1 Buchheim A, Kächele H (2003) Adult attachment interview and psychoanalytic perspective: A single case study. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 23: 81-102 Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis: A Single Case Study Anna Buchheim & Horst Kächele Department of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatic Medicine, University of Ulm 1. Introduction When Daniel Stern published his monograph on the Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985) he has retrospectively opened a new phase in the history of psychoanalysis. There had been the immense work of many generations of clinicians to reconstructing their patients´ account of history in the clinical setting 1 underscoring the importance of development: This genetic point of 1 These intensive endeavours created the clinical reconstructed baby – to be more specific created the many clinical babies one in each theory „These descriptions are constructions created by fathers and mothers such as Freud, Abraham, Klein, Ferenczi, A. and M. Balint, Winnicott, Mahler, and Kohut. Everyone is aware that the various psychoanalytic babies differ greatly. The designers of the models must put up with the fact that their creations are compared. Kohut's tragic man lies as an infant in the cradle surrounded by an environment (the so-called selfobjects) which only partially reflects his innate narcissism. The fact that Freud's theory of narcissism was the godfather makes the tragedy almost inevitable, but it is nevertheless bathed in a relatively mild light: evil is not a primary force, and oedipal guilt feelings are avoidable, according to Kohut, if the early tragedy is limited and the narcissistic self discovers itself in the mirror of love (Kohut 1984, p. 13). In Kohut's theory, Freud's guilty, oedipal individual and his intrapsychic conflicts are the product of a narcissistic disturbance in early childhood. Without this disturbance, the oedipal conflicts of 3- to 5-year-old children would be principally pleasurable transitional phases, leaving no appreciable guilt feelings as long as a healthy self had already developed. Kohut's theory gives the individual the prospect of a future free of oedipal conflicts. It can be inferred from Kohut's late works that, provided the empathy of the selfobjects is good, the human tragedy also stays within reasonable bounds. Klein's (1948, 1957) psychoanalytic infant is quite different. This time the godfather was Freud's death instinct, ensuring a malevolence whose early manifestations are unrivalled and which can only be endured by dividing the world into a good breast and a bad breast. The tragedy of the infant's later life is then profound, in contrast to Kohut's mild form, which may find expression in selfironic humor. Klein's adult was born as Sisyphus, condemned to eternal failure in his attempts to atone for the imaginary wrongs inflicted by hate and envy. Throughout life the processes of projective and introjective identification, and their contents, remain the basic vehicles of interpersonal processes, within families and between groups and whole peoples. In restricting ourselves to the description of the essential features of two influential models of the psychoanalytic infant, we have highlighted dissimilarities and contradictions. This was our intention. Our current concern is not to advocate pragmatic eclecticism and recommend that the most plausible components be extracted from all the psychoanalytic theories of early childhood and amalgamated with elements of general developmental psychology or parts of Piaget's theory. Rather, we believe that productive eclecticism within psychoanalysis, and within neonatological research into interaction, is only possible if we also examine the aspects which are neglected in the different constructions. It is, after all, disturbing that similar empathic