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Jeremy Holmes, London, Routledge, 2010, 199 pp., £24.99, ISBN 978-0-415-55415-2
When I was asked to review Peter Fonagy's monumental Attachment theory and psychoanalysis (2001) for the Journal of Child Psychotherapy, I commented that when I began my training in the 1980s the notion of any link between attachment and psychoanalysis seemed hardly to be on the horizon. As Fonagy acknowledged in 2001, ‘there is bad blood between psychoanalysis and attachment theory’. He talked of ‘defensive thinking’ along both sides of the divide. It is heartening to see how things have moved on, so that these ‘tectonic plates’ as Fonagy described them, can be brought back in relation to one another. He described both significant overlaps and significant divergences in the two fields, and at that point suggested that attachment theory needed to give more weight to research into ‘constitutional’ factors. He credited Jeremy Holmes with having given the fullest exposition of attachment-based psychotherapy, and Holmes's assertion that life's biological foundations are intertwined with the psychological, has been fully borne out by subsequent ethological and neuro-scientific research.
Last year Jeremy Holmes received the prestigious Bowlby-Ainsworth Award for his contributions to the field of attachment. Now retired from full-time psychiatric practice, he says in his preface that he has during the last five years been setting up a psychoanalytic psychotherapy training, and this has sharpened up for him the idea of a greater infrastructure/superstructure debate in the profession, i.e. what we think, then what we do, and how we do it. As he ponders, ‘how can we explore the elusive DNA of our discipline?’. This of course is a vital question, in terms of our being able to engage in research and the requirement for ‘evidence-based practice’, and continue to make a significant contribution to public sector mental health provision, both for adults and children.
The first part of the book explores an