Attachment from Infancy to Adulthood The Major Longitudinal Studies [Hardcover]

This volume provides unique and valuable firsthand accounts of the most important longitudinal studies of attachment. Presented are a range of research programs that have broadened our understanding of early close relationships and their role in individual adaptation throughout life. In addition to discussing the findings that emerged from each study, leading investigators offer rare reflections on the process of scientific discovery. Themes addressed include the complexities of designing studies that span years or even decades; challenges in translating theoretical constructs into age-appropriate assessments; how Bowlby's original models have been refined and expanded; and how attachment interacts with other key influences on development.

'The child is father to the man': Wordsworth intuited it; Freud asserted it; Bowlby systematized it; this book proves it. Grossmann, Grossmann, and Waters have assembled an illustrious gallery of top attachment and developmental researchers. They present their findings in ways that are scientifically convincing as well as highly readable and personally moving. Reductionists, eat your hearts out--or, rather, start to search for the mechanisms that underlie these incontrovertible links between childhood attachment experience and adult relational competence. This volume is a 'must' for all psychotherapeutic clinicians and child development researchers, and will become a standard text for courses in clinical psychology and social work. I will certainly use it as such in the master's program in psychological therapies that I run. --Jeremy Holmes, MD, FRCPsych, University of Exeter and University College London, UK

This book provides a unique overview of more than 30 years of fascinating longitudinal research on attachment development. It contains marvelous reports of the seminal longitudinal studies conducted by the most well-known people in the field. The volume demonstrates in an impressive manner hlãt