Mary Main

Mary Main (1943 to 2023) was an American psychologist and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, notable for her work on attachment. One of the first doctoral students of Mary Ainsworth at Johns Hopkins University, she studied the link between attachment and infant play, replicated the Strange Situation on a new sample and worked with Ainsworth on a seven point scale of avoidance. She is best known for introducing the disorganized infant attachment classification and for developing the Adult Attachment Interview and its coding system, which assesses an adult's state of mind regarding attachment. Her work has been called revolutionary and credited with unprecedented resonance and influence in the field, and the disorganized classification has been linked to later behavior problems and dissociation.