ABSTRACT

In the previous chapters I have described the reconceptualization of the internal world that Bowlby initiated, which has been developed by subsequent attachment theorists. I have indicated some of the issues which opened up when Bowlby started to question the psychoanalytic view of the nature and formation of internal objects and introduced the idea of the internal working model with internalization as the key to the formation of unconscious patterns or structures in the psyche. His insistence on the powerful effect of external reality on the infant psyche and his view that the internalization of that reality was the key process in the formation of the unconscious internal world eventually led to his alienation from the psychoanalytic community, a fracture which is only now beginning to be healed (Eagle 1995; Holmes 2001).