A Secure Base

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Ellen Broomé welcomed Gillian Schofield and Mary Beek to talk about the new edition of their bestselling publications, The Secure Base Model and Promoting Attachment and Resilience.

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Psychoanalysts had, at the time, gone way off on a tangent, completely detatching themselves from reality, and Bowlby was trying to set them back on track. Selective attachments, then, begin to form from birth and early infancy is a critical period for their development, but there are further key stages throughout childhood. Rhesus macaques - infants show a marked preference for a soft dummy ‘mother’, despite its providing no food, to a hard one that does provide it (Harlow and Zimmermann 1959). For example, the young person who feels good about herself and expects others to be mostly warm and friendly will present herself to a potential new friendship group in a way that signals ‘you can trust me.

It gave me so much to think about as a mother especially how my own childhood has an impact on my kids’ childhoods as well. The infant's drive to approach the caregiver for care and protection results in fear and increased rather than decreased anxiety. It is fairly well explained, there are a lot of studies cited, and some lectures were very interesting. We have added to the model an additional dimension, family membership, that is relevant for all children but can be particularly challenging for children who are separated from their families of origin.All of these behaviours give strong signals which lead caregivers to approach and respond to the needs of the baby. This course will develop participants' knowledge of the Secure Base Model as well as their competence in using it during the assessment process, in preparing applicants, and in evidencing and analysing prospective carers' potential to meet the needs of children and young people.

Gillian Schofield is Emeritus Professor of Child and Family Social Work and former Head of the School of Social Work at the University of East Anglia (UEA). The author presents attachment theory in a historical fashion each time by first stating what psychologists used to think and how new findings changed it.Disorganised: Where the caregiver is rejecting, unpredictable and frightening or frightened, the infant is caught in a dilemma of ‘fear without solution' (Main and Hesse 1990). With my limited knowledge I would say that this book is the ground-zero for anyone interested in developmental analytical psychotherapy. How can children be helped to recover from earlier harmful experiences and feel competent to face future challenges successfully and fulfil their ambitions and potential? The caregiver may draw on their own ideas about what children need or what makes a good parent from their own experiences or from what they have learned from training. This caregiving cycle encompasses the many interactions of family life or life in a residential care setting.

The risk, then, is that feelings and behaviours might become fixed in destructive loops and the damage of the past will not be healed.

Bowlby was a psychoanalyst who was just starting to break the mold that Freud had set, and had been stagnating for several years. All of us, from the cradle to the grave, are happiest when life is organised as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures. Having said that, this book also enables us to see how we can take what we have, make sense of it, and begin to change it. It is a positive, strengths based approach that focuses on the interaction between the caregiver and the child, but also considers how that relationship can enable the child to develop competence in the outside world and manage often complex relationships with birth family members. Where children have not experienced the kind of sensitive parenting that promotes security and resilience, they will find it difficult to trust and will struggle with managing their feelings and behaviour.