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

Synopsis:

Explaining why love is essential to brain development in the early years of life, particularly to the development of our social and emotional brain systems, this study presents the discoveries that provide the answers to how our emotional lives work.

Description:

Sue Gerhardt considers how the earliest relationship shapes the baby's nervous system, with lasting consequences, and how our adult life is influenced by infancy despite our inability to remember babyhood. She shows how the development of the brain can affect future emotional well being, and goes on to look at specific early 'pathways' that can affect the way we respond to stress and lead to conditions such as anorexia, addiction, and anti-social behaviour.

Why Love Matters is a lively and very accessible interpretation of the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis and biochemistry. It will be invaluable to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, mental health professionals, parents and all those concerned with the central importance of brain development in relation to many later adult difficulties.

'Why Love Matters is hugely important. It should be mandatory reading for all parents, teachers and politicians.'
- Rebecca Abrams, The Guardian

'A really useful briefing on the new neuroscience and its underpinning of the central tenet of contemporary psychoanalysis: how actual relationships form us and are central to therapeutic endeavours and, even more importantly, how important loving relationships are crucial to our capacity to be human.'
- Susie Orbach

'This is an extremely informative, creative work. There is now a market for translation of 'cutting-edge' science. Few can pull this off as the author does here.'
- Allan Schore, UK

'A wonderful book full of research that connects the nature v. nurture argument, explaining how sensitivity to a baby's needs - and a caring response - can actually affect how a baby's nervous system develops scientifically. I would recommend it to all new parents.'
- Virginia Ironside

Notes about the author(s):

Sue Gerhardt is a practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist.