Desire and Secure Attachment: An Adaptive Dialectic—Discussion of Jill Gentile’s “Between the Familiar and the Stranger: Attachment Security, Mutual Desire, and Reclaimed Love”

I view Gentile’s attempt to see desire and attachment as inherently working together from an existential–adaptive perspective and how, as I see it, they must work together dialectically—both developmentally and as a complex system (Coburn, 2015). A clinical–developmental narrative illustrates the larger context within which these dialectical tensions between attachment and desire enable us to probe, evaluate, and create the realness and trustworthiness of all intimate relationships—from birth onward throughout the lifecycle and in the treatment setting (Slavin and Klein, 2013).