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Morris Eagle is one of that very small cadre of psychoanalytic scholars, theorists, and clinicians, who has been dedicated over a good many years to facilitating “a greater degree of integration between attachment theory and psychoanalysis” (p. xi). This quest has been deeply grounded in his own path to psychoanalysis, City University of New York, a doctorate in clinical psychology at New York University, and a period of working at the New York University's Research Center for Mental Health, headed by George Klein and Robert Holt, with other research-committed psychoanalysts like Merton Gill and Hartvig Dahl as regular ongoing participants. It was a remarkable cluster of truly pioneering analysts, trained under the influence of David Rapaport, raised within the rigors and the certainties of the dominant ego psychology metapsychology paradigm, architected by Heinz Hartmann and his colleagues, but nonetheless also committed to formal, systematic empirical research as a major avenue for psychoanalysis to truly fulfill its mission, as a still aspiring science of the mind, through necessary incremental research-based additions to its established knowledge base.
For Eagle, this brought together the two streams of his professional development, psychoanalytic theory and practice as a theory of the development of the normal human mind, and of its aberrations in mental and emotional illness, and also his training-based commitment to empirical research as a major, necessary avenue to advance its secure knowledge and its psychotherapeutic applications. This led quite naturally to Eagle's growing interest in John Bowlby's evolving attachment theory, consolidated when he first met Bowlby, when the latter visited the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute in the 1980s. Bowlby was a British psychoanalyst, brought up within its very early strongly Kleinian years, analyzed by Joan Rivière, a major Kleinian adherent and contributor. His own focus, however, based on his own earlier social wor