A Secure Base Quotes

“risks. Thus we take it for granted that, when a relationship to a special loved person is endangered, we are not only anxious but are usually angry as well. As responses to the risk of loss, anxiety and anger go hand in hand. It is not for nothing that they have the same etymological root.”
― John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development

“Ever since Freud made his famous, and in my view disastrous, volte-face in 1897, when he decided that the childhood seductions he had believed to be aetiologically important were nothing more than the products of his patients' imaginations, it has been extremely unfashionable to attribute psychopathology to real-life experiences.”
― John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development

“Thus in the right place, at the right time, and in right degree, anger is not only appropriate
but may be indispensable. It serves to deter from dangerous behaviour, to drive off a rival, or to coerce a partner. In each case the aim of the angry behaviour is the same - to protect a relationship which is of very special value to the angry person.”
― John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development

“It was regarded as almost outside the proper interest of an analyst to give systematic attention to a person's real experiences.”
― John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development

“All knowledge is conjectural and ... science progresses through new theories coming to replace older ones when it becomes clear that a new theory is able to make sense of a greater circle of phenomena than are comprehended and explained by the older one and is able to predict new phenomena more accurately.”
― John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development

“At the time of his second birthday, for example, a healthy child whose mother is resting on a garden seat will make a series of excursions away from her, each time returning to her before making the next excursion. On some occasions, when he returns, he simply smiles and makes his number; on others he leans against her knee; on yet others he wants to climb on her lap. But never does he stay for long unless he is frightened or tired or thinks she is about to leave.”
― John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development