Developmental Psychology, Attachment Research
Mary Main
University of California, Berkeley · 1943–
Key work
Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) (1985)
What they contributed
Main developed the Adult Attachment Interview — a structured clinical interview assessing adults' attachment-related representations of their childhood experiences. Her research with the AAI documented the phenomenon of "earned security": adults who experienced insecure or traumatic childhoods who had, by adulthood, developed coherent, integrated narratives of their early experiences and were functioning with secure attachment. She established that the capacity to make sense of one's attachment history — even a difficult one — is both measurable and developable.
Why it matters here
Main's earned security research is the foundation of the claim that attachment patterns can change — providing empirical evidence that adult relational experience can update early attachment templates, and that narrative integration (not just positive experience) is a mechanism of change.
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