The Multi-Layers of Attachment*

Welcome to Volume 17 (issue 2) of Attachment. This is the first issue under my editorship that has been entirely generic. And as such I found myself struggling to pull together the current issue, as I was pondering the themes of the superb articles and book reviews I had the pleasure of reviewing over the coming months. First, I have been impressed with how skilfully and creatively authors have made use of attachment theory and applied it to their various fields of expertise. It was a pleasure to read such a wide variety of papers and second, that the theme I kept returning to, was how wide the net had spread to the utilisation of attachment. It was this wide scope that made me ultimately settle on the multi-layers of attachment and how this linked to the way many have organised the various psychotherapies. This organisation perhaps feels quite accessible to my mind with my various core therapy professions, first in clinical psychology, then in family/systemic practice, and finally in the world of psychoanalysis. It almost inevitably makes me think of the individual, the interpersonal, and the world.

Many therapies have been frequently criticised for focusing on the individual such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), for example; which has long received the sometimes-necessary critique of being an overly Eurocentric model locating far too much in the individual (Harper, 2016). I always understood this critique from clinical psychologists, in a sense I always felt they were to some extent critically reflecting on themselves, but was always more curious when this came from psychoanalysis, as the traditional intrapsychic models of psychoanalysis could be accused of much the same, epistemologically speaking at least. But I rather like CBT, particularly the third wave approaches, so it shouldn't surprise you then that I find the intrapsychic approaches useful too.