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One of the most significant and compelling areas of inquiry in psychology in the past 20 years has been the focus on attachment, the ability of the human infant to bond with a maternal person and the longer-term effects of the quality of this bonding on the infant's development into adulthood (Bowlby, 1988). For example, researchers focusing on attachment have been able to correlate reliably the quality of the infant's attachment with brain and central nervous system (CNS) development (Shore, 2000), affect regulation (Fonagy & Target, 1997), and infant mental health (Shore, 2001). Researchers looking at adult derivatives of infant attachment (Main & Goldwyn, 1984) have reliably correlated the quality of adult attachment to interpersonal comfort (Ainsworth, 1989), the capacity to love (Karen, 1994), defensive style (Hazan & Shaver, 1987), and success in psychotherapy (Fonagy, Leigh, Steele, & Steele, 1996). Most telling, it has been shown that faulty infant attachment creates impairments in the infant's developing brain functions that can endure into adulthood and can act as a heightened risk factor for later psychiatric disorders (Shore, 2003b).
These findings about attachment are crucial not only because of what they reveal about what it means to be human and healthy but also because they legitimize and empirically validate the work of psychotherapy. For as yet, there is no pill that can heal deficits in a relationship. The findings of attachment research are particularly validating for psychoanalytic object relations theory with its emphasis on internal representations of good and bad objects (Blatt & Levy, 2003) and also for psychoanalytic self psychology with its emphasis on the actual creation of the self through early human interactions (Kohut, 1984; Shore, 1994).
The contributors to Relational Trauma in Infancy have taken the study of attachment to the next logical level and have explored the transmission of the sequelae of trauma from the maternal person to he