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This monograph in the John Bowlby Memorial Conference Series emerges from the 2008 conference whose theme was The crucial role of attachment relationships in the modulation of states of fear, and the consequences for the individual, family, community, and nation state when this protective function of attachment fails. (p. xiii)
This theme immediately locates the unique perspective that Bowlby brought and the Bowlby Centre continues to underline. The Centre's values listed at the end of the book give a clear account of where the book is located in terms of its emphasis on the social, cultural and political reality which surrounds and penetrates the individual psychotherapeutic encounter. For example in bullet point 2:
Attachment relationships are shaped in the real world and impacted upon by poverty, discrimination, and social inequality. The impact of the social world will be part of the therapy. (p. 92)
All the papers in this monograph share attachment theory as an organising framework but they further develop its conceptual and clinical reach through links with body psychotherapy, group and family therapy and research on dissociative identity disorders in the context of abuse—both domestic and political. Peter Fonagy (2002) and Jean Knox (2011) have integrated attachment perspectives into psychoanalysis and Jungian analysis in several major publications. However, this small book still poses a challenge and brings clinical material to bear on the possibility of defence and denial operating in the therapist and the training group and the wider cultural and political context. This troubling dimension of collective group denial was also underlined by psychoanalysts working with Holocaust survivors in the post-war years (Bergmann and Jucovy 1982).
It is disappointing that the view of psychoanalysis is somewhat stereotyped at times, as so much interesting and varied work has taken place in recent years