Becoming Attached First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love

by Karen, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780195115017
• ISBN10: 0195115015
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-04-23
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The struggle to understand the infant-parent bond ranks as one of the great quests of modern psychology, one that touches us deeply because it holds so many clues to how we become who we are. How are our personalities formed? How do our early struggles with our parents reappear in the way werelate to others as adults? Why do we repeat with our own children--seemingly against our will--the very behaviors we most disliked about our parents? In Becoming Attached, psychologist and noted journalist Robert Karen offers fresh insight into some of the most fundamental and fascinatingquestions of emotional life. Karen begins by tracing the history of attachment theory through the controversial work of John Bowlby, a British psychoanalyst, and Mary Ainsworth, an American developmental psychologist, who together launched a revolution in child psychology. Karen tells about their personal and professionalstruggles, their groundbreaking discoveries, and the recent flowering of attachment theory research in universities all over the world, making it one of the century's most enduring ideas in developmental psychology. In a world of working parents and makeshift day care, the need to assess the impact of parenting styles and the bond between child and caregiver is more urgent than ever. Karen addresses such issues as: What do children need to feel that the world is a positive place and that they have value?Is day care harmful for children under one year? What experiences in infancy will enable a person to develop healthy relationships as an adult?, and he demonstrates how different approaches to mothering are associated with specific infant behaviors, such as clinginess, avoidance, or secureexploration. He shows how these patterns become ingrained and how they reveal themselves at age two, in the preschool years, in middle childhood, and in adulthood. And, with thought-provoking insights, he gives us a new understanding of how negative patterns and insecure attachment can be changedand resolved throughout a person's life. The infant is in many ways a great mystery to us. Every one of us has been one; many of us have lived with or raised them. Becoming Attached is not just a voyage of discovery in child emotional development and its pertinence to adult life but a voyage of personal discovery as well, for it isimpossible to read this book without reflecting on one's own life as a child, a parent, and an intimate partner in love or marriage.

Author Biography

Robert Karen is a clinical psychologist in private practice and an award-winning author. In addition to two previous books, he has written articles for The Atlantic, New York magazine, Mirabella, The Nation, and The Yale Review. He is Assistant Clinical Professor at the Derner Institute of Advance Psychological Studies, Adelphi University.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: How Do We Become Who We Are?	1	(12)
PART I. What Do Children Need?	13	(116)
1. Mother-Love: Worst-Case Scenarios	13	(13)
2. Enter Bowlby: The Search for a Theory of Relatedness	26	(14)
3. Bowlby and Klein: Fantasy vs. Reality	40	(7)
4. Psychopaths in the Making: Forty-four Juvenile Thieves	47	(12)
5. Call to Arms: The World Health Report	59	(8)
6. First Battlefield: "A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital"	67	(20)
7. Of Goslings and Babies: The Birth of Attachment Theory	67	(16)
8. "What's the Use to Psychoanalyze a Goose?" Turmoil, Hostility, and Debate	103	(16)
9. Monkey Love: Warm, Secure, Continuous	119	(10)
PART II. Breakthrough: The Assessment of Parenting Style	129	(48)
10. Ainsworth in Uganda	129	(14)
11. The Strange Situation	143	(19)
12. Second Front: Ainsworth's American Revolution	162	(15)
PART III. The Fate of Early Attachments	177	(92)
13. The Minnesota Studies: Parenting Style and Personality Development	177	(14)
14. The Mother, the Father, and the Outside World: Attachment Quality and Childhood Relationships	191	(11)
15. Structures of the Mind: Building a Model of Human Connection	202	(8)
16. The Black Box Reopened: Mary Main's Berkeley Studies	210	(10)
17. They Are Leaning Out for Love: The Strategies and Defenses of Anxiously Attached Children, and the Possibilities for Change	220	(18)
18. Ugly Needs, Ugly Me: Anxious Attachment and Shame	238	(10)
19. A New Generation of Critics: The Findings Contested	248	(21)
PART IV. Give Parents a Break! Nature-Nurture Erupts Anew	269	(92)
20. Born That Way? Stella Chess and the Difficult Child	269	(20)
21. Renaissance of Biological Determinism: The Temperament Debate	289	(24)
22. A Rage in the Nursery: The Infant Day-Care Wars	313	(32)
23. Astonishing Attunements: The Unseen Emotional Life of Babies	345	(16)
PART V. The Legacy of Attachment in Adult Life	361	(50)
24. The Residue of Our Parents: Passing on Insecure Attachment	361	(18)
25. Attachment in Adulthood: The Secure Base vs. The Desperate Child Within	379	(15)
26. Repetition and Change: Working Through Insecure Attachment	394	(17)
PART VI. The Odyssey of an Idea	411	(32)
27. Avoidant Society: Cultural Roots of Anxious Attachment	411	(15)
28. Looking Back: Bowlby and Ainsworth	426	(17)
APPENDIX: Typical Patterns of Secure and Anxious Attachment	443	(3)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	446	(3)
NOTES	449	(20)
BIBLIOGRAPHY	469	(18)
INDEX	487