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Attachment research has demonstrated that stress related to the manner in which caregivers are present or absent may serve as a reliable index of an infant’s secure or insecure attachment style (Fonagy, 2001). It has also shown that an insecure attachment style is often indicative of a failed environmental provision. This insecure attachment style is characterized by a deep sense of estrangement and alienation that the self experiences in relation to others. In the book under review, Candida Yates explores how these dynamics that shape individual development likewise affect the structures of institutions, politics, and culture. Positing psychic alienation and insecurity as underlying the chaos of unregulated economies and financial mismanagement, Yates argues that radical psychic fragmentation exists at the very center of the discourses of harmony and prosperity espoused by neoliberal ideology. Through her thoughtful examination of these discourses, she suggests that lost care and estranged relationships are normative within the political sphere, and, moreover, that the resulting alienation produced by insecure attachment is belied in contemporary politics by a narrative of pseudo-intimacy.
Yates, a professor of culture and communication at Bournemouth University, makes eloquent use of British object relations theory, combined with a healthy dose of French critical theory and psychoanalysis, to analyze the erosion of what might be considered formerly forthright discourses within the political climate of Britain. She moves beyond the binary found in Masud Khan’s (1979) observation that it is Freud who takes up alienation within the self and Marx who considers it in society by creating a work that finds no tidy break between self and society. Drawing upon object relations theory, Yates moves beyond well-worn Freudian-Marxist syntheses, offering a significantly different approach through an emphasis on subjective experience and feelings in relational contexts. In so doi