Course Description

This course approaches personality development as an epiphenomenon of attachment experience and temperament, and specifically focuses on the role of primitive mental states in attachment formation. Course content will focus on the developmental scaffolding of anxiety states and their complex relationships with attachment styles, and how these attachment styles inform the development of adult personality. The theoretical context for this course will include object relations, self psychology, and Jungian perspectives.

Learning Objectives

Describe how early attachment experiences and temperament contribute to the formation of primitive mental states, and explain how these states scaffold distinct anxiety patterns across developmental stages.
Analyze the relationship between anxiety regulation, attachment style, and character structure, enabling clinicians to differentiate developmentally normative anxiety from anxiety rooted in primitive or unintegrated mental organization.
Differentiate object relations, self psychological, and Jungian perspectives on anxiety and attachment, and integrate these models to formulate how early relational failures shape adult personality organization and defensive style.
Apply an attachment-informed, depth-psychological formulation to clinical material in order to identify dominant anxiety states, anticipate transference–countertransference dynamics, and tailor therapeutic stance and pacing for patients with varying levels of psychological integration.

The Aion Institute is approved by the California Psychological Association to provide continuing professional education for psychologists. The Aion Institute (AIO279) maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

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AION 203 Anxiety, Primitive Mental States, and Character