Becoming Attached

Description

The classic text on the history of attachment theory and its impact on the field of child development, now in a fully expanded and updated edition.

A century ago, leading childcare experts were miles apart in their recommendations to parents. Behaviorists warned against spoiling children with too much affection ("Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap") whereas geneticists argued that affection matters little because our genes alone determine who we are. Into this fray in the late 1930s stepped John Bowlby, the British psychoanalyst whose work with psychologist Mary Ainsworth would overturn the world of child development and shape its trajectory for the next 70 years.

Becoming Attached tells the story of one of the great undertakings of modern psychology: the hundred-year quest to understand what children need and what constitutes good parenting. In this expanded and fully updated new edition, psychotherapist and journalist Robert Karen chronicles the origin of a groundbreaking idea - attachment theory - and its resounding impact on the fields of developmental psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Karen charts the historic course of attachment theory as it gained notoriety and support-and not a little controversy. Do "securely attached" children fare better as adults than "insecurely attached" ones? What do children truly need to thrive? Can babies handle prolonged separations? Presenting the origin story of an important idea in child development, this new edition also reveals how attachment research has exploded worldwide in the past several years as evidence for the benefits of secure attachment continue to grow. Karen explores the cutting-edge science examining the relationship between infants and their caregivers - such as the hidden world of synchronized play, fMRI studies that reveal neural patterns of parental and receptive love, and the link between attachment and genetics, wherein early experience changes the expression of genes. Karen also tells a dramatic story of scientists at work and at war, what happens when a theory such as attachment becomes complicated by political and economic pressures, and how its entanglement with gender roles and equity in the workforce continue to overshadow research to this day. Karen shares anecdotes drawn from his own practice to illuminate the challenges many adults face in overcoming insecurities that may originate in infancy and childhood, and how resulting harmful relationship patterns may be quashed.

Cementing its place as a classic text of child development and its rich history, Becoming Attached has much to say about both child and adult life, as readers will find it impossible to read without reflecting on their own lives as children, parents, and intimate partners in love or marriage.

New to this Edition

• Fully expanded and updated with the latest scientific research
• Draws on new evidence showing that the benefits of secure attachment continue to grow
• Further explores complications, such politics, gender, and equity, that affect the latest research

Table of Contents

Introduction: Does Love Matter?

PART I WHAT DO CHILDREN NEED?

1. Mother Love: Worst Case Scenarios
2. Enter Bowlby: The Search for a Theory of Relatedness
3. Bowlby and Klein: Reality vs. Fantasy
4. Psychopaths in the Making: Forty-four Juvenile Thieves
5. Call to Arms: Bowlby's World Health Report
6. First Battlefield: "A Two-Year Old Goes to Hospital"
7. Of Goslings and Babies: The Birth of Attachment Theory
8. "What's the Use to Psychoanalyze a Goose?" Turmoil, Hostility, Debate
9. Monkey Love: Warm, Secure, Continuous

PART II BREAKTHROUGH: THE ASSESSMENT OF PARENTING STYLE

10. Ainsworth in Uganda
11. The Strange Situation
12. Pay-off! Ainsworth's Revolution

PART III THE FATE OF EARLY ATTACHMENTS

13. The Minnesota Studies: Parenting Style and Personality Development
14. The Mother, the Father, and the Outside World
15. Structures of the Mind: Building a Model of Human Connection
16. The Black Box Reopened: Mary Main's Berkeley Studies
17. Why Do We Turn Out Like Them? The Residue of Our Parents

PART IV GIVE PARENTS A BREAK! NATURE-NURTURE ERUPTS ANEW

18. Born that Way? Stella Chess and the Difficult Child
19. The Rush to Debunk: A New Generation of Critics
20. The Fight Over the First Year
21. Renaissance of Biological Determinism: The Twin Studies
22. A Waning of the Extremes
23. Attachment Resurgent
24. Academia at Its Worst: The Infant Daycare Wars

PART V THE HOLDING ENVIRONMENT

25. An Athens of Infancy: The Baby Bowlby Left Behind
26. Being Oneself with Others: Winnicott's True Self
27. Life as It Is: Mourning, Integration, and Repair
28. Astonishing Attunements: Mothers and Infants in Slow Motion
29. The Older Baby and the Family Drama: Video Studies, Part Two
30. And Now for Something Entirely Different: The Neurobiology of Love
31. The Regulation of Self and Other: In Daily Life and the Brawls of Science
32. The Reflective Parent: Seeding the Examined Life

PART VI FAULT LINES AND REPAIRS: THE INNER LIVES OF ANXIOUSLY ATTACHED CHILDREN

33. Fear, Guilt, and Shame: Stalkers of the Insecure Self
34. They Are Leaning out for Love: Survival Strategies of Insecurely Attached Children and the Prospects for Change

PART VII SECURE BASE AND INSECURE BASE: A THERAPIST CONSIDERS ADULT ATTACHMENT

35. Love and Reliance: The Secure Self in Adulthood
36. Repetition: Why People Don't Change
37. All the Discomforts of Home: The Insecure Base
38. Beckoning: The Fight for the Secure Self

PART VIII THE ODYSSEY OF AN IDEA

39. Avoidant Society
40. Looking Back: Bowlby and Ainsworth