A Science Born from Catastrophe — and from the Refusal to See It
Robert Karen’s history opens where attachment knowledge actually began: in the wards. Levy’s primary affect hunger, Bakwin’s sterile hospital units, Spitz’s foundling-home films, Robertson’s A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital — the evidence that institutional care without a loving other wasted children was there for decades, and the professions arranged not to see it. Karen’s telling is unashamedly a moral drama: the sign Bakwin posted at Bellevue in 1931 — “Do not enter this nursery without picking up a baby.” — replaced the antisepsis warnings, and infection rates fell. Spitz’s film ends on the title card “The cure: Give mother back to baby.” What makes the narrative more than anecdote is Karen’s consistent framing device: the resistance to these findings was itself a defense, an institutional version of the very exclusion-of-painful-information that Bowlby would later theorize in individuals. The science of attachment, in this book, is the long story of that defense breaking down.
Bowlby Against the Analysts: Reality Versus Fantasy
The book’s intellectual spine is the fight between John Bowlby and the psychoanalytic establishment that trained him. Freud’s 1897 turn from seduction to wish set the terms; Klein’s school — including Joan Riviere, Bowlby’s own analyst — held the inner world of fantasy primary, while Bowlby, unmoved, insisted that what parents actually do to children matters and went looking for a science that could say so. Karen renders the ethological turn — Lorenz’s goslings, Harlow’s wire and terrycloth mothers — as Bowlby’s flanking maneuver around a profession that would not look at real interaction, complete with the era’s derision (what’s the use, colleagues jeered, of psychoanalyzing a goose?). Yet Karen is fair to the depth tradition Bowlby left: object relations — Klein, Fairbairn, Balint, Winnicott — supplied the concepts attachment theory would operationalize, and Bowlby’s defensive exclusion is repression renamed with an information-processing accent. Ursula Bowlby’s description of her husband — “the most formidable man I ever met” — anchors a portrait of a scientist whose calm was itself a character study in the theory he built.
Ainsworth’s Revolution and the Attachment Wars
The middle of the book belongs to Mary Ainsworth — Uganda, Baltimore, the Strange Situation, and the maternal-sensitivity findings that turned a theory into a research program — and then to the wars that followed. Karen is at his best as an honest broker: Kagan’s temperament critique gets its full force, the twin studies their due, the day-care wars their rage in the nursery. He lets the critics speak in their own voices and still keeps the through-line: none of the counterattacks dissolved the core finding that the organization of early care shows up in the organization of the child. His chapter on shame — the anxious child’s conviction that ugly needs make an ugly me — is the book’s most clinically generative aside, and one this shelf’s addiction and trauma volumes corroborate from other directions.
The Residue of Our Parents: Repetition, and the Possibility of Change
The closing movement carries attachment into adult life: Main’s Berkeley studies and the move to the level of representation, internal working models as the mind’s self-perpetuating maps — Karen reaches for Bowlby’s own homely image of the digger wasp’s fixed map to show what a working model is and why it resists update — and the secure base against what he calls the desperate child within. The final chapters widen the lens to cultural diagnosis (an avoidant society that idealizes self-sufficiency) and then narrow it to the only clinical question that matters: whether the patterns repeat forever. Karen’s answer is the book’s lasting gift to the consulting room — working models are conservative but revisable; earned security is real; the residue of our parents is an inheritance to be worked through, not a sentence.
Becoming Attached holds its place on this shelf as the story of the science the Ainsworth monograph records and the Johnson volume applies — the definitive narrative history, rich and quotable, that lets a reader feel why these ideas had to be fought for. For anyone entering the attachment literature through its human stakes rather than its coding tables, this is the door.