ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relation of psychoanalytic symbolism to conceptual metaphor—another consilience with cognitive science. This consilience was of course unknown to John Bowlby, and to Ainsworth when she devised the strange situation, and it remains unknown to researchers uninterested in neuroscience. The process of attachment—the forming of basic emotional bonds as between infants and their mothers and others who care for them—is particularly relevant for psychoanalysis, and also a bridge between psychoanalysis, experimental developmental psychology from infancy, and neuroscience. The attempts to co-ordinate converging research from a number of fields—including psychoanalytic theory, attachment research, and neuroscience—to relate the way depressed patients have improved during psychoanalytic therapy to hypothesised alterations in their internal models of their emotional bonds with their parents. From the perspective of both evolution and attachment, this seems one of the most significant of human psychological developments. The whole field of developmental psychology from infancy, including parts of psychoanalysis, is reviewed in M. Bornstein.
