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

Summary

Becoming Attached tells the story of the hundred-year quest to understand what children need and what constitutes good parenting. In this expanded and fully updated edition, psychotherapist and journalist Robert Karen chronicles the origin of a groundbreaking idea—attachment theory—and its 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 controversy. Do "securely attached" children fare better as adults? 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 as evidence for the benefits of secure attachment continue to grow. Karen explores the 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 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.