Becoming attached: Unfolding the mystery of the infant-mother bond and its impact on later life
✍ Scribed by Charles H. Zeanah
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 13 KB
- Volume
- 18
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0163-9641
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
A few years ago, a colleague gave me a copy of an article written in The Atlantic, entitled simply, "Becoming Attached." To my surprise, this article was one of the clearest and most complete accounts of attachment theory and research that I had seen in a single reference. I still find it to be an extremely useful introduction to the topic of attachment for students and trainees.
This superb book is the longer and more complete version of that article. Robert Karen, a clinical psychologist in New York, tells the story of attachment from the standpoint of the people and the times that made it possible and important. All of the important figures in the history of attachment are featured and made more vivid by the author's use of material derived from detailed interviews of many of these individuals, concerning themselves and others.
The story of attachment, as told by Karen, begins with the topic of maternal deprivation and the concern of scientists and clinicians about children raised in institutions and other settings that deprived them of a stable and emotionally available caregiving figure. This sets the stage for the emergence of Bowlby, who comes across vividly as the insightful, determined, and intriguing figure that he was. The enormous resistance to Bowlby's ideas, quite stunning in retrospect because of how many of his ideas we now take for granted, is carefully described.
Still, as Karen makes clear, it is quite possible that without the pioneering work of Mary Ainsworth, Bowlby could have been just another theorist. It was the work of Ainsworth that operationalized attachment and attracted the interest of developmental researchers. As Karen notes, many believe that this work played a major role in changing the focus of developmental psychology from its perceptual and cognitive origins and contributed to the legitimization of emotional development (and more recently even relationships) as areas of investigation.
Karen also appreciates that the work of Alan Sroufe and his colleagues, which provided crucial validation of Ainsworth's Strange Situation procedure, was central to acceptance of the paradigm by the larger field. If such a prominent figure as Sroufe and his colleagues at the Minnesota Institute of Child Development were taking the Strange Situation so seriously, there must be something about it worth appreciating.
The invaluable contributions of Mary Main are also considered. Her description of disorganized infant attachment helped resolve some serious conundrums regarding findings