Embodiment and our Immersion with Others: Commentary on Fonagy and Target

eading Fonagy and Target's essay is a pleasure. In critical scientific discourse it is all too typical for authors to dissect differences in points of view between traditions or within traditions over time; this then leads to an argument for a new speculative view that tries to take into account current knowledge but that in many respects leaves the reader hanging. Fonagy and Target do much more. They review cogently, and brilliantly, the early history of Bowlby's attachment theory and its shunning by psychoanalysis, its subsequent modification through research using observation and experiment, its “move to representations,” and its recent acceptance into psychoanalytic thinking, particularly with the ascendancy of relational psychoanalytic views. They also point to the fact that Bowlby's thinking on the cognitive aspects of attachment theory, though strongly multidisciplinary, was in large measure based on an information-processing model in the cognitive sciences, a model that has been superseded in the newer cognitive neuro sciences, in which links between mental functioning and brain/body are being discovered. In the midst of newly emergent technology and methods, mental functioning is seen not as abstracted (as in the former computer metaphor that guided information processing) but as “embodied” such that plausible neurobiological events are sought to account for mental events. Surprisingly, the authors point out, not only does this new research-based model put a different light on some of attachment theory, but it also draws forward some historical elements of psychoanalytic theory that in our times have been relatively neglected. Moreover, the “embodied” view from the cognitive neurosciences brings