Attachment Theory As A Secure Base For Psychoanalytic Exploration: A review of Attachment Theory: Social, Developmental, and Clinical Perspectives, edited by Susan Goldberg, Roy Muir, and John Kerr. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1995. 528 pp.

AS ANALYSTS, myopia is one condition we must avoid. We are called upon to deal with a vast array of entrenched difficulties and must be open to any information that could be of use in our work. We can afford neither the narrow departmentalism of academia nor the rigid religiosity that some analytic circles still require of adherents.

For this reason, the story of John Bowlby’s relationship to the analytic world is a sad, shameful chapter in our history. As recounted in this recent volume, Bowlby’s is the story of a man ostracized from the British Psychoanalytic Society once his unpopular views on attachment became known. In a sympathetic chapter (pp. 19-43) written with literary finesse, Jeremy Holmes tells how Bowlby’s interests in psychoanalysis and processes of attachment grew. Holmes freely speculates about possible roots of Bowlby’s interests in his childhood, recounts his growing up and his analytic training (with Joan Riviere as his analyst) in a British Psychoanalytic Society torn between adherents of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. At first, Bowlby was able to navigate well in this atmosphere, but his interpersonal rather than intrapsychic, and reality- rather than fantasy-based theories were soon met with skepticism and then with a kind of silent wall of ostracism by the largely Kleinian analytic community. Only in 1980 did he begin to receive recognition at home for his ground breaking research. It would be useful if we could learn from those twenty years in which both psychoanalysis and attachment theory suffered because of an insecure analytic climate in which provocative ideas could not be considered.

Bowlby’s story forms the backdrop for the contributions in this richly rewarding volume. Actually the book developed out of a conference held in 1993 in Toronto, which had as its express purpose the interaction of clinicians and researchers in the common pursuit of an understanding of the processes of attachment.

The contributors study attachment from ethol