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Although I agreed to do a review of this book in autumn of 2013, it is only now that I have managed to sit down to do it. It makes me wonder if there had been a “parallel process” in operation. The parallel process I am referring to could be related to the fact that as it took me nearly 30
months to actually come around to doing this review, it took the author of this book, Dr. Bacciagaluppi, an eminent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst from Italy, nearly 30 years to author and edit this book about a seminar that he had arranged for Dr. John Bowlby from Great Britain to deliver in Milan, but one which Bacciagaluppi missed from attending due to another commitment happening for him around the same time.
The book starts by Bacciagaluppi sharing excerpts of the letters that he wrote to Bowlby and those he received from him in turn over an eight-year period from 1982 until Bowlby passed away in 1990. The summary of this two-way correspondence takes us to an era where there were no emails or social media and one in which both Bacciagaluppi and Bowlby demonstrate the highest standards of mutual respect and courtesy while navigating through the various nuances of their scholarly debate about attachment theory. How it was distinct as a school of thought separate from psychoanalysis as propagated by Freud, though having evolved from its principles nevertheless. Bacciagaluppi summarizes this section of the book by making three comments about Bowlby's own development as a child and the potential influence of the same on his work on attachment theory, while making a reference to Eric Fromm's psychoanalytic social psychology (1941). Most notably, Bowlby's nanny, to whom he was very attached, left when he was four years old, and Bacciagaluppi wonders if Bowlby's empathic interest in the impact of separation on small children may well be related to this significant event from his childhood.
In the next section of this book, Bacciagaluppi presents a transcription of the general discuss