Editor's Introduction

The articles in this issue of the Journal focus on diverse important topics.

There is no question that attachment theory and research have provided crucially important concepts and data about the development, organization and functioning of all aspects of the personality in health and illness. The literature on attachment has deservedly become vast. Maunder and Hunter's article stands out because it successfully integrates different sets of research data as well as clinical knowledge. Maunder and Hunter provide their own “prototype” for conceptualizing attachment styles and for furthering research. In so doing they critically review the salient literature on models of self and other behavioral patterns of proximity and distance, characteristic patterns of affect expression associated with attachment styles, mentalizing, narrative coherence, loss and trauma. Their thought-provoking article provides a critical overview of the state of the field and points the way to potentially productive research in the future.

Robbins treated a woman, with psychoanalytic psychotherapy, who required multiple psychiatric hospitalizations and also intermittently received phenothiazines. The treatment lasted for 11 years, and Robbins took detailed notes as it progressed.

Robbins' therapeutic approach is not what is customarily meant by the term “long term psychotherapy.” As a general rule, that term is applied to the outpatient treatment of neurotically conflicted patients. Although people in this group might need treatment for years, they do not tend to suffer from the most severe and chronic or recurrent mental illnesses. Most patients who suffer from the latter do not need and do not receive the type of treatment described by Robbins in this report. Even so, the vast majority of them do require psychodynamically informed assessment, crisis intervention and treatments that vary in length and include brief psychotherapy and intermittent treatment over lengthy periods of time.

Heroic time,