offers probably the best framework to describe how this emotional security develops and is transmitted across generations, both with regard to a romantic love (Shaver and Mikulincer, 2007) and intergenerational relations (Bowlby, 1969).

Up to date, attachment has been extensively proved to be intergenerationally transmitted in terms of the process's mechanisms and its outcome, intergenerational attachment congruence. Although the distinction between the process of transmission (IGT) and its outcome – intergenerational attachment congruence (IGC) – is to a great extent artificial (as both are inseparable in nature), this distinction is not novel and seems to be useful for the selective analysis of transmission-related issues (Belsky, 2005; Takahashi, 2005; Trommsdorff, 2009). In this vein, a more profound investigation of evidences on intergenerational congruence of attachment is proposed in this chapter. Although understanding of the mechanisms of attachment transmission is core for psychological practice and knowledge, at least two reasons may also urge a fresh discussion of the problem of the congruence of attachment across generations. First, for two decades many reports have evidenced the large extent of intergenerational congruence of attachment. Second, and therefore, most psychology students and researchers new to the attachment field who read these reports become more or less convinced that attachment quality is irrefutably transmitted from parent to the child in the same quality, as if adaptive processes that evoke complementing, flexible behaviours from both partners would not exist above and beyond one-directional processes of immediate modelling and imitation undertaken by a child watching his/her parent.

Even though IGC of attachment has been well supported so far, this chapter advocates the notion that the careful analysis of attachment indicators implemented in these studies through the lenses of developmental processes, ecological context and especially measurement issues, reveals differences across measures and studies in the extent of intergenerational congruence of attachment, ranging from a complete absence to its existence at a very high level.