Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain.

Abstract

Reviews the book, Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes the Baby's Brain by Sue Gerhardt (see record 2005-01883-000). This is a timely book with what might be construed as an ironic title. Freud (1914) in his paper 'On narcissism' came to the conclusion that without love the human psyche was condemned to sterile self-obsession. Freud, in fact, receives short shrift in Gerhardt's book and there are frequent somewhat dismissive references to the Freudian project, as if all the new science that she quotes renders him obsolete. In fact, it could be argued that what is now known of the surprising capacity of the infant to communicate with others from the moment of birth contrasts profoundly with Freud's view of 'his majesty the baby', the embodiment of his parents' narcissistic investment. Gerhardt's main concern in this book, however, is to draw together recent work in neuroscience and attachment research in order to argue for the importance of early affective experience in sculpting the newborn brain and in creating subsequent attachment patterns. In this respect, her book adds valuable weight to the argument for more investment in early infancy and in supporting parents in the work of loving and caring for their babies. Gerhardt is extremely sympathetic to women's struggles, and part of the book's agenda would seem to be a broadening out of the debate to consider the wider social implications of how infants and children are cared for. Gerhardt presents new research in assimilable form and puts flesh on the arguments with vignettes of what it might mean for individuals in various real life situations to have characteristic ways of relating that have been hardwired in the first two years of life. The importance of early intervention in a maladaptive parent-infant relationship is a clear corollary of the arguments that she presents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)