THE INTERNAL WORLD AND ATTACHMENT. By Geoff Goodman, Ph.D. Hillsdale, NY:  Analytic Press, 2002.  339 pp.

It all started with Bowlby, all of it: attachment—the discipline and the phenomenon—and its detachment from psychoanalysis, resulting from this British psychoanalyst's disenfranchisement after he

put forth his new ideas. Put off by Kleinian words and ideas, unconvinced by the language of libido theory and challenged by the World Health Organization to establish general principles for healthy child-rearing across cultures, Bowlby turned to ethology. After studying Tinbergen and others, he did his own field work, observing children who had been left in pediatric hospitals (before the days of parents' rooming in) and those at play in Kensington Gardens. He developed concepts such as internal working models of attachment, the balance of security and exploration, and reactions to loss. When he presented these ideas in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis1 (the journal bold enough to publish his work), he came up against withering criticism from Anna Freud. Abandoned by psychoanalysts—but with a new student, Mary Ainsworth, who put his ideas into practice in Uganda and then in the United States—Bowlby and his attachment theory found a new home in academia, nurtured by subsequent students such as Waters, Sroufe, Main, Cassidy, and others.

Only in the last few years have analysts returned to attachment and returned attachment to its home of origin, psychoanalysis. Several psychoanalytic thinkers, such as Fonagy,2 Szajnberg and Crittendon,3 and Main,4 have tried to bridge apparent conceptual gaps (which may actually be more gaps of language) to integrate the work of attachment, particularly with object relations theory.

The Internal World and Attachment is a recent effort to bring clarity and integration to two fields that deal with our inner lives and intimacy, attachment theory and object relations. Its author, Geoff Goodman, is systematic, summarizing briefly both fields and