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

• Parenting From the Inside Out
• Attachment in Psychotherapy
• The Forgiving Self: The Road from Resentment to Connection
• The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are
• A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development

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.

This book is perfectly written, gives a reading pleasure, a very good historical review of attachment theory. I'll advise this book as a good start for anyone who wants to get familiar with attachment. But if you want something more technical this may be not suitable for you.

It's a great read. I recommend That's How the Light Gets In: Memoir of a Psychiatrist by Susan Rako, M.D. The title comes from a song by Leonard Cohen: "There is a crack, a crack in everything. The writing just flows. That's how the light gets in." Rako's book is remarkably candid, brilliantly insightful, and wonderfully wel-written.

Moreover in the seemingly relatively normal upbringing of a child and then the adult who looks retrospectively at their own childhood and their present relationship with their own children similar issues arise which affect their ability or capacity to love or show an ability to love. She sees babies and toddlers who have been abused through neglect; absence of communication; verbal, emotional, physical and sexual abuse. This is an amazing book which was recommended to me by a friend who works in Child Protection - the parents of the children have mental health issues which range from learning disabilities to more extreme personality disorders. The children suffer a range of disorders from the physical to mental, emotional and social as a result, yet all have degrees of attachment to their abusers, ambivalent attachment and codependency and the patterns of how they are likely to develop are easy to see manifesting in the child that will become the adult if there is no early intervention, if the relationships were to continue between child and parent and if there is a lack of awareness or ability as a growing adult to consciously make efforts to change habitual patterns. This book causes one to self-reflect, analyse and ponder quite deeply how we love because of how we were loved or what we understood or perceived love to be. This book covers all of these themes.

I would highly recommend this to everyone because you will not only understand others, but you will understand yourself. I just finished this book about two weeks ago and I want to read it again. Although the book at times is a little technical, it is perfect for anyone interested in understanding people. Absolutely love it. Although the book is primarily about child development, Robert Karen adds amazing insights throughout that are absolutley mind boggling.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through this, and I must say: I am very impressed. The book does get a bit dense towards the middle, including info that the layperson probably wouldn't want to bother with, but he never loses the narrative thread and I kept reading and learning and being grateful he did such a thorough and well-reasoned job of presenting all this material. You can learn a lot more from this book about childrearing and how to bring children up to be secure, confident adults that you can from most of the pop psychology and parenting books which present the fad of the day or some catchy opinion that has not been backed up by scientific research. Karen has a rare combination of professional expertise, a wide command of the extensive literature relating to early childhood including psychoanalytic, a real gift for writing, and a willingness to not dodge difficult issues and to be entirely forthright with the reader, without ever underestimating the intelligence of the reader to grapple with the issues he brings up and form their own conclusions.