What is the significance of the earliest ties we create in childhood? What impact do they have on our later life, on our emotions, fears and desires? To what extent do our early ties affect the quality of the social and, particularly, love relations we create in adult life? Relying on extensive research, Blaise Pierrehumbert examines the complex emotions that infants manifest when they are caught between the desire to open up to the outside world and the need to maintain powerful ties. Pierrehumbert’s scientific, psychological approach enables him to understand the subtle mental states that will ultimately enable the child to use the figures he or she is emotionally attached to as a springboard to independence. The child will then learn to use the known to open up to the unknown, and to use the past to embrace the future.
Pierrehumbert pleads for freer, less dependent children, and for more responsible but less guilty parents.
He offers concrete advice, adapted to specific cases, regarding such contemporary issues as working mothers, new ways of being a father, and different types of child care, including day-care centres from early infancy.

Blaise Pierrhumbert is a specialist in emotional attachment . He has a practice at Lausanne’s teaching hospital, in the ward of child and adolescent psychiatry. He also teaches at the University of Lausanne.