Lost and Found in Translation: Introduction to Fonagy and Target

In their paper in this issue of JAPA, Peter Fonagy and Mary Target attempt a major integrative task. Seeking new links between attachment theory and psychoanalysis, they trace the history of the relation-ship between the two fields and reformulate attachment theory to fit with contemporary cognitive science, which, they believe, posits a mind more strongly rooted in both brain and bodily experience than was the cognitive science of Bowlby's era. As an exemplar of this “embodied mind” and the bridge it affords between attachment theory and psychoanalysis, Fonagy and Target turn to yet another field, lin-guistics, and trace the origin of speech in an early gestural language that arises in the context of the attachment relationship.

This paper, which is especially broad in scope, exemplifies problems of integration that are frequently encountered in contemporary psychoanalysis. How should clinical psychoanalysts bring together different theoretical frames, for example? Can the language of one model be imported and used in another without doing violence to key meanings? How can we integrate the observations we make when we look at a person's experience from outside with the subjective observations-observations from inside—that the same person reports to us? How can clinical psychoanalysis make use of findings from allied fields—the neurosciences, for instance, or infant observation? And, related to the latter area, how can we bring together different temporal perspectives—the way an experience looks when we have it and the way it looks when we look back on it from a distance?

In a sense, these problems of integration can be seen as problems of translation: how much do we keep and how much do we lose when