Attachment and Psychopathology: Leslie Atkinson and Kenneth Zucker, New York, London.  Guilford Press, 1997.

Even though this book was not written for a psychoanalytic audience, I find it has relevance to psychoanalysts. My biases are a positive attitude towards attachment theory and the developmental point of view Furthermore, I think that psychoanalysis needs to understand, integrate, and differentiate itself from a number of extra-analytic fields, particularly neurobiology, empirical child developmental studies, and attachment theory. These fields may be seen as the basic sciences for psychoanalysis, and data from them can be used to theorize psychoanalytically about development, psychopathology, and therapy.

Most analysts are familiar with Bowlby, who proposes attachment as the alternative primary drive to the sexual drive of psychosexual theory Bowlby proposes that the child's tie to the mother is produced by the activity of behavioural systems that have proximity to the mother as a predicted outcome; that the infant differentiates the object of attachment from other objects, that the infant displays characteristic responses to the presence and/or absence of the mother, and that attachment is a primary motivation to fulfilment of psychosexual needs. Some psychoanalysts may be less familiar with the fact that this theory has been substantiated by a large number of research studies