Attachment Issues in Psychopathology and Intervention.

Abstract

LESLIE ATKINSON and SUSAN GOLDBERG (Eds.) Attachment Issues in Psychopathology and Intervention Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004, 312 pages (ISBN 0-8058-3693-4, US$45.00, Cloth) John Bowlby's seminal work on and loss explored the development and means by which bonds of affection are formed and broken. His theory of behaviours - those that increase proximity to a preferred individual - was based on his observations of children in clinical and institutional settings who displayed disturbed or maladjusted behaviours. While the principles of theory have a strong clinical basis, over the years the focus of attachment-based work has tended to emphasize the implications rather than the applications of attachment-based research resulting in little relevant clinical data. Ten contributions from academics and clinicians discuss clinical aspects of theory in Attachment Issues in Psychopathology and Intervention. Atkinson and Goldberg state in the preface that their intention in editing this collection was to push forward thinking about the clinical aspects of theory. This goal peeked my interest. As I work through the transition from graduate school's thinking about attachment-based issues from a research perspective, to full-time employment in a more clinical setting, I am becoming acutely aware of how challenging it is to bridge the implicationsapplication gap. During this period I have found myself wondering how the enormous attachment-research body can inform my own clinical work from both assessment and intervention perspectives. I found the breadth of coverage in this work a worthy attempt at providing this link. In their selection of focus for this volume, the editors have undertaken a large task in terms of the range of psychological difficulties covered, the developmental span across life stages (infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood), and the application of the content (risk, psychopathology, and intervention) . The content of this book is split between psychopathology and intervention-based chapters with the first half focusing on issues related to and the development of disorders of attachment across three age groups - infants, young children, and adolescents. The second chapter provides an overview of and psychopathology from a developmental construct perspective and highlights key issues to consider, a good basis for a graduate text on this topic. Similarly, the chapter on adolescent psychopathology provides a broad perspective and more theoretical review of behavioural systems and research. However, the data presented in the subsequent chapters relating to issues of infants' failure to thrive, and hostile-helpless relationship models in young children and their parents, were a more compelling and novel read. The second half of this book pushed the intervention agenda and provided more directly relevant information for the clinician or scientist-practitioner, from both an assessment and intervention perspective. The last two chapters were particularly strong. Sue Johnson's presentation of couples therapy using Emotionally-focused Therapy, provides an excellent parallel presentation of how working models of affect the strategies that people used when faced with trauma. …