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 | | Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love by Robert Karen ISBN-10: 9780195115017 ISBN-10: 0-19-511501-5 ISBN-13: 9780195115017 ISBN-13: 978-0-19-511501-7 Paperback 1998-04-23 Oxford University Press, USA Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description 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 we relate 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 fascinating questions 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 professional struggles, 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 secure exploration. 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 changed and 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 is impossible to read this book without reflecting on one's own life as a child, a parent, and an intimate partner in love or marriage. | ||
Reviews | ||
Great book! I am a Licensed Professional Counselor and love this book. A great read, scientific and practical. Great book about how our understanding of human attachment has matured over the past century. Packed with information about how we develop our capacity to attach, to love, to live in society, supported with scientific research. Great information for proper parenting of infants. Ainsworth conducted studies measuring infant attachment, from securely attached to avoidant. The mothers who responded quickly and warmly to their babies cries during the early months of life tended to have securely attached babies at the end of the first year, and the babies cried less. Thank you, Dr. Karen, for advocacy of of a simple, warm parenting style, which is backed by research. So strange that there are so many parenting books out there based on personal opinion, and that we have gotten away from simple warm parenting, which is modeled in more communal cultures. | ||
Attachement theory for those who have never heard of it This is an exceptional book on attachment theory. Robert Karen leads an extraordinary compendium on the important works of Bowlby and Ainsworth. It offeres a powerful peek into our own psychology and how our first relationships shape our lives. Whether you work with children or simply want to understand your own patterns of adult attachment you will not be disappointed | ||
One of the best-written non-fiction books I've read I absolutely LOVED this book. Other reviewers said they found parts boring -- call me a nerd, but I couldn't put it down! Why did I love it? First, the topic is really compelling. I came to this book with a strong interest in adult personality disorders (having a relative with narcissistic personality disorder) and a strong interest in attachment disorders (having an extremely sweet and lovable two-year-old who unfortunately has some attachment problems as a result of spending her first nine months in an orphanage in Kazakhstan). I truly believe that understanding and addressing attachment problems in early childhood is one of the most important issues society faces, given the links to (narcissistic, antisocial, borderline) personality disorders in adulthood, which cause major distress and suffering to the disordered individual and especially everybody else with whom they interact. Second, the book was exceptionally well-written. It's rare to find somebody who can make academic research accessible to laypeople and I found this book to be a tour de force. Third, as a professor at a major research university, I greatly appreciated the author's objectivity in presenting both sides of the academic debates, as well as his thoroughness in documenting the empirical evidence. I wish I could give this book ten stars and have been telling everybody I know to go out and read it. In particular parents with children who were adopted at an older age (read: anything but newborn) would benefit from the book, but biological parents would certainly benefit from it too. The only caveat I would give is that this book is NOT one of those attachment books that is written as a practical manual for how to interact with your child in order to promote attachment (as I had somehow assumed when I bought it). That having been said, I wasn't the least bit disappointed when I started reading it and quickly realized it was more of a history of theory and empirical studies in this area. In particular I felt that the last few chapters explaining the links between childhood attachment problems and subsequent personality disorders (or at least traits) in adulthood were thoughtful, neutrally and compassionately written, and persuasive. | ||
What a rich and wonderfully detailed read! Such a wonderfully detailed book with a narrative that propels you forward through the history of how Attachment Theory came to be. The richness of the chronicling, the details of the lives of the therapists who created and performed the studies, and the depth with which the author explains all of the intricacies of Attachment Theory itself makes this a must-read for anyone who has an interest in thoroughly understanding what influences, molds, and creates our capacity to be in relationship with others. 5 Stars! | ||
This book is like the cover photo a pure joy to read. Everything gets clear, and the history of the attachment theory is a fascinating read and shows how much confusion "science" can make when they go in and overturn common sense. | ||