Prologue

BOWLBY IS THE DICKENS OF PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY; he illuminated the quintessential human experiences of attachment and loss as vividly as Dickens represented the quintessential human experiences of poverty and deprivation. Bowlby's pioneering trilogy Attachment, Separation, and Loss (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980) revealed the central role that attachment plays in human development and behavior, the severe consequences of its loss and disruption, and its possible configurations from normal to pathological. Bowlby's understanding of the variations of attachment, and the representational states that underlie them, has inspired a generation of developmental researchers. Recently, an increasing number of clinicians have found that attachment theory illuminates aspects of the therapeutic relationship and therapeutic process. This issue, the second of two monographs, is devoted to examining the relationship between psychoanalysis and attachment theory and research. The first issue addressed theoretical and conceptual convergences and divergences between these two traditions, with the focus on how these two perspectives can be mutually enhancing and facilitating. This second issue, devoted to the application of attachment in clinical endeavors, moves in the direction, foreseen by Bowlby (1988), that observations of attachment behavior could enhance our understanding of clinical phenomena, including the nature of psychopathology and the therapeutic process. The majority of the papers address several major themes including: (1) the clinical relevance of the patterns of discourse and interpersonal behavior in the various adult attachment classifications, or states of mind with respect to early attachment relationships; (2) the extent to which the patients' states of mind or representational states with respect to attachment may configure transference-countertransference dynamics; (3) the delineation for clinical groups of the cognitive-affective dimensions expressed in various inte