Attachment in the Preschool Years: Theory, Research and Intervention: Edited by Mark T. Greenberg, Dante Cicchetti & E. Mark Cummings. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 1990. Pp. 507.

This book is a collection of papers by developmental psychologists addressing the theory, research and intervention based on the concept of attachment, particularly as they have been extended from infancy to the preschool years. This concept was introduced by John Bowlby in a series of papers in the 50s and 60s and subsequently elaborated in a three volume series (1969), (1973), (1980). He argued that the infant/caregiver relationship, rather than anaclitic to drive gratifications, was determined by evolutionarily programmed attachment behaviour serving purposes of protection. It was characterized by proximity seeking and interacted with other behaviour systems, such as exploration and fear/wariness. He relied heavily on ethological concepts, systems theory, information theory, etc. This theory was not immediately attractive to psychoanalysts, in part because of his tendentious oversimplifications of and attack on drive theory. George Engel (1971) spelled out these problems in an excellent review article in the IJPA.

Developmental psychologists were drawn to his ideas because they lent themselves to operational research on patterns of behaviour. Mary Salter Ainsworth (1970), in particular, devised a research paradigm called the strange situation, in which the child's reactions to brief separations from the caregiver could be observed and categorized. Secure and insecure attachment patterns were identified at 12 and 18 months and their antecedents and consequences could be studied. However, the strange situation does not suffice to illustrate attachment behaviour beyond infancy, hence comes much of the work reported in this volume.

The book is divided into four sections: theoretical issues; research on normal development; developmental psychopathology, and clinical intervention