A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development

A Secure Base collects lectures John Bowlby gave late in his career, presenting attachment theory and the research it inspired to clinicians, parents and a wider public. Its organising idea, taken from Mary Ainsworth, is that a child explores the world confidently from a secure base provided by responsive caregivers, to which it can return for comfort and protection. Bowlby argues that early interactions between infant and caregiver have a profound effect on social, emotional and intellectual development, and he insists that good parenting demands time, attention and sacrifice that many people would rather not hear about. The lectures recount the origins of attachment theory, defend psychoanalysis as a natural science that should test its claims against observation, and examine violence in the family and what happens when children are made to disown what they have seen and felt. The final chapters apply the theory to personality development and to psychotherapy, in which the therapist offers the patient a secure base from which to understand the origins of their difficulties and revise rigid patterns of attachment.