Concept
Secure base
The role of an attachment figure as a dependable source of safety from which a child ventures out to explore the world and to which it can return for comfort when frightened or distressed. Mary Ainsworth drew the idea from the security theory she studied before the war and from her observations of infants, and Bowlby made it central to his account of healthy development and of the therapist's task, which he likened to providing such a base for the patient.
- Broader concept
- Attachment theory
- Introduced by
- Mary Ainsworth
developed by
- John Bowlby 1988 Bowlby took up Ainsworth's notion of the secure base and, in his late lectures collected as A Secure Base (1988), applied it to parenting and to psychotherapy, where the therapist offers the patient such a base.
introduced by
- Mary Ainsworth Ainsworth used the phrase in her 1940 doctoral dissertation on security theory and later made the secure base a working concept in her observational studies of infants.