Intimate Attachments: Toward a New Psychology: Morton Shane, Estelle Shane, and Mary Gales. New York:  The Guilford Press, 1997,  242 pp.

A female analytic patient has spent the previous week tentatively exploring her newly experienced sexual feelings for her analyst. The first session of the next week finds her questioning the value of analysis and feeling depleted and despairing. She describes feeling alienated and lonely. Yes, the previous week's work had put her in touch with long repressed sexual desires; but now what? She wonders whether struggling with the loneliness and alienation she feels in the presence of the analyst would be beneficial. She complains of the lack of intimacy. She wants to know what the analyst feels for her. Does he also have sexual feelings? One analyst might view the patient's longings and disappointment as part of an oedipal transference, which needs to be understood and worked through. A second analyst may see the patient as requiring his mirroring presence in order to integrate a heretofore-dissociated sexuality into her self-concept. A third might consider answering the question and tracking the patient's associations to that answer. How does one make informed clinical choices involving interpretation, provision, gratification, or frustration given the ever-widening parameters of contemporary psychoanalytic technique. Intimate Attachments attempts to provide a framework to aid the analyst facing such technical dilemmas.

The authors believe that human beings who are loved and responded to by caring others acquire a consolidated self over the course of their development and a capacity for pleasurable intimacy with others. These are the hallmarks of mental health. Trauma in the form of parental failure or constitutional difficulties in the child disrupts this progressive and interdependent process toward self and self-with-other consolidation. As a result, the vital experience of the self coming into being and being in connection is impeded. Trauma, therefore, is the cause of self and relational pathology. Psychoanalysis, through the provision of positive new experience,