An Interview with Arietta Slade

Dr. Arietta Slade was originally trained as a psychoanalytically oriented clinician. During the course of her graduate and postdoctoral training, she became intrigued by the clinical relevance of empirical and theoretical work in the area of child development, particularly attachment theory. She has been researching, writing about, and teaching attachment for 30 years. She is currently on the faculty of the clinical psychology doctoral program at The City College of New York, is codirector of the Minding the Baby program at the Yale Child Study Center, and has a private practice in Connecticut.

Slade recalls psychoanalysis being part of her “worldview” from an early age; her parents were both in psychoanalysis, and analytic ideas were part and parcel of the world she inhabited. Once in college, she began to study normal child development, particularly the works of Piaget. She recalls that “at the time the worlds of analysis and normal child development were very separate.” Nonetheless, she found the intersection of psychoanalysis and developmental theory to be compelling, and now describes her thinking as a “hybrid” of these two fields: “I couldn't imagine learning about language learning independent of the context in which you first speak. Your first communication is in the context of a very intense love/hate relationship. Meaning making and cognitive learning take place in an emotional context.” Meanwhile, analytic thinkers such as Melanie Klein had ideas that Slade found clinically useful, but these ideas were not anchored in developmental theory and research.

An important turning point in the development of her analytic-developmental “hybrid” identity came when she was first introduced to attachment theory. The clinical relevance of attachment research caught her attention and inspired her to learn about the research techniques that had sprung from Bowlby's clinical writings. In 1980 she learned Mary Ainsworth's “strange situation,” and