John Bowlby and Attachment Theory by Jeremy Holmes. Published by  Routledge, London, 1993;  249 pages.

In the last issue of this Journal, Martin Stanton argued that if psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are to develop in the universities there will have to be a critical and comparative examination of all its hypotheses and theories as with all other subjects. In the same issue Jeremy Holmes informed us about a new development in the USA where a group of psychoanalysts have set up an Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis because the American Psychoanalytic Association does not want to ‘widen the narrow cannon of psychoanalytic authors deemed suitable for study, especially Bowlby, Kohut and Lacan’. Jeremy Holmes has himself contributed to this widening of general psychoanalytic developments by writing this book about John Bowlby and attachment theory.

In a way you get two books in one because there is a biography of John Bowlby presented along with an introduction to the many facets of attachment theory both in research and clinical terms. There are also useful clinical examples drawn from Jeremy Holmes' work as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and psychiatrist. Important contemporary research brings the reader up to date on this explaining field. The classic Bowlby work, such as that on maternal deprivation, attachment, loss, anger and grief, is combined with recent advances in child development research (‘post-Bowlbyan research’). Finally the implications for psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, psychiatry and society are described in four chapters.

The final chapter takes the form of a letter to John Bowlby because the author feels that writing a biography is also like a therapeutic relationship and the letter is to say goodbye. Jeremy Holmes comments that some people may have seen Bowlby as reserved, detached or even arrogant. My experience of being supervised by John Bowlby was that he was warm, friendly, intensely curious and provided me with a very secure base for my work. He was also, incidentally, able to apply attachment thinking to the problems of child abuse e