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I was fascinated during this three-day conference by the great difference between the community of attachment researchers who are mainly PhD psychologists and my own community of attachment-based psychotherapists. A family metaphor repeatedly came to mind as I listened to these confident, assured lecturers advancing attachment theory on entirely different fronts from the ones I am used to. It was as if we had a grandfather in common but that as cousins we had grown up in entirely different cultures. One branch of the family became substantially based in the USA, where the leading lights and inspirations were Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main, both strongly committed to developing attachment theory as a research paradigm. The other branch remained in Britain, where the research aspect has been substantially developed by Peter Fonagy and Howard and Miriam Steele at University College, London, and the clinical practice has been taken up and developed over the last twenty years in the first attachment clinical training at the London Centre for Attachment-based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. In the event, my worst fears were not at all realized, as there was hardly any of that cloying insistence that attachment theory needed to be scientific. There was just too much excitement about the work itself and how valuable attachment theory was for understanding the vicissitudes of human psychological development.
Although the conference speakers were largely US based, this was a genuine international event attended by 520 researchers and graduate students from twenty-eight countries. Held in the comfortable surroundings of the University