Minds in the Making: Attachment, the Self-Organizing Brain, and Developmentally-Oriented Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

It is an honor to be invited to present the Seventh Annual John Bowlby Memorial Lecture. Indeed, this is a double privilege in that it follows another last year, in which I was asked to write the Foreword to the re-issue of Bowlby's ground-breaking volume, Attachment (Bowlby 1969). In that work I surveyed, from a perspective at the close of what has been called ‘the decade of the brain’, his far-sighted proposals about the biological and neurological nature of attachment. Indeed, in a number of contributions I am describing how a spectrum of psychological and biological disciplines have adopted his ideas as the dominant model of human development available to science.

Each of these fields of scientific inquiry, when documenting the origins of the theory, points to Bowlby's integration of ethology (the study of behavioral biology) and psychoanalysis. In a contemporary description of the volume, Ainsworth wrote, ‘In effect what Bowlby has attempted is to update psychoanalytic theory in the light of recent advances in biology’ (Ainsworth 1969, p. 998). I suggest that in the three decades since the publication of Attachment, although the connections between attachment theory and science have deepened, those between itself and psychoanalysis, especially clinical psychoanalysis, have not. This situation is currently improving, however, due to the contributions of developmental psychoanalytic and psychological attachment research that demonstrate the clinical relevance of the concepts of mental representations of internal working models and reflective functions. Experimental and clinical attachment researchers are now describing, in detail, these two fundamental characteristics of ‘minds in the making’, the theme of this meeting.

It has sometimes been forgotten that attachment theory is a direct outgrowth of Freud's developmental perspective, not just a repudiation of some of his early speculations. Indeed, in the very first paragraph of Attachment Bowlby (1969) begins his g