ABSTRACT
The Tavistock Clinic became the maternity unit where attachment theory was born. Pregnancy was difficult; labour and delivery hard work. Bowlby had to navigate through mountains of jargon in psychoanalytic texts and to face a hostile reception to his ideas, in the context of a largely Kleinian orientation that dominated the Clinic after the Second World War. This became a problem for him. But he had resilience and never gave up. His scientific mind conceived problems as neither more nor less than questions that have no easy answer. This attitude enabled him to face tricky questions and deliver tentative answers. This, in turn, helped him reformulate the questions, refine the answers and so forth. A virtuous circle or, rather, a revolutionary spiral developed. The history of psychoanalysis is strongly linked, indeed, to sexuality (see
Chapter 11). Initially, Freud was receptive to true stories of child sexual abuse and incest reported by his patients. But he could not cope with the consequences of his discovery and retreated. The stories somehow seemed unreal for him: a product of the patient’s imaginations. Subsequently, he lost interest in real life events and concentrated on his patients’ dreams and phantasies – a term generally used in the psychoanalytic literature to describe ‘unconscious fantasies’ (Makari, 2008). Melanie Klein took this further and developed a theory, and a treatment tech-
nique, in which she gave primacy to the role of phantasies. Of course, she did not deny history but did not concentrate on it. In my early days at the Tavistock, I struggled to learn the language of the Unconscious (I still do). My patients were saying something, but Anton Obholzer was telling me in supervision that they were meaning something else. In Chapter 1, I described a mistake I made by talking to my first Tavistock patient as we were walking along the corridor, on our way to the consulting room. Following this, I decided to say nothing to my patients at the beginning of therapy sessions.
