One can obtain a reasonably adequate grasp of Bowlby's attachment theory per se from authors like Mary Main, Phil Shaver, Alan Sroufe, Peter Fonagy, Inge Bretherton, Jude Cassidy, Mary Ainsworth, and the Man Himself on the Internet.
But if one is deeply intrigued or invested in the subject for the sake of gaining a better grip on concepts like "family systems," "interpersonal psychology," "ego defense formation," "affect regulation," "belief systems conflicts" or the currently popular rubrics of "codependence" and "romance addiction," a used copy of this first edition seems well worth $20 or $30.
The range of topics and applications is immense, and the commentators are in fact the who's who of the AT "school." There's a lot of dry, British intellectualism, expecially in the first half or so of this =long= and often repetitious read, but the final eight or ten articles are better understood if one is willing to fight his way through the earlier stuff, and those final articles are major paydirt for a deeper understanding of borderline personality disorder.
Magai's treatment of Silvan Tomkins' work on affect theory was especially instructive for me, as were the parts of Mary Main's article on neuropsychology in relation to AT. Several contributors' illuminated the "preoccupied," "disorganized" and "desperate" types of attachment in such fashion that my focus on borderlinism is now considerably sharper.
If one assumes himself to be a specialist in such, the Handbook may be a =very= rewarding journey into the why's and wherefore's, more or less as Meissner's, Kernberg's work is through the lens of object relations: A real hard slog, but tremendously edifying in the end.
