PERSON
Mary Main
American developmental psychologist (1943–2023) whose development of the Adult Attachment Interview and identification of
earned security extended attachment research into adulthood and provided the empirical foundation for the claim that internal working models can be revised across the lifespan.
Mary Main studied under
Mary Ainsworth at Johns Hopkins and spent the majority of her career at UC Berkeley, where her contributions reshaped attachment research in three decisive ways. First, with Judith Solomon she identified the disorganized attachment category in 1986, expanding Ainsworth's original three-category classification and opening the research field to the specific pattern of children whose caregivers had been simultaneously source of comfort and source of fear. Second, she developed the Adult Attachment Interview — a semi-structured protocol that assesses attachment organization not by what adults say about their childhoods but by how they structure the telling. Third, her research on adults who had achieved
secure attachment despite difficult childhood histories established the concept of
earned security, demonstrating that
internal working models formed in childhood could be revised through later relational experience. For the AI transition, Main's work is the empirical foundation of genuine hope: the working models disrupted by technological change can be rebuilt.