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Attachment and intersubjectivity are hot topics in contemporary psychoanalysis. In this book Nicola Diamond, a London based psychotherapist with a sophisticated understanding of philosophical issues, and Mario Marrone, a psychoanalyst who was supervised by Bowlby for ten years, attempt to integrate these two themes while proposing an expansion of attachment theory and tacking on some thorny controversies in developmental psychology and psychoanalysis. As the authors point out, an intersubjective perspective is perfectly consistent with Bowlby's emphasis on the enormous impact the quality of parental and environmental conditions have on the development of attachment relations across the life span.
The book has four major themes:
An effort to articulate the essential element of attachment theory as a psychoanalytic paradigm in its own right and to recast attachment theory within an intersubjective context.
A thoughtful review of Bowlby's concept of internal working models (IWM) and its relationship with other representational models such as Sandler's and Rosenblatt's seminal paper on representation, Daniel Stern's concepts of interactions that become generalized (RIGS) and schemas-of-being-with, Emanuel Peterfreund's concepts of error correcting feedback, and the Argentine analyst, Enrique Pichón Rivière's concept of referential and operative schemas.
A proposal to expand attachment theory toward a multimotivational theory that includes other basic biosocial systems.
A discussion of the complex relation between attachment and sexuality.
The authors view intersubjectivity as a basic interpersonal platform from which needs, desires, and motives, including attachment needs, are communicated and understood experientially. In this sense intersubjectivity operates at a more basic level than attachment and other motivational systems like sexuality.
One of the most interesting aspects of the authors' discussion of intersubjectivity is how they note that the concept of intersubjec