A Secure Base
Bowlby writing directly about what attachment means in the consulting room.
In providing his patient with a secure base the therapist's role is analogous to that of a mother who provides her child with a secure base from which to explore the world.
Gathering lectures Bowlby delivered late in his career, this collection sets out how attachment theory bears on everyday clinical work. First published in 1988, it moves from the making and breaking of bonds in infancy to the patterns a patient carries into the consulting room decades later. The central argument is that the clinician functions as a secure base: a reliable presence from which the patient can turn to examine the painful and often disavowed experiences of earlier life. Bowlby insists that real events, actual family experience, and how a person was treated as a child matter alongside phantasy, and he traces attachment across the whole lifespan rather than confining it to the nursery. For the practitioner, the book names the tasks this position asks of the therapist: providing that base, attending to the transference as a guide to attachment history, and helping the patient reconsider the working models built in childhood.
About the author
John Bowlby
John Bowlby (1907 to 1990) was a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst based at the Tavistock Clinic in London. He founded attachment theory, drawing on ethology and evolutionary biology to argue that the child's bond with a caregiver is a biologically rooted survival system rather than a secondary drive. His Attachment and Loss trilogy sets out this framework, building on his earlier work on maternal deprivation. He collaborated closely with Mary Ainsworth, whose empirical studies extended and tested his ideas.
Details
- 1988
- English
- Routledge
- Routledge, 1988
- 224
- 9780415355278