You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Peter Fonagy is a prolific and expert author at the interface of psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology. He has written Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis to inform those knowledgeable about the attachment literature but not psychoanalysis, and vice versa. Therefore, he focuses on the particular and intimate relationship between psychoanalysis and attachment theory as he sees it evolving from John Bowlby's work from the 1950s. While it is a relatively expensive paperback, Fonagy's book is an intellectual bargain.
Fonagy begins by describing the troubled relationship between Bowlby and the psychoanalytic establishment. He then launches into a laudable Chapter 1: “Introduction to Attachment Theory” (where the reader is alerted to the author's editorializing tendencies by statements such as “…marriages without sex perhaps represent the majority of such partnerships” [p. 10]). He spells out the book's major objective: to illuminate the links — those both present and missing — between Bowlby's hypotheses, their recent reformulations, and current psychoanalytic thought. A great deal is packed into these few pages, including a valuable diagram of four developmental levels summarizing the “ontogenesis” of the mind in a way understandable to psychoanalysts and non-analysts. The book ends with a disappointingly brief conclusion in which Fonagy somewhat piously repeats his belief that both fields can be of benefit to each other. In this review, I focus on two chapters: “Key Findings of Attachment Research” (Chapter 2) and “What Do Psychoanalytic Theories and Attachment Theory Have in Common?” (Chapter 12).
Fonagy divides this valuable chapter into six sections, a device highly conducive to teaching and learning, and a testament to the author's