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In the wake of the death of Her Majesty Elizabeth II, the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, on 8 September, 2022, it hardly surprised me that virtually every single one of my patients spoke quite movingly about the emotional impact of the loss of this iconic ninety-six-year-old maternal and grandmaternal transference figure, who had occupied such an important symbolic role in all of our lives.
Sadly, several weeks thereafter, on 6 January, 2023, another truly remarkable person passed away in her home, at the age of seventy-nine years, namely, the brilliant and much-admired Professor Mary Main, whom we might well describe as the veritable Queen of Attachment Research.
Although the vast majority of mental health workers have devoted our working lives to the facilitation of clinical psychotherapeutic sessions with individuals, couples, and families, and, sometimes, even groups and organisations, Mary Main— an esteemed academic developmental psychologist—spent decades undertaking groundbreaking empirical research about the short-term and long-term impact of internalised parental attachment behaviours and styles upon young babies and toddlers. Through her iconic investigative work, undertaken in collaboration with many astute colleagues, including her husband, Professor Erik Hesse, the forwardthinking Mary Main has provided us with vital evidence that intrafamilial childhood experiences, especially moment by moment interactions between babies and parental caregivers, really do matter.
During the early decades of psychoanalysis, most clinicians restricted their focus and, consequently, their publications to very detailed examinations of disguised, individual case histories. But, as the twentieth century unfolded, leading figures such as Dr John Bowlby (1944a, 1944b, 1945-1946) broke new ground by embracing the research methods of academic psychologists, examining larger samples of cases. Indeed, as early as the 1940s, Bowlby contributed hugel