Customer Reviews

Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications

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This is a great book. However, it is too clinical and hard to read. Very dry reading. I was looking for some practical tips to use at work. The heading "Handbook" is misleading. To me a handbook is a reference tool that I can go to and get information I can use quickly, practically and the client can understand. I think I wasted my money in this sense. But, it was my choice. Thanks.

One can obtain a reasonably adequate grasp of Bowlby's attachment theory per se from authors like Mary Main, Phil Shaver, Alan Sroufe, Peter Fonagy, Inge Bretherton, Jude Cassidy, Mary Ainsworth, and the Man Himself on the Internet.

But if one is deeply intrigued or invested in the subject for the sake of gaining a better grip on concepts like "family systems," "interpersonal psychology," "ego defense formation," "affect regulation," "belief systems conflicts" or the currently popular rubrics of "codependence" and "romance addiction," a used copy of this first edition seems well worth $20 or $30.

The range of topics and applications is immense, and the commentators are in fact the who's who of the AT "school." There's a lot of dry, British intellectualism, expecially in the first half or so of this =long= and often repetitious read, but the final eight or ten articles are better understood if one is willing to fight his way through the earlier stuff, and those final articles are major paydirt for a deeper understanding of borderline personality disorder.

Magai's treatment of Silvan Tomkins' work on affect theory was especially instructive for me, as were the parts of Mary Main's article on neuropsychology in relation to AT. Several contributors' illuminated the "preoccupied," "disorganized" and "desperate" types of attachment in such fashion that my focus on borderlinism is now considerably sharper.

If one assumes himself to be a specialist in such, the Handbook may be a =very= rewarding journey into the why's and wherefore's, more or less as Meissner's, Kernberg's work is through the lens of object relations: A real hard slog, but tremendously edifying in the end.

When I ordered this book I thought there was a later version available. Online there are two versions available - this one (1999) and a later one - 2002 or 2003 or even later - I can't remember. It was confusing if the later one was available or if there is even a later one. When I submitted this question to Amazon they basically said that there was no way of determining which book would be sent to me. So it was disappointing when I received the earlier version. I wasn't about to take the time to send it back because I needed to start using it.

Wonderful resource for academics - good overview of important and current issues in attachment theory.