Mary Main

Mary Main, who passed away on 6 January, 2023, was a giant in the field of attachment, a thinker of immense originality, exceptional subtlety, and extraordinary clarity, which brilliantly illuminated our corner of social science. I remember her with respect verging on awe but also great warmth and fondness, and am aware of how deep her loss must be felt by her husband and intellectual collaborator, Erik Hesse. The contribution that Mary made to attachment theory and developmental research transformed the field, and continues to inspire and challenge researchers.

Mary Main was an early PhD student in Mary Ainsworth's group at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Following the completion of her doctorate, which sought to replicate Ainsworth's Strange Situation protocol, Main moved to the Psychology Department at Berkeley, California, where she remained for the rest of her career, and where she worked with a group of talented students who were to go on to make substantial contributions to the field, such as Nancy Kaplan, Judith Solomon, Donna Weston, and others. Main is most gratefully remembered for two seminal innovations, both of which radically altered our understanding of attachment relationships: her work on disorganised attachment, developed with Judith Solomon, with the introduction of a new classification to the Strange Situation procedure, and her work on the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), which, by tracing attachment into adulthood, staked new ground on the nature and meaning of attachment processes and relations in the human psyche.

In thinking about Mary Main's contribution to the field, I returned to some of her classic papers. I began with her 1985 piece with Nancy Kaplan and Jude Cassidy, “Security in infancy, childhood, and adulthood: A move to the level of representation” (Main et al., 1985). Mary Main was not a rampantly prolific writer, but the richness of so many of her papers is extraordinary. The 1985 paper provides a precise and sophisticated