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In general, this is an excellent introduction to the neuroscience of attachment. Its writing style tends toward the heavily prosodic rather than the more dryly scientific (which has both pluses and minuses, depending on one's preference). There are also problems in terms of overstatement and oversimplification of a number of complex issues (see below), but in general this would make a good adjunctive undergraduate text or early graduate text for any course focusing on the affective neuroscience of attachment. For those who have already digested large portions of the neuroscientific literature (including the various chapters pertaining to these topical domains in Panksepp's summary textbook, Affective Neuroscience, or Allan Schore's encyclopedic summaries) much of this work will seem introductory, but for those coming from a psychoanalytic (or neuroscience) background who have not been exposed to a great deal of this material, this text gives us a passionate reading on the nature of our most basic passions and our most irreplaceable needs and wishes. The book presents a compelling image of attachment as a biological mandate for all social and mammalian brains, essential to the regulation of our biology and homeostasis.
There are certainly issues one could raise about various aspects of the argument (see below for details), and some readers will find the prose a bit overstated, overblown, or dramatic, but I suspect the authors are trying to drive home as powerfully as possible basic points that neither many in neuroscience nor large segments of our affectively blinded culture adequately appreciate. From this standpoint, the book constitutes a valuable tonic to a culture increasingly addicted to a wide variety of substitutes and anodynes for the often badly missing and quite irreplaceable gratifications of intimacy, empathy, and social connection. Additionally for many readers, an overly wet prosodic style might be considerably preferable to an overly dry one. The book