Advanced Seminar: Attachment and Loss

Catalog description

What are the foundations of our feelings about our most important relationships? How do our earliest relationships set the stage for later psychological adjustment? How do early experiences of trauma and loss impact our relational development? Using primary texts, this seminar takes a deep dive into the origins and fundamental concepts of John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory. We explore how psychological health across multiple domains is predicted by early childhood attachment categories, what features of parenting account for the intergenerational transmission of attachment styles, the cross-cultural literature on attachment theory, and the critical impact of early deprivation, loss, and trauma on early attachment and subsequent psychological adjustment.