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.
The idea for this book came from an international conference to mark 50 years of the Tavistock Marital Studies Institute. Christopher Clulow, the editor, is the Director of the Institute and some of the seventeen contributors to the book were speakers at the conference. The aims of the book are stated as two-fold - to further the dialogue between practice and research in couple/marital psychotherapy and to enable some rapprochement between object relations theory and attachment theory. Despite the shared interest in relationships, these theoretical frameworks have historically been at odds, partly because of Bowlby's critique of Freud and Klein.
Jeremy Holmes, a noted writer on attachment theory, provides a helpful overview in his Foreword. He summarizes Bowlby's central ideas, and in particular the concept of the secure base, vital for the developing child, but also that which is needed in the establishment of an intimate couple relationship in adulthood. Many of the contributions to this volume, both in the research described and in the more clinical chapters, explore the connections between childhood and adulthood patterns of security in attachment.
Part One of the book draws on contemporary research into security and attachment in couples. Four chapters by mostly North American authors describe various research instruments (questionnaires, structured interviews, interventions of different kinds) used to examine, in sophisticated ways, questions like: What influence does past family experience have on current relationships? What are the best attachment predictors of marital stability? What are the differences between adult attachment and that between parent and child? Why are some insecure attachments so astonishingly stable? Detailed models of different kinds of secure and insecure attachment are offered, and how these apply in couple relationships and therapeutic interventions is discussed. Cowan and Cowan show that offering facilitative groups to look at the cou