Listening to Attachment: A Tribute to Joseph Lichtenberg

• Published in: Psychoanalytic inquiry Vol. 44; no. 7; pp. 755 - 759
• Main Author: Diamond, Diana
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Routledge 02.10.2024; Taylor & Francis Inc
• Subjects: Attachment theory; Attachment theory and research; embodied simulation; infant research; Listening; Psychoanalysis; Psychoanalytic theory; reflective function; representation; Simulation
• ISSN: 0735-1690; 1940-9133
• DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2024.2408150

In this paper, the author reflects on how her work in attachment theory and research and its implications for psychoanalysis grew out of listening to Joseph Lichtenberg as he listened to and engaged with attachment concepts as a clinician and researcher. This paper explores Lichtenberg's multiple contributions to exploring and understanding how clinical psychoanalysis might be revised by attachment theory and research, while also providing new directions for psychoanalytic theory and practice. The paper focuses on three areas of Lichtenberg's contributions including 1) the theory of motivational systems which involved the recognition that humans have an innate proclivity to seek comfort and care from significant attachment figures which placed attachment squarely at the heart of the seven motivational systems; 2) the concept of how motivational systems are linked to representations that become their intrapsychic legacy; and finally 3) the concept of embodied simulation, or the idea that all representational structures are rooted in sensory, emotional, and enacted experience with objects.