Becoming attached

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 childrenseemingly against our will - the very behaviors we most disliked about our parents? And how do we pass on to our children our capacities to love and create, as well as our insecurities, bad habits, and unresolved anxieties? These questions have long intrigued psychologists, philosophers, and novelists. In Becoming Attached, a book destined to become the seminal work on attachment theory for a general audience, 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 and Mary Ainsworth as they struggled in Britain and the United States to get their ideas about the profound effects of early childhood influences accepted.^

He chronicles thirty years of groundbreaking studies that address such issues as: What does a child need to feel that the world is a positive place and that he has value? Is day care harmful for children under one year old? What experiences in infancy will enable a person to develop healthy relationships as an adult? Which of us are more likely to raise troubled children? How can we be supported and how can we change? 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 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 can be changed and resolved throughout a person's life. More than an eye-opening presentation of the fierce debates that have transformed the way we think about human bonds, Becoming Attached is also a voyage of personal discovery. It is impossible to read this material without reflecting on one's own life as a child, a parent, and an intimate partner in love and marriage.