ABSTRACT
I must first of all justify my position as editor of a seminar at which I was not present because of another engagement elsewhere. However, I was much involved in all other respects. I was a great admirer of Bowlby from the very beginning, and had read the three books of his trilogy as soon as they were published, starting in 1969. My wife immediately applied attachment theory when, the next year, our first-born boy, aged five, had to be hospitalised, and she insisted on “rooming in”—a very uncommon practice in those days, especially in Italy. In 2012, I published a book, Paradigms in Psychoanalysis (Bacciagaluppi, 2012), in which there is a special emphasis on Bowlby. By editing the seminar, I am trying to compensate for my absence.
