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This complex, comprehensive, and clinically oriented work contributes a distinctive theoretical position to the diversity of perspectives encompassed by contemporary self psychology. Writing in a cogent, eloquent, and accessible style, the authors grapple with a wide range of theoretical and clinical issues that are of concern not only to self psychology but to contemporary psychoanalysis as well. They consider such currently debated questions as the mind-body problem, the place of reality in theory and practice, conceptions of transference and countertransference, the role of the analyst's subjectivity in therapeutic action, and the setting of boundaries in a “nontraditional” approach. The authors' primary focus is on delineating their vision of psychoanalytic change. A particular feature of Intimate Attachments is the authors' use of contemporary metatheory to guide the organization of their theoretical framework. A brief review, taking up selected aspects, will inevitably fail to do justice to the impressively broad scope of this work.
The authors build on an integration of constructs extracted from key theoretical and clinical assumptions of self psychology (Kohut and contemporary contributions) and key ideas of attachment theory (Bowlby and more recent researchers). Recognizing the limitations of Kohut's one-person psychology, they aim to create a model that takes the experience of the other as other, and of relatedness to that other, into account (a two-person psychology view). They use the findings of attachment studies, and of infant and brain research, to support and further inform their integrative endeavor. Their use of contributions from related disciplines stands in contrast to the position of Kohut, who delimited the domain of psychoanalysis to data accessible to introspection and empathy as the method of observation. The authors discuss their approach to forming a model, which involves integrating selected