Development and Vulnerability in Close Relationships

How do people develop in their important relationships? How do two people come together to form a new, close relationship? How do relationships affect or determine who we are and who we become? These questions should be central to the study of mind and development, but most researchers neglect relationships and focus instead on analyses of individuals, as if people were basically alone, experiencing occasional fleeting moments with other people. Research based on this individualist assumption has dominated the behavioral and clinical sciences, but there are other voices, and they are growing. In this book, many of the scholars who are moving relationships and attachments back to the center of human development outline their central concepts, findings, and perspectives. People are fundamentally social, and relationships are part of the fabric of being human, forming an essential foundation that molds each person's mind and action. A mind does not reside in one person but in relationships and communities, composed of many people's interconnected minds, which mutually support and define each other. From the start and throughout life, each person develops strengths and vulnerabilities in important relationships in communities and cultures. Those relationships are so central to each person's activity and experience that without them, no scientific explanation can even begin to analyze mind and action. There is no mind without other people. There is no psychological vulnerability that does not involve others. The contributors to this book aim to establish a firm foundation for the role of relationships in human activity and health and to promote strong research by bringing together in one place most of the best research and theory on development and relationships. Their goal is to stimulate a more radical inclusion of relationships in mind, an ecological focus on the ways that relationships constitute action, feeling, and thought.

Gil G. Noam, Kurt W. Fischer

Contents: Introduction: The Foundational Role of Relationships in Human Development. Part I: Attachment and the Construction of Close Relationships. I. Bretherton, Internal Working Models of Attachment Relationships as Related to Resilient Coping. P.R. Shaver, C.L. Clark, Forms of Adult Romantic Attachment and Their Cognitive and Emotional Underpinnings. R. Case, The Role of Psychological Defenses in the Representation and Regulation of Close Personal Relationships Across the Life Span. Part II: Cognitive Development and Relationships. W. Edelstein, The Social Construction of Cognitive Development. T. Gouin-Décarie, M. Ricard, Revisiting Piaget Revisited or the Vulnerability of Piaget's Infancy Theory in the 1990s. Part III: Construction of Vulnerabilities and Strengths in Relationships. G.G. Noam, Reconceptualizing Maturity: The Search for Deeper Meaning. K.W. Fischer, C. Ayoub, Analyzing Development of Working Models of Close Relationships: Illustration with a Case of Vulnerability and Violence. M.Z. Levitt, R.L. Selman, The Personal Meaning of Risk Behavior: A Developmental Perspective on Friendship and Fighting in Early Adolescence. Part IV: Dynamics and Themes of Relationship in Personality Development. C. Gilligan, The Centrality of Relationship in Human Development: A Puzzle, Some Evidence, and a Theory. J.F. Benenson, Gender Differences in the Development of Relationships. L. Luborsky, E. Luborsky, L. Diguer, K. Schmidt, D. Dengler, P. Schaffler, J. Faude, M. Morris, H. Buchsbaum, R. Emde, Extending the Core Relationship Theme Into Early Childhood. S.J. Blatt, R.B. Blass, Relatedness and Self-Definition: A Dialectic Model of Personality Development.