Attachment and Loss, Volume 1: Attachment

Where the need to belong comes from developmentally. Background for week 2, not required.

John Bowlby (1982). Basic Books (2nd edition).

Secondary reading — not required, but it is the one to follow next.

Baumeister and Leary treat belonging as a standing adult motivation. Bowlby asks where it came from, and answers that the bond between infant and caregiver is a behavioural system with its own logic — proximity-seeking, a secure base, distress at separation. The adult who needs somewhere to go on a Tuesday is running on machinery built for something else.

This is here if week 2 caught you. It is long, and this course does not test it. But if you find yourself wanting to explain why a regular keeps coming back when nobody there is family, this is the literature that has thought about it longest.