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This slim volume represents a new and radical collection of papers on contemporary thinking about sexuality. Positioned firmly in the theoretical arena of intersubjectivity, the book explores our clinical understanding of sexuality, inviting us both to examine our own subjective experience and our work with patients in order to penetrate the mysteries of human sexuality. Derived from the 11th John Bowlby Memorial Conference, the papers represent the current preoccupations and thinking of the group of relational psychoanalytic psychotherapists clustered around the Centre for Attachment-Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists (CAPP) based in London.
The book opens with a short introduction to attachment theory and the John Bowlby Memorial Lecture which helpfully outlines some of the historical landscape. Bernice Laschinger describes the traditional theoretical gap that existed between attachment theory and sexuality pointing out that Bowlby, unlike Freud, did not make sexuality the focus of his study. Rather he placed the drive towards attachment to a care-giving adult as a motivational system of its own, alongside sexuality and feeding. Laschinger points out that this gap in theorizing is currently being addressed and relational psychotherapists now see sexuality as the central arena in which dramas of attachment are played out. She explains recent developments in attachment theory citing the work of Ainsworth (1982), Main et al (1985) and Fonagy (2001) and discusses how there is a growing interest in bringing together perspectives of our embodied selves with our relational selves.
I approached this volume with great interest, wondering how these two perspectives might be integrated and hoping that the split between a more instinct driven essentialist perspective and a purely relational one could be bridged by new insights from the harder science of attachment theorists. This expectation was not met but the volume provided rich and challenging reading despite this.
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