Before Attachment: Maternal-Infant Bonding in the First Eight Weeks
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Authors
Breakey, Karen
Issue Date
2025-11
Type
Capstone
Language
en
Keywords
matrescence , maternal-infant bonding , matricentric feminism , perinatal critical window , interpersonal synchrony
Alternative Title
Abstract
This paper re-evaluates mother-infant bonding and attachment through the lenses of current neuroscience, interpersonal psychology, and matricentric feminism. It outlines maternal-infant bonding as a dyadic neurobiological process rooted in interpersonal synchrony and mammalian biology. Bonding occurs in the first eight weeks of life, is fundamental to human psychosocial functioning, and becomes the basis for all later human affiliative bonds, including romantic attachments. New bonding research based in neuroscience calls into question a half-century of attachment research focused on older babies, the feminist dismissal of bonding as a scientific fiction, and the narrow focus of psychotherapy on self-actualization of the individual. Two crucial perspectives had previously gone unexamined—those of newborns and mothers themselves. Neonatal babies were believed too passive and blank to participate in the bonding process and were ignored by researchers until they could demonstrably express feelings toward the mother. Mothers were seen as the agents of their baby’s wellness but rarely asked for their own views on bonding or mothering. Neuroscience now confirms infants were underestimated. They build foundational neurocircuitry for lifelong psychosocial functioning during a critical developmental window that opens at birth and closes after eight weeks. Newborn babies actively participate in their own social learning and mothers undergo simultaneous neural change, opening tremendous possibility and also vulnerability for both. During this crucial time, mothers and newborns function as an intersubjective dyad rather than two individuals. The psychosocial health of each depends upon the other. Consequently, the wellbeing of new mothers demands new primacy and attention from mental health professionals.