You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I very much appreciate the invitation to present this year's John Bowlby Memorial Lecture. I have always found Bowlby's work stimulating and very important; he directly concerned himself with what has seemed central to me both in terms of theory and clinical practice. I met him once in the 1980s, when I served as a discussant of a paper on attachment and detachment he presented at the William Alanson White Institute, and have vivid memories of the stories he told about the British Psychoanalytical Society in the 1930s and 1940s, the early years of his intellectual maturity. I remember him commenting that ‘the pressures against looking at real life experiences were something ferocious’. In the discussion I wrote at that time, I noted that:
At a time when psychoanalytic theory often seems to be growing more and more jargonized and arcane, Dr Bowlby's work has been an inspiration for those hoping to see psychoanalytic theorizing remain open to other intellectual disciplines and informed by advances in research and clinical observation.
I would like to take this occasion to reflect on the relationship between the flourishing attachment tradition Bowlby's work established and the psychoanalytic tradition. I want to show how Bowlby's virtual expulsion from mainstream psychoanalysis in the early 1960s makes some sense in terms of the history of psychoanalytic ideas, since he was several steps ahead of his own time. I then want to consider the ways in which other major psychoanalytic authors, Fairbairn and Loewald, as well as the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, struggled with the same problems Bowlby was dealing with. There is now a very marked receptivity among psychoanalysts to the same ideas that earned Bowlby his place in the psychoanalytic Gulag along with Fairbairn and Sullivan. Finally, I want to consider the way in which an integration of these different angles on the same phenomena car, be helpful both conceptually and clinically.
Psychoanalysis, has alway