ABSTRACT
Any activity, whether intellectual or practical, is informed by an ideology: a set of more or less conscious underlying guiding beliefs and principles. These taken-for-granted facts and theories form the seedbed from which new ideas arise, but, if unexamined, also trammel creative thought. The aim of this preliminary chapter is to foreground this book’s basic assumptions, clearing the ground for what follows. I start with a brief orientation for those unfamiliar with attachment theory (and an update for the initiated), followed by a summary of the particular psychoanalytic perspective adopted.
