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Morris Eagle has the necessary credentials to introduce psychoanalysts to attachment theory and research: he has immersed himself in both intellectual worlds and clearly has a lot of respect and affection for both. He starts with the familiar—i.e. psychoanalytic—theory and goes on to explore the similarities and differences of psychoanalytic theory and attachment theory, as well as demonstrating how one can inform the other. Psychoanalytic theory is much more complex than attachment theory, and also at this point in its history, psychoanalysis is characterized by a plethora of schools of thought, not all of which are compatible. It only made sense, Eagle explains, to fit the more compact attachment theory into the massive meandering body of thought that we know as psychoanalysis than vice-versa.
The first four chapters of this compact volume introduce the history, core tenets, and key research findings of attachment theory and provide an in-depth explication of measuring adult attachment. Eagle focuses on “conceptual, theoretical, and clinical issues” in the historical introduction as he describes the influences on Bowlby's development of attachment: his early work with disturbed children where he was influenced by social workers; his exposure to ethology, which demonstrated early instinctive bonding in animals; his interest in Harlow's monkey experiments; his reading of the beginnings of cognitive psychology; and his psychoanalytic training in Freud's drive psychology and Kleinian theory. For many years Bowlby was sharply criticized by the psychoanalytic world, and it is only in the last two decades that his theory has been seen as more compatible with it, as a result of the development of contemporary psychoanalytic theories.
Eagle's chapter on core tenets of attachment theory lays out attachment as a behavioural system with at least as many biological and evolutionary credentials as Freud's theory of drives. He explains how these behaviours promote attachment to ca