Building a Bridge: Exploring in Security: Towards an Attachment-Informed Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (2010) by Jeremy Holmes, published by  Routledge.

The aim of this book is to build a bridge between attachment theory and psychoanalysis, which is not a new undertaking. John Bowlby himself, when he developed attachment theory, was seeking to make a bridge between psychoanalysis, biology, and psychology. The author, Jeremy Holmes, is visiting Professor of Psychological Therapies at the University of Exeter, following an eminent career as a consultant psychiatrist in the National Health Service, where he worked as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and family therapist. The bridge that Holmes seeks to build between attachment theory and psychoanalysis is long overdue. He writes here with elegance and authority to bridge the divide, using a persuasive combination of rigorous theoretical analysis and clinical vignettes.

The fundamental principle of this book is that attachment theory can help psychoanalytic psychotherapists understand better what they already do intuitively in the consulting room. He argues that without attachment theory there is a gap between theory and practice in psychoanalytic psychotherapy clinical technique. This gap comes about because the emphasis on the therapeutic relationship cannot be properly understood without acknowledging attachment theory.

In building links with a wide range of psychoanalytic perspectives, Holmes links Freud's description of unconscious processes with secure or insecure attachment processes. He also describes the analyst as an attachment figure who provides the security needed for insecurity to be explored, hence the wordplay in the book's title. He argues that all psychoanalytic perspectives rely on a secure therapeutic relationship. For example, he writes that

Kleinian psychoanalysis is sometimes caricatured as focusing almost exclusively on negative emotions such as aggression, in contrast to more attachment-influenced approaches. In skilful hands there is, however, no real incompatibility.

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Positive priming, via the implicit validating presence of the analyst, is a pre