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THESE TWO VOLUMES on attachment theory and research are dedicated to the memory of Mary D. Saltar Ainsworth, who died on March 21, 1999.
Mary Saltar Ainsworth, as I think of her over our 40 years of acquaintance, was large—large physically, large in heart, and very, very large in accomplishment. The theory of attachment we document in these two volumes of Psychoanalytic Inquiry could not have come about without her brilliance and simplicity, a rare combination. If Mary wanted to see if Bowlby's ideas were correct, she went where she could observe the evidence. Observing, for Mary, meant looking with the most sensitive powers of perception at the whole of child rearing in Uganda. Simplicity meant that if she wanted to observe responses to separation in an urban culture, she would set up a test situation that could be standardized and confirmed by others. Look, study, document—not coldly, not experience distant, but right where we live as humans. Thus Mary chose for her book Infancy in Uganda the subtitle Infant Care and the Growth of Love. Mary's writing reveals her freedom from the distraction of all the psychoanalytic arguments about drive theory that swirled around Bowlby. She simply went to the heart of the matter—the caregiver and the child and their interplay. We psychoanalysts now reap the harvest of her freedom to explore. In an inscription to the Uganda book Mary gave me on its publication, she wrote: “I hope you enjoy this. I enjoyed writing it.” Mary knew how to enjoy—to play. We lose her in death but, as she taught us, attachment is about the mastery of danger and loss.