Attachment theory and psychoanalysis

Abstract

This chapter argues that attachment theory, with strong scientific roots, has never been a 'school', and has not felt the need to stick to the Bowlbian letter. Psychoanalysis has begun to open out to the wider world of psycho-therapy generally, as well as neurobiology and contemporary philosophy. Attachment theory and psychoanalysis complement each other here. Attachment theory shows how meanings, in the sense of narrative patterns, arise out of childhood behaviours and parental handling. Psychoanalysis is concerned primarily with meanings and with data that are essentially subjective. In both attachment theory and psychoanalysis, there is an oscillation between the 'data', the observable behaviour of the patient, or the responses of the analyst's counter-transferential 'instrument', and a theoretical superstructure that informs clinical intervention. When attachment theory has a significant contribution to contemporary psychoanalysis, it may be to help it to accept the death of its founder.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 714 citations exist upstream.