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

Why Love Matters explains why love is essential to brain development in the early years of life, particularly to the development of our social and emotional brain systems, and presents the startling discoveries that provide the answers to how our emotional lives work.
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.

Introduction. Part I: The Foundations: Babies and their Brains. Back to the Beginning. Building a Brain. Corrosive Cortisol. Conclusion to Part 1. Part II: Shaky Foundations and their Consequences. Trying Not to Feel. Melancholy Baby. Active Harm. Torment. Original Sin. Part III: Too Much Information, Not Enough Solutions. "If All Else Fails, Hug Your Teddy Bear". Birth of the Future. Bibliography.