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“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.… Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body will also rest secure, because you will not abandon me to the grave.… You will fill me with joy in your presence” (Psalms 23: 4; 16: 9-11; cited on p. 25).
With biblical passages such as this, Geoff Goodman introduces most chapters of The Internal World and Attachment. In so doing he not only lyrically describes the basic and universal sentiments of human attachment and their primacy to human nature and development, but also, perhaps, hints at the magnitude of the task he has set for himself in his attempt to integrate two major strands of contemporary psychoanalytic theory.
It is of considerable interest that Goodman's 2002 volume follows so closely on the heels of Peter Fonagy's 2001 Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis. These two works, taken together, constitute a major contribution to putting to rest the remnants of the straw dogs of differences through which earlier adherents of attachment theory and psychoanalytic theory have made caricatures of each other and lay the necessary foundation for the further genuine integration of the enormous contributions attachment theory offers to psychoanalysis.
Fonagy begins his work with the statement, “There is bad blood between psychoanalysis and attachment theory. As with many family feuds, it is hard to identify where the problem began” (p. 1). He takes the position that the relationship between attachment theory and psychoanalysis is more complex than adherents of either community generally recognize and that modern psychoanalysis does not overlook the child's need for a relationship. He then looks at each major school of