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Attachment Therapy on Trial:

The Torture and Death of Candace Newmaker

Book Cover


   Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003, xii, 260 pp.
   ISBN 0-275-97675-0.
   LC call RJ507/A77/N495/2003 (card 2002-44991).
   List Price: $44.95
   Series ISSN: 1538-8883.

A New Book by ACT Authors!

  • Jean Mercer, PhD

    Chairman of Professional Board of Advisors, ACT

    Professor of Psychology, Richard Stockton College (Pomona, New Jersey)

    President, New Jersey Association for Infant Mental Health

  • Larry Sarner, BS, BA

    Administrative Director, ACT

    Executive Director, Citizens for Science in Medicine

  • Linda Rosa, RN

    Executive Director, ACT

    National Board Member, National Council Against Health Fraud


This scholarly book investigates the entire phenomenon of Attachment Therapy, focused through the lens of the infamous case surrounding the life and death of Candace Newmaker. Published by highly respected academic publisher Praeger, Attachment Therapy on Trial is an unsensational dissection of the pseudoscience, misconceptions, errors, bad judgments, and ethical lapses that has allowed a whole underground industry to thrive around the maltreatment of adopted and foster children. It sounds the alarm about the growth of pseudoscience and unvalidated practices in psychotherapy. And it is a call for action to protect the thousands of children who are not only among the most vulnerable, but also among the most likely, to receive abusive and harmful treatment at the hands of trusted adults … their caretakers — and their therapists!


Masterfully chronicles the chilling story of how a 10-year old girl, Candace, endured painful physical stimulation, was dangerously restrained, and eventually suffocated to death. In the name of “curing her” with Attachment Therapy, Candace’s therapists ignored her begging, screaming, and gasping; eventually they were convicted in criminal court. The extent to which some therapists embrace such unvalidated fringe treatments is one of the greatest scandals in today’s mental health system. This damning indictment should stir a badly needed national debate about these practices, and aid in the fight against them.

—Elizabeth Loftus, PhD,
Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine

Here is a profoundly good book — humane, constructive, and scrupulously objective — about a case that could have been treated with sensationalism and melodrama. Attachment Therapy, the authors show, is only the most dangerous embodiment of a more general aberration: the founding of treatments on premises that have already been confuted by sound research. Every therapist and every legislator ought to take this important work to heart.

—Frederick Crews, PhD,
principal author, The Unauthorized Freud




— Book Contents —
Introduction: Attachment Therapy and Its Victims

Part I/
The Case of Candace Newmaker


  1. Candace’s Adoption and Death: How a Second Chance Became the Last Chance

  2. The Backstory: People and Systems Behind Candace’s Death

  3. Candace’s Treatment: What They Did and Why They Did It

Part II/
The Facts Behind Candace’s Case:
Realities of Emotional Development and Childhood Mental Illness


  1. Some Facts About Normal Emotional Development (and What the Attachment Therapists Believed)

  2. When Emotional Life Goes Wrong: Some Facts About Childhood Mental Illness versus the Attachment Therapists’ Beliefs

  3. Better Treatment for Candace: How Trained Psychotherapists Would Have Approached This Case
    (by Gerard Costa, MD, Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey)

Part III/
Preventing More Cases Like Candace’s:
Problems and Some Possible Solutions


  1. Science and Psychotherapy: Is There Evidence That Attachment Therapy Is a Valid Treatment?

  2. The Deceivers and the Deceived: Factors That Made Attachment Therapy Acceptable to Parents and to Practitioners

  3. The Law and the Child: How Our Legal System Affected Candace Newmaker’s Life and Death

Conclusion: Lawsuits and Legislation—Where Do We Go From Here?

Also: bibliography, index, acknowledgments, author descriptions, series foreword

You can order it today!

Also—check with your public or school library. If they don’t have it yet, get them to order it!


See also ACT’s victim page for Candace Newmaker. ACT Home