Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) Course

2025 course registrations now open!

Berry Street are delighted to partner with Dr Clark Baim and the Family Relations Institute (Miami, USA and Reggio Emilia, Italy) to offer this unique online learning experience.

The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is a procedure for assessing adults’ strategies for identifying, preventing, and protecting the self from perceived dangers, particularly dangers tied to intimate relationships.

This course is a unique opportunity to explore the use and value of the Adult Attachment Interview, to become skilled in the delivery of the AAI, and to begin the pathway towards becoming a reliable coder of the AAI.

The AAI will be interpreted using the Dynamic-Maturational Model (DMM) of Attachment and Adaptation. The DMM offers a strengths-based, non-pathologising, bio-psycho-social alternative to symptom-based diagnoses of mental illness and psychopathology. The DMM looks beneath symptoms and focuses on the adaptive function and meaning of self-protective behaviours (Crittenden and Landini, 2011).

The training addresses the patterns found in normative and out-patient treatment populations. It involves 18 five hour sessions delivered over six blocks of full-time effort coding transcripts. Blocks 1 to 4 cover most of the Ainsworth-based patterns that form the basis for the Main and Goldwyn system. Blocks 5 and 6 cover some of the more complex patterns in the Dynamic-Maturational approach, i.e. A3-6 and C3-6 and some of the modifiers of patterns e.g. lack of resolution of trauma and loss, depression and reorganisation. There is coding work between each 3-day block and a requirement to submit three AAIs carried out by the course participant. This work must be completed to receive certificates for administering and coding AAIs.

Following the basic course, students may take a fourth 6-day unit that covers very complex patterning e.g. A7-8, C7-8, other forms of lack of resolution, disorientation, intrusions of forbidden negative affect, and expressed somatic symptoms. These constructs are relevant to the eating and personality disorders, psychoses, serious (forensic) cases of child protection, some parents of children with psychiatric or psychological disorders, and criminal behaviour. This is offered and requires separate registration and payment. Details will be provided during the course.

The Dynamic-Maturational Model (DMM) approach to the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is both a useful research tool and also a potential guide for professionals working with psychopathology.

Participants will learn new ways to conceptualise disturbed development and ways to identify adults' distortions of the mental processing of information, particularly information relevant to disorders of feelings, thought and behaviour. The techniques for interpreting speech can be useful even if the professional does not formally use the interview itself in practice.

For those interested in research applications, the 18-day training is a very good way of gaining an in-depth understanding of discourse analysis and the development of self-protective strategies.

The course also prepare researchers and clinicians to reliably deliver the AAI interview.

Block 1: 28, 29, 30 April (3pm – 8pm, AEST)

Block 2: 26, 27, 28 May (3pm – 8pm, AEST)

Block 3: 23, 24, 25 June (3pm – 8pm, AEST)

Block 4: 28, 29, 30 July (3pm – 8pm, AEST)

Block 5: 8, 9, 10 September (3pm – 8pm, AEST)

Block 6: 27, 28, 29 October (3pm – 8pm, AEDT)

The course will be delivered completely online using ZOOM as the teaching platform.

Online learning will take place between 3pm and 8pm each day (Australian Eastern time zone) with several breaks, and some variations in exact times. Additionally, there will be about three hours of additional reading and practice coding each day of the course.

We strongly recommend that students avoid having any other work commitments during each of the three-day learning blocks and that they have several hours each evening and morning for reading and coding transcripts.

The learning blocks are very time intensive and students will need to have the time and capacity to undertake the highly focused work of reading and coding AAI transcripts.

Total course fee: $5,400 (incl. GST)

The course fee covers 18-days dedicated online training days with Dr Clark Baim, feedback on participants' AAIs, practice transcripts between sessions, ZOOM tutorials to discuss transcripts.

All students must pay 100% of the course fee before the 30 March 2025, there will be no exceptions.

Professionals in the mental health, social care, criminal justice, education, research and voluntary sectors and related professions can all benefit greatly from the course – as will their colleagues and service users.

The course is at an advanced level, suitable for post-qualified professionals. The course is also suitable for PhD and masters level researchers and academics.

Participants with experience of working directly with people are best suited to the course, because of their practical experience of listening and responding to spoken discourse.

To register for this course, participants must:

1. Have completed or are enrolled to complete the 3-day Attachment & Psychopathology (A&P) or the closely related course, Attachment, Neurodevelopment and Psychopathology (ANP) run by either Clark Baim, Patricia Crittenden or Andrea Landini, within the past six years (exceptions may be made if you attended Attachment and Psychopathology more than six years ago if you have attended further DMM trainings in the past six years).
   Berry Street are offering an A&P online course in October 2024, prior to the commencement of this AAI course.
   
2. Have a relevant degree qualification (e.g. Social Work, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Education etc
3. Be available to attend each of the 18 Learning Sessions of the course
   If a student misses more than three of the 18 sessions they will not be deemed to have completed the course. If a session is missed, the student must consult the instructor to discuss how the missed work can be made up in alternative ways.
4. Complete practice coding of transcripts between teaching blocks (approximately 6 to 8 hours per week, plus several hours of reading each week)
5. Undertake the Adult Attachment Interview as an interviewee before or at the start of the course. This is so that each person on the course has had the experience of being given the AAI.
6. Give the AAI to three people between April and October 2025 (two normative and one clinical case), and submit written transcripts of the interviews.
7. Connect and participate in weekly or fortnightly ZOOM online study sessions between Learning Blocks.
8. Complete a Confidentiality Agreement
9. Complete an open-book test at the end of the course, at the student’s own convenience. This is a test of key concepts from the course. Answers to be sent in via email.
10. Pre-Read the book: Crittenden, P. M. (2016). Raising Parents (2nd edition). London: Routledge (available for purchase from Book Depository and other online bookstores)
11. Purchase the course text and have it with them during the course: Crittenden, P.M. & Landini, A. (2011). Assessing Adult Attachment: A Dynamic-Maturational Approach to Discourse Analysis. New York: Norton. (available for purchase from Book Depository and other online bookstores)
12. Pay the full course fees of $5,400 prior to 30 March 2025.

Additional information

Students seeking reliability as AAI coders have the option (subject to the conditions described below) to complete a reliability test following on from the completion of the final set of practice transcripts. The reliability test is separate from this course and will require further payment to the Family Relations Institute or Dr Patricia Crittenden, depending on how the test is administered (tbc). The reliability test is done via email and takes place over twenty weeks, with one transcript classified per week. This will take place in 2026.

Please note: Participation in this AAI course does not necessarily qualify participants for the AAI reliability test. Only those participants who have a demonstrated a very high degree of consistency and dedication in coding the practice transcripts, along with high coder reliability on the practice transcripts – typically 85% or higher - will be recommended for the 2026 AAI reliability test. Most participants will need to do significant further study and practice, in addition to successful completion of an AAI week 4 course (for more serious clinical cases) to become eligible for the reliability test.

The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is a clinical and research tool that offers reliable and valid assessment of adult attachment. It provides information on:

1. An adult’s self-protective strategy i.e. the way the speaker uses information to organise their behaviour when they feel endangered or believe their children to be endangered.
2. A possible set of unresolved traumatic experiences that distort the person’s behaviour without their being aware of it.
3. An over-riding distortion of the strategy such as depression.
4. A pattern of information processing.
5. An interpreted developmental history of the speaker.
6. The Level of Parental Reasoning (LPR, Crittenden, Lang, Claussen, & Partridge, 2000) i.e. how the parent thinks about making caregiving decisions for their children.

The course offered is based on an expansion of the Bowlby-Ainsworth theory (Crittenden, 1995) and an extension of the Main and Goldwyn procedure (Main & Goldwyn, in press) as applied to the Adult Attachment Interview (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1986, 1996).

The Dynamic-Maturational Model (DMM) method (Crittenden, 1999) for analysing Adult Attachment Interviews differs from the Main and Goldwyn method in several ways:

1. Intent: The intent of the Dynamic-Maturational method is to describe the self-protective strategies and patterns of mental processing of speakers. The intent of the Main and Goldwyn method is to predict infants’ patterns of attachment.
2. Outcome classifications: The set of outcome classifications is larger in the Dynamic-Maturational method and better suited to differentiating among individuals with psychological disorder than the set of classifications used by the Main and Goldwyn method.
3. Treatment of non-Ainsworth classifications: The Dynamic-Maturational method uses 6 compulsive Type A sub-patterns (A3-8) and 6 obsessive Type C sub-patterns (C3-8), plus a full array of combinations of these. In the Main and Goldwyn method, most non-normative individuals fall in three classifications (E3, U/E3, and “Cannot Classify”).
4. Patterns vs ratings: The Dynamic-Maturational method depends upon patterns within and among memory systems, whereas the Main and Goldwyn system depends upon ratings of constructs.
5. Functions vs defined meanings: The Dynamic-Maturational method uses the function of discourse markers to define meaning, whereas the Main and Goldwyn method assigns meanings to discourse markers.
6. Memory systems: The Dynamic-Maturational method systematically assesses 5 memory systems (procedural, imaged, semantic, episodic, and working) alongside connotative language, whereas the Main and Goldwyn method considers 3 (semantic, episodic, and working).
7. Modifiers: In the Dynamic-Maturational method, there are four modifiers (depressed, disorientated, reorganising, and unresolved with regard to trauma or loss), with 8 different forms of lack of resolution of trauma or loss (dismissed, displaced, vicarious, blocked, preoccupied, anticipated, imagined, and hinted); the Main and Goldwyn method has only preoccupied lack of resolution of loss or trauma.
8. Validity: Validity for the Main and Goldwyn method is primarily based on normative samples and prediction from mothers to infants, whereas the validity of the Dynamic-Maturational method is primarily based on clinical samples and differentiation among disorders.