Guest Editors' Introduction

This Special Issue on the Neurobiology of Attachment is the result of a relationship that began with the Victor J. Teichner Award in 2011. In 2011, the Department of Psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine received the Victor J. Teichner Award. This award is a joint mission between the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry (AAPDP) and the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training (AADPRT). The award allows for a program with relatively few psychodynamic or psychoanalytic resources to benefit from the expertise, advice, and mentorship of a scholar chosen by the program. Richard Brockman, M.D. was the scholar chosen for his expertise and scholarship in the integration of neurobiology with psychoanalytic and psychodynamic concepts. In the spring of 2012, Dr. Brockman visited the Indiana University Psychiatry Residency Program. After three days of discussions, mentorship, and suggestions, an attachment had formed between mentor (Brockman) and mentee (Chambers). Through this mentorship, many discussions happened over the ensuing years about ways to conceptualize the most salient process in the therapeutic relationship in neurobiological terms. As these discussions grew more detailed, the focus increasingly turned to the process of attachment—attachment to mothers, to therapists and analysts, to lovers, and to children. Searching the literature to deepen the understanding of attachment, it became clear that the literature was broad and diverse as well as segregated: it seemed difficult to find articles that addressed both the psychological and neurobiological process of attachment in detail. This seemed important as the future of our field lies in our ability to explain mental processes in neurobiological terms. This Special Issue serves to integrate the knowledge we have so far in the psychological field of attachment research in humans with the neurobiological understandings that we have about attachment, oft