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This is a quite unusual and very good book. Perhaps the title is badly chosen. Ezquerro isn't telling tales of attachment at all, implying something slightly mythic and fictional. Instead, it is a solid professional review of Bowlby's attachment theory, enlivened by vignettes of the author's personal relationship with Bowlby and little known historical details. Bowlby's three volume trilogy (1969, 1973, 1980) will remain the standard reference analogous to the Standard Edition of Freud's works, but Ezquerro has created a book that could serve both as a text for trainees and as an introduction for clinicians otherwise unacquainted with attachment theory. It complements and adds to the growing literature on Bowlby and his work (Fonagy, 2001; Holmes, 1993, 2015; Fonagy & Campbell, 2014; Slade, 2008).
Ezquerro was Bowlby's supervisee for six years from 1984 to 1990. As a consultant psychiatrist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and group analyst he knows his way around the disputes and arguments that characterize our fraught discipline. His account of attachment theory covers the bases, from an account of Bowlby's childhood through to the Controversial Discussions, Bowlby's gig at the World Health Organization, and Bowlby's isolated years at the Tavistock Clinic. Ezquerro has expressed his admiration of Bowlby's contribution, doing so by summarizing attachment theory in a straightforward, matter-of-fact way, without embellishment or fan-mail.
Particularly welcome is Ezquerro's summary of Bowlby's insistence on the importance of real experience in treatment, especially in the treatment of trauma and sexual abuse. Ezquerro summarizes the conflict between Bowlby's supervision with Melanie Klein and his 10-year training analysis with Joan Riviere, and their emphasis on the inner world versus Bowlby's growing theoretical insistence on real-life experience, by quoting Bowlby's 1991 reflection:
one can only understand a person's internal world, and thus see his current situation th