Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis

by Peter Fonagy

A Bestseller Attachment Theory shows scientifically how our earliest relationships with our mothers influence our later relationships in life. This book offers an excellent introduction to the findings of attachment theory and the major schools of psychoanalytic thought. "The book every student, colleague, and even rival theoretician has been waiting for. With characteristic wit, philosophical sophistication, scholarship, humanity, incisiveness, and creativity, Fonagy succinctly describes the links, differences, and future directions of his twin themes. [His book] is destined to take its place as one of a select list of essential psychology books of the decade."-Jeremy Holmes, Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy, University of Exeter "Extraordinary--an invaluable resource for developmental psychoanalysis."-Joy D. Osofsky, Professor, Louisiana State University

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction

269 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to rate and review. Fonagy is clearly a brilliant synthesizer and theoretician. His work on mentalization, and his effort to bridge attachment theory and psychoanalysis is invaluable, but as a junior resident in psychiatry with a serious interest in attachment this book was a major slog. The middle sections comparing attachment to the classical, ego, object relations, and self-psychology schools of psychoanalysis were extremely dense. I had to come back to them after reading Freud and Beyond by Mitchell and Black, and even then much of it was obscure to me. The strongest part of the book is the section on the interpersonalists and then the attachment oriented psychoanalysts, especially Fonagy's own work on mentalization. However even there, his writing is steeped in theoretical language that makes his concepts difficult to absorb. I think other writers in the field are more accessible, and I think Fonagy is somewhat guilty of trying to do too much, too fast in this book. Overall the content and scope is impressive, but I rated it somewhat lower as I feel like the knowledge requirements to have a good reading experience are very high.

[Dia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before reading this book, I'd thought that attachment theory was a popular, contemporary dilution of psychoanalytic tenets so the latter could be smuggled into clinics and agencies; attachment theory has some empirical backing and would thus be more acceptable than psychoanalytic techniques to insurance companies and the general population, but both theories centrally posit that mother's responses to infant's needs have lifelong repercussions, and for both, therapy essentially consists in reparenting. (These may seem like meaninglessly broad commonalities, but they put attachment work much closer to psychoanalysis than to, say, cognitive behavioral therapy, the therapy most preferred in our current managed care climate.)

Anyhow -- boy was I wrong! From the very beginning of attachment theory, prominent psychoanalysts panned it on many accounts. Fonagy leads the reader through the various schools of psychoanalysis and shows that some do share (did anticipate) some of the major tenets of attachment theory, but the overall impression is that almost every school of psychoanalysis is much richer than attachment theory currently is. In general, this book -- read with Mitchell & Black's excellent Freud and Beyond close at hand for clarification (Fonagy's prose is not as squeaky clean as it could be) -- reminds one of the incredible breadth and depth of psychoanalytic theory. But does psychoanalytic theory need to remain so rarefied? Can it be useful at all in community mental health settings? Attachment theory (and CBT, for that matter), although its purview is smaller, has shown its value for particular types of not uncommon cases. It doesn't give us a worldview, but it does give us a world that works a little better -- at an affordable price.

[Paul Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book a real slog - maybe it was just not for me! I suppose it does what it says on the tin - comparing psychoanalytic and attachment theorist approaches, but it is very detailed and the main message is: quite a lot of overlaps but also many differences. To find this book interesting and useful you probably need to be someone with a highly specialised interest :-)

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fonagy outlines object-relations theory and how it interacts psychoanalytic theory. While it's a decent introduction, it's written with a lot of jargon, so it helps to have some basic understanding of psychoanalytic and object-relations terminology before beginning.

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

For some reason, I just couldn't bring myself to put this book down.