Although Bowlby's ideas received a cool reception by the clinical field at the time of their publication, the relevance and importance of attachment theory and research for clinical work are much more broadly accepted now. This is evident in the growing number of publications devoted to the clinical application of attachment theory and research. A closer examination of much of this writing, however, reveals that significant gaps in our understanding of how to apply attachment to clinical work persist. In particular, perhaps because many of the publications are reports of research findings, their immediate relevance for clinical application is often less obvious. The goal of this special issue is to begin to narrow this gap by directly exploring the added value of recent developments in attachment research to clinical work. To that end, each article in this issue focuses on a specific domain of theory, research, and/or assessment, and case materials are utilized to illustrate their application and usefulness for the clinical encounter. The hope is that readers involved in infant mental health and clinical work with children more broadly will find these articles helpful in bridging the theory -practice gap.
Slade's article opens this issue by suggesting that while attachment classifications of infants and adults have been very useful in advancing attachment research, it is the understanding and assessment of attachment processes, not categories, that is most useful for the clinician. Slade illustrates this point with a case, as do Steele and Baradon in the next article. Using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) of a father in a parent -infant psychotherapy case, the authors describe the distinct, yet related, perspectives of the AAI coder and the psychoanalytically oriented therapist and the added value of the AAI for the understanding of the clinical process. Continuing with the emphasis on analyzing attachment processes in individual cases, Koren-Karie, Oppenheim, and Gretzler-Yosef describe emotion dialogues between mothers who were severely abused as children and their own children, and show how mismatched parent -child communication patterns can undermine children's coherent representations of themselves and sense of security in the relationship with the parent.