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Psychotherapists have a unique vantage point on the vicissitudes of contemporary intrapsychic and interpersonal life. There can be few of us who have not found ourselves perturbed by the sight of groups of people - in railway carriages, walking with their families down the street, sitting side by side in a café - gazing raptly at their smartphones, or talking into them, rather than interacting with the environment, human and non-human, with which we are surrounded. Does this signify the increasing autism and isolation of modern life, a withdrawal from connectedness and communication? Or should it be celebrated as a manifestation of the ‘global village’ and of how modern technology enables us to remain psychically in touch with the significant people and attachment figures in our lives, however physically far apart? Can Freud's famous telephone metaphor of the unconscious of the analyst resonating with that of the patient, be ‘back-translated’ into the reality of the voice of a loved one in one's ear as a true manifestation of attachment and love?
One of the enduring strengths of attachment theory is its capacity to encompass both the evolutionary origins of human behaviour, and at the same time to pinpoint the role of context and the contemporary in shaping attachment patterns. Bowlby and Hinde coined the phrase the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness to describe the selection pressures which influenced the origins of the attachment dynamic: the role of the infant-parent attachment bond as a protection from predation in a hostile environment, and later as the glue that holds couples, families and societies together. Meanwhile, Mikulincer and Shaver (2007) show how subliminal exposure to attachment-related words - ‘love’, ‘mother’, ‘home’ etc. - help the insecurely attached move to more secure dispositions, better able to describe and resolve interpersonal conflict, and less prone to chauvinism and suspicion.
In this timely volume, Cundy and her fellow attachment-