Editor's Introduction

It has been a policy of this Journal since its inception to publish articles that (collectively) address both the tremendous range and the rich clinical and theoretical texture of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. That the current issue is no exception to this can be easily demonstrated by a perusal of its contents, which range from the phenomenological to the empirical, from the developmental to the discretely clinical.

In her article, entitled “Anxious Attachment in Adulthood: Therapeutic Implications,” Sable provides us with a useful review of the principal concepts associated with attachment theory, and some of the intrapsychic and behavioral continuities exhibited by anxiously attached individuals at different stages of the life cycle. The thrust of her paper, however, is aimed at converting this developmental model into a framework for clinical practice. In his earlier works, Bowlby had claimed that attachment theory has applicability to such disorders as agoraphobia, conversion symptoms, and anorexia. Such claims seem much less controversial today than they must have seemed to the psychoanalytic establishment twenty years ago. Sable observes that attachment may even enhance our understanding and treatment of a disorder such as posttraumatic stress, but that