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Peter Fonagy and Mary Target have contributed much to the integration of developmental empirical science and the psychoanalytic body of theory and practice. This is but another chapter in their impressive collaboration. The current paper addresses the complex of problems between attachment theory derived from the work of John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst, and psychoanalysis as a clinically based motivational science. They examine the distortions inherent in the cognitive science based on information theory that they say Bowlby borrowed in the 1960s and find that a modern “embodied cognitive science” of the twenty-first century provides a more congenial link to psychoanalysis. Then they examine how psychoanalytic rootedness in instinct and drive derived from the body is compatible with data from this new approach to mind and cognition. They further expand their argument to examine the rootedness of symbolic thought in affect and bodily metaphors. The authors concisely state that “these advances in our understanding of the way affects organize the mind and provide an embodiment to cognition offer an opportunity to forge powerful links between the hitherto separate domains of attachment theory and psychoanalysis.” They confess that they are engaged in a speculative enterprise when they seek phylogenetic and ontogenetic links between immature gesture and symbolic thought.
In what follows I will examine the personal, human controversies between the advocates of each discipline and method and then address the intellectual speculations offered in the second section regarding language, thought, and symbolic function.