Verwandte Artikel zu The Attachment Effect: Exploring the Powerful Ways...

The Attachment Effect: Exploring the Powerful Ways Our Earliest Bond Shapes Our Relationships and Lives - Softcover

Lovenheim, Peter

 
9780143132424: The Attachment Effect: Exploring the Powerful Ways Our Earliest Bond Shapes Our Relationships and Lives
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0143132423 ISBN 13: 9780143132424
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

"Every reader will find this book about attachment enlightening."
--Dr. Sue Johnson, author of Hold Me Tight

"Does a magnificent job of revealing how attachment manifests at the workplace, in friendships, religion, and even politics.”
 --Amir Levine, M.D., author of Attached

A revealing look at attachment theory, uncovering how our early childhood experiences create a blueprint for all our relationships to come
 
Attachment theory is having a moment. It’s the subject of much-shared articles and popular relationship guides. Why is this fifty-year-old theory, widely accepted in psychological circles, suddenly in vogue? Because people are discovering how powerfully it sheds light on who we love--and how.

Fascinated by the subject, award-winning journalist and author Peter Lovenheim embarked on a journey to understand it from the inside out. Interviewing researchers, professors, counselors, and other experts, as well as individuals and couples whose attachment stories illuminate and embody the theory's key concepts. The result is this engaging and revealing book, which is part journalism, part memoir, part psychological guide--and a fascinating read for anyone who wants to better understand the needs and dynamics that drive the complex relationships in their lives.

Topics include:
  *  What it means to be securely and insecurely attached
  *  How our early childhood experiences create a blueprint for future relationships--and how to use those insights to gain self-awareness and growth
  *  Why anxious and avoidant attachment types tend to attract each other, and how to break the negative cycle
  *  How anyone can work to become "earned secure" regardless of their upbringing and past relationships.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Lovenheim is an author and journalist whose articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Parade, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. He teaches nonfiction writing at The Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland. His previous book is In the Neighborhood, winner of The First Annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

chapter 1

When the Tiger Comes: Origin of the Attachment System

Every time I attended Harry Reis's class on attachment theory, I was late. That was because the start of Harry's class at the University of Rochester conflicted with the end of a writing class I was teaching at a nearby college, and even if I made all the lights and quickly found a parking space, the soonest I could get there was ten minutes after class began. So I'd enter the amphitheater-style lecture hall quietly through a side door and take a seat in the back.

That turned out to be an advantage, though, because from the back of the room I could see all one hundred or so students, including who was paying attention and who wasn't. That first day, I noticed, in the seats nearby, a young man reading e-mail, a young woman on Facebook, and a young man checking stock quotes.

"This is a damn good theory," Harry was saying as I took my seat that first day. He stood six foot three, had a deep, resonant voice, and spoke with a slow, deliberate cadence. "We think it explains an unbelievable amount of human behavior: about our childhoods, about intimate adult relationships, about nearly all relationships throughout our lives."

When I'd first realized Harry was one of the country's leading relationship researchers and that he lived and taught about attachment theory in my hometown of Rochester, New York, I invited him for coffee. Halfway through our meeting, a middle-aged woman sitting at the next table suddenly turned around to us and nearly shouted, "Wow! I'd pay to be at your table! What you're sayin' is so true. Wished I'd known all that when I was younger-it would've saved me a heap of grief!"

Oddly, Harry hadn't seemed surprised by the interruption.

"People hear about this attachment stuff," he told me, "and say, 'Yeah, that's what I want to study. That's what I want to understand.'"

I wanted to understand my own attachment style and how it may have been affecting my relationships and behavior. I'd been through a divorce and then a long-term romance. If knowing more about attachment could help me find a satisfying, stable relationship, that's what I was after. Later, my interests would broaden to include understanding how attachment influences people throughout their lives and throughout society: their relationships with family and friends, how they raise their kids, get along at work, cope with loss, and much more. Could attachment theory be a key to unlocking a deeper understanding of our behavior and everyday lives?

Onto a large screen, Harry projected photos of parents-human and nonhuman-holding and protecting their babies: a mother carried her child on her back; a father held his son on his knee; a cat nursed two kittens; a polar bear sheltered her baby under her body.

"Let's look at this first slide," Harry said. "Notice that in all these different species, there is a physically close, protective bond between an adult caregiver and an infant."

The room was quiet except for the clicking of a hundred students typing on laptops. Taking notes in longhand, I was a visitor from another generation.

Harry's next slide showed a black-and-white photo of a middle-aged British man looking distinguished in a tweed sport coat over a wool sweater.

"In Britain during World War II," Harry began, "fathers were off at war, and during the bombing of London many mothers were killed, so there were a rather large number of children brought to orphanages. And working in the orphanages was a young British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst named John Bowlby."

The red dot of Harry's laser pointed at the image of the distinguished-looking Brit.

"Bowlby was struck by the behavior of these infants," he continued. "What he observed was that even though the orphans were housed in a clean, germ-free environment, were fed well and given good medical care, they didn't thrive. They were underweight. They became depressed. Some died."

The young woman in front of me who had been on Facebook looked up from her laptop.

"And Bowlby observed another thing," said Harry. "He was struck by the way these infants called for, cried for, and watched the door for their mothers, what he called 'searching behaviors.' And he took that to be the human equivalent of what animals do-you know, if you've ever seen a young kitten or a puppy and some scary person walks in the room, what do they do? They run immediately back to their mother for safety."

Monkeys

Harry didn't mention it that day, but at about the same time Bowlby was noting the effects of maternal deprivation on orphaned children, Harry Harlow, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, was observing a related phenomenon in monkeys. His work would later influence Bowlby.

In his most famous experiment, Harlow separated baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers at birth. He then provided them a choice of two surrogate "mothers": one made of wire and holding a bottle of milk, the other also of wire but covered with a soft cloth and without any milk. The result? Most of the time, the infant monkeys clung to the soft-cloth mother-and ran to her whenever they were frightened; they used the wire mothers only for milk.

"These findings are legendary in psychology," Lee Kirkpatrick has written, "as well they should be. They demonstrated convincingly that, at least in rhesus monkeys, infants' interest in their mothers was not reducible to the need or desire for food or breast; [instead,] they spontaneously sought physical contact and comfort."

Babies and Their Caregivers

There is no such thing as a baby-meaning that if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone. A baby cannot exist alone but is essentially part of a relationship.

-pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott

Harry Reis took a couple of steps away from the lecturer's table and faced the class.

"You know," he said, "horses can run within a day or two of birth. That's one of their ways of surviving. But we can't do that. Human babies have the longest period of vulnerability of any species on earth. For seven or eight years of your life, if there isn't someone taking care of you, forget it-you're dead. If a tiger comes, you have no chance of survival."

Harry paused, scanning the class.

"Okay, so you're an infant," he continued, "and there's a tiger coming. What's your way of surviving? If you can find a caregiver and keep that caregiver close-someone who'll provide you food and shelter, and when the tiger comes, take you away from danger-this would be your way of surviving.

"So how do you locate and then keep close to that caregiver?"

As he moved toward an answer, I felt the class's tension rise.

"How do you find and hold close to that caregiver?" he repeated.

"You cry!" he shouted. "You cry, meaning, 'Something's going on that's scaring me! I want somebody to protect me!'"

Babies use other "seeking behaviors" too, Harry explained, such as turning their heads, following with their eyes, and reaching with their hands. "Bowlby argued that these behaviors-crying, staying near the caregiver, etc.-were designed to maintain physical closeness because infants who did that were more likely to survive."

These behaviors of babies, in other words, are not...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0143132423
ISBN 13 
9780143132424
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
eucomply OÜ
hello@eucompliancepartner.com

Pärnu mnt 139b-14
Tallinn
11317
Estland