Encounters with John Bowlby: Tales of Attachment By Arturo Ezquerro. Routledge2016. £28.79 (pb). 266 pp. ISBN 978 1138667648

‘Unhappy the age that has need of heroes’, says Brecht's democracy-deprived Galileo. But no pioneers: no progress. John Bowlby (JB), Ezquerro's conquistador, mentor, and supervisor is the inspiration for this delightful book, part eulogy, part exposition of attachment theory, part account of the travails of a NHS Child and Adolescent psychiatrist and group analyst.

Bowlby's hero was Darwin. Like its evolutionary parent, attachment theory was a long time in gestation. Bowlby rejected the prevailing orthodoxies: asocial neuropsychiatry, Skinnerian behaviourism, and the psychoanalytic Vatican. Drawing on his scientific and socialist-leaning approach, he painstakingly worked towards a new paradigm – attachment theory as an evidence-based, psychobiological theory of human relatedness.

Ezquerro engagingly intertwines his own translocation from rural Spanish childhood to Tavistock trainee, with JB's existential and intellectual journey to attachment via upper middle class London, Klein-dominated psychoanalysis, War Office Selection Boards, the new science of ethology, and enduring friendships with Harry Harlow, Robert Hinde and Mary Ainsworth.

This is not the first biography of Bowlby, but, as supervisee and family friend, Ezquerro adds a personal slant that brings JB's brilliance and the historical context of the London psychotherapy scene vividly to life. There is new historical scholarship too: Blatz (1940) as the founder of ‘security theory’ was unfamiliar to me. Ezquerro describes in some detail how Bowlby wowed the star-studded WHO study Psychobiology of the Child group, which included alongside JB, Huxley, Erikson, Piaget, Mead, Lorenz and Bertelanffy -- a unique interdisciplinary forum, a still much-needed model for psychodynamic cross-fertilisation.

In the later chapters Ezquerro moves on from his exposition of Bowlby's contribution, to his own experiences of group analysis, personal therapy, adolescent in-patient psychiatry, and working with sexual survivors, including those abused by therapists. The cast-list includes Peter Bruggen, Anton Obholzer and Sebastian Kraemer as supplementary Tavistock heroes.

Psychiatry needs to remember and celebrate its pioneers and role-models, of whom Bowlby is an outstanding example. The current neo-liberal health agenda has created a culture of short-termism, history-ablation, and decimation of group therapies and in-patient care. Ezquerro's habanera, with its emphasis on the need for secure therapeutic relationships, continuity, and mourning of loss, is a warm, humane, and strongly recommended antidote.