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In his introduction, Goodman has done an excellent job of describing what he is going to tell us in each of the subsequent 14 chapters. With clarity and directness, he outlines his basic ideas and references the various people who have influenced his thinking.
Geoff Goodman is a dedicated scholar with a background in academic and research psychology and a foreground in psychoanalysis as an advanced candidate in the child and adult program at the Psychoanalytic Institute of the New York Freudian Society. He writes with enthusiasm for his subject, perhaps even with a sense of cause, as he introduces and draws us into his subject matter with a story of one of his earliest memories of himself as a 5-year-old child briefly lost from his parents at an airplane show. His memory of the traumatic experience, and his “forgotten” psychosomatic reaction at the time, triggered his personal interest in attachment and loss, and the wish to understand the intrapsychic process by which separation anxiety becomes internalized and represented. This book, he tells us, is a “first attempt to enlist the help of psychoanalytic theory in understanding this internal world in relation to attachment” (p. 15). It is, indeed, a thorough and engaging first attempt.
It is unusual but interesting to find, in a book devoted to the serious scientific effort of developing a model for integrating two diverse theories, that chapter 1, and all but two of the 15 chapters, opens with a quotation from the Hebrew scriptures. A passage from Sigmund Freud and one each from Melanie Klein and Mary Ainsworth head up the other two chapters. Clearly Goodman holds these scriptures in his mind and finds that their expressions of longing for a protective Presence resonate with his understanding of the child's need for the loved parent, the human need for attachment, the hunger for love.
Throughout the book, his own as well as others' experimental studies are well detailed and critiqued. He acknowledges his indebtedness