CONCEPT
Internal Working Models
The cognitive-affective maps of self-in-relation-to-others that are installed through early experience and operate below awareness — the fishbowl that precedes and constrains every subsequent relational encounter.
Internal working models are the mental representations of relationships that each person carries forward from early attachment experiences. Constructed through thousands of caregiver interactions across the first three years of life, they encode expectations about what to expect when one reaches out for connection. The models are not beliefs one could revise by argument; they operate at the level of perception itself, shaping what the person notices, remembers, and feels before conscious thought begins. Bowlby named them 'working models' because they function instrumentally — guiding behavior in ways the person does not perceive as guided. Their structural identity with Segal's fishbowl is not coincidental: both describe invisible assumptions that feel like reality because the person has never been outside them.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Bowlby drew the concept from cognitive psychology's models of mental representation, combining it with psychoanalytic insights about transference. The resulting framework specified that early relational experience does not merely leave memories — it installs processing architectures that shape how all subsequent relationships are
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