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This book proposes a New Attachment Theory. ‘New’ in the sense of New Labour. Although Holmes agrees that attachment is a new paradigm he implies that it is compatible with all existing psychoanalytic traditions. Bowlby would not have agreed with this as his writings make clear, so it is a new proposal. This, I would argue, is similar to New Labour in that many of the preceding government's principles are adopted in the New Labour paradigm.
In the first chapter Holmes develops his thesis summarized by a chart, Figure 1-1, where the psychoanalytic influences on Bowlby's attachment theory are shown as Klein, Balint and Winnicott. In fact, Bowlby's preferred object relations theorist was Fairbairn who is given little space until Chapter 4. This first chapter covers well the development of attachment theory and its breadth, but in my view he transforms it into an umbrella which can uncritically contain the divergence of psychoanalytic approaches.
The second chapter is a summary of the controversies around attachment theory and psychoanalysis where the idea of a conflict free umbrella theory is proposed. Holmes writes:
Klein places aggression and destructiveness much more centrally in her map of the human heart than does Bowlby, and so can perhaps more easily account for the intractability, resistance, and masochism that psychoanalysis so often reveals.
Klein, Bowlby, and Freud are not necessarily in conflict; they can be thought of as addressing different levels of psychological functioning. Kleinian theory focuses on the intrapsychic
Page 389world of a single individual; attachment theory is primarily directed at the level of two-person interactions; and oedipal theory is about how the introduction of a ‘third term’ affects the two previous levels. (p. 46)
This it would seem to me is the kernel of the problem with Holmes's attempt to put together in this way fundamentally different paradigms.
Chapter 3 brings a statement of the main terms of the New Theory, ‘the triangle of attach