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If you are going to read only one book on attachment theory and clinical work, Jeremy Holmes and Arietta Slade’s Attachment in Therapeutic Practice is the book to read. This rigorously researched and highly readable text covers essentials of attachment theory and its clinical applications, presented by two internationally recognized theoretician/clinician/researchers of attachment. The authors take readers on a journey from the origins of the concept of attachment and its empirical basis, through a sophisticated elaboration of its relevance for clinical work, ending with a chapter on the significance of attachment ideas for societal functioning. The inspiration for this book came from the authors’ observation of the lack of clinical literature on the subject, despite the fact that the attachment paradigm has become a dominant paradigm in psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience. Their primary goal in this work is to systematically examine “how attachment principles might shape, influence, underpin, inform and improve psychotherapeutic practice” (p.2).
The authors write that attachment theory is neither the provenance of psychoanalysis nor any particular psychotherapeutic modality. They suggest that the general approach of an attachment-informed therapy likely includes factors common in all effective therapies. Although this may be true, as I studied their application of attachment theory to clinical work—especially their detailed clinical examples of individual treatment—it was hard to imagine someone not working from an analytic perspective being able to engage and think about the dyad in the complex ways these thoughtful, experienced clinicians do. As they apply the vast literature on attachment to clinical work, their clinical wisdom seems rooted in psychoanalytic thought, closer to today’s Interpersonal/Relational work than to classical Freudian psychoanalysis. There is no way I can do justice to the sheer quantity of theoretical and clinical material packed into