Attachment in Psychotherapy: By David Wallin

Our professional mailboxes are stuffed with shiny new brochures for workshops and books on attachment theory. This particular domain of inquiry has captured the psychoanalytic “mind” 100 years after Freud's (1900) Interpretation of Dreams. Here, I wish to take up the focus on attachment theory. In reviewing a very well-received and now popular book on attachment theory by David Wallin (2007), I am grappling with some key issues raised in the application of this theory in our work as contemporary psychoanalysts.

“Secure base,” a poetic phrase, rich in the depth of meaning it can convey, is now part of the analytic vernacular. In a sense, John Bowlby provides us with a secure base and has done so for the past 30 years in directing our attention away from the sometimes unhinged, theoretical meanderings of dense, reified, analytic concepts to the lived experience of babies and their caregivers.

Bowlby's story is a terrific one. He shares ground with Kohut as establishment figures, who, each in his own way, went against the tide. When Freud abandoned an emphasis on his female patients' suffering of real sexual

trauma at the hands of their trusted kin, he ushered in a long period of relative silence with regard to the impact of real life on psychic development.

Bowlby at first joined the consensual quiet. He was analyzed by Joan Riviere, who in 1927 had written, “Psychoanalysis is … not concerned with the real world, nor with the child's or the adult's adaptation to the real world. It is concerned simply and solely with the imaginings of the childish mind. … ” (Karen, 1994, p. 45).

However, Bowlby stepped out of the analytic trance of the time when he parted theoretical and collegial company with Melanie Klein, his supervisor, who was utterly disinterested in the traumatic context of a small boy whom Bowlby was analyzing. The little patient's mother was admitted to a mental hospital. “What a nuisance, we shall have to find another case,” Klein responded, becau