No More Learning

1 Yet, once the frequency and effects of such threats are firmly grasped, a great many cases of separation anxiety and anxious attachment that otherwise appear inexplicable become intelligible.
177
Furthermore, it becomes easy to understand why so many children who have to go to hospital or residential nursery should suppose that they are being sent there as a punishment.
It is of course true that a majority of parents do not threaten to abandon their children and, as the Newsons found, refrain from doing so as a matter of principle. As a publican's wife remarked: 'It takes the child's security away. You're the whole of their security, and you must not take that away. ' Yet the Newsons also came across mothers who, though sure that such threats were wrong, admitted that none the less they occasionally used them when they were upset.
Such shamefaced admissions by parents may well include
____________________
1 Nevertheless, sanctions of professional ostracism to coerce younger and weaker members
of a profession to accept the theories held by their seniors are not unknown. -229-
the most frightening threats of all. There is certainly a minority of parents who, in fits of exasperation and temper, say the most horrifying things which they later greatly regret. Threats to abandon the home and/or to commit suicide, made perhaps only at rare intervals but with an angry vehemence, are likely to have an effect entirely out of proportion to their frequency. Their effect, moreover, is magnified should the parent, father or mother, subsequently be so ashamed of having made such a threat that he or she cannot acknowledge either what was said or how frightening it must have been to the child. In such families the child has no opportunity to check his inevitable fears against the real risks, whatever they may be.
Furthermore, when families of this sort reach a psychiatric clinic, there is small likelihood that the true facts will be divulged. It is then very easy to attribute the child's fears either to his own guilty phantasies or to his having projected onto others his own guilty wishes. Long familiarity with how easy it is even for experienced clinicians to be misled in such cases suggests that, whenever a child or adult is inexplicably afraid, it is always wise to assume that there is no smoke without fire.
Since the way a parent treats a child is usually modelled on the way his (or her) parents treated him (or her) as a child, it is almost inevitable that the use of such threats should run in families. This was made dramatically clear during the treatment of an acutely anxious and depressed mother and her young son.
An Illustrative Case
Mrs Q and her son, Stephen, were referred originally when Stephen was eighteen months old, because he refused to eat and was seriously underweight. It was soon apparent that Mrs Q was in a chronic state of anxiety and depression which had begun at the time of Stephen's birth. Mrs Q was taken into once-a-week analytically oriented treatment and made good progress. Once Stephen's mother was able to refrain from constantly pressing him to eat, Stephen began to do so, and after a month or two was putting on weight satisfactorily.
178
In view of the severity of Mrs Q's condition, she remained in once-a-week treatment for some years. Her father was a skilled artisan, now retired, and her husband a ticket collector on the railway. She herself was an intelligent woman who had had to leave school early in order to earn but who had later become a successful technician. The account she gave of her childhood was
-230-
lucid and consistent, though for many months, indeed years, she had the utmost difficulty in divulging its more distressing and frightening aspects.
Pieced together the following picture emerged. Mrs Q's father had fought in the 1914-18 war and had been invalided on account of 'shell shock'. His neurosis appeared to have developed after his section had been blown up on a bridge, leaving him the sole survivor. Thereafter, he had been subject to long phases of depression and ill temper during which he could treat his family very badly. Mrs Q's mother was an active capable woman of strong opinions, whose own mother had been a chronic alcoholic for many years. Throughout Mrs Q's childhood her parents had had violent quarrels, during which dreadful things were not only said but often done. Crockery was smashed, knives drawn, and furniture set alight. Mrs Q recalled long sleepless nights listening to the battles and dreading the outcome. Yet by breakfast next morning all was quiet. Putting all the horrors of the night behind her, Mrs Q's mother went out to her daily domestic work the picture of peaceful respectability. On no account was any of the trouble at home to be divulged to outsiders; and it was deeply impressed on Mrs Q that she must whisper it to no one -- neighbours, teachers, or schoolfriends. This explained why she hid its full horror from her therapist for so long.
There were a number of occasions when Mrs Q's mother had attempted suicide, and many more when she had threatened it. Twice Mrs Q had returned home to find her mother with her head in the gas oven and once she had found her collapsed after having drunk household disinfectant. Not infrequently her mother, after having threatened to desert the family or to commit suicide, would disappear. On some occasions she would leave the house and not return until after midnight. On others she would hide, perhaps, in a cupboard. In view of all this it is hardly surprising that Mrs Q grew up an acutely anxious girl, constantly afraid to go far from home, and that she experienced spasms of violent anger. 1
Although it seemed evident that the anger was aroused by her parents', mainly her mother's, violent behaviour, Mrs Q
____________________
1 In her relationships both with her mother and with her son Mrs Q. showed all the features
found by Melges ( 1968) to be typical in cases of post-partum disturbance. They include intense conflict with own mother, and repudiation of own mother as someone to be imitated, together with a strong tendency nevertheless to behave like her.
-231-
during treatment found it very difficult to accept this possibility. Instead, she claimed for a long while not only that her feelings for her mother were of love, which was true since her mother had many good qualities, but that that must exclude hatred. But, as she gained confidence, Mrs Q recalled how, as a child, after a bad row with her mother, she would
179
sometimes go to her room and wreak violence on her dolls, throwing them at the walls and trampling them underfoot.
It was in this context that Mrs Q's problems with Stephen became intelligible. After Stephen's birth, Mrs Q had experienced strong impulses to throw the baby out of the window and, not unexpectedly, had become acutely anxious lest Stephen should die. Her frantic and ineffective efforts to make him eat were a direct result. It seemed evident that Mrs Q's hostility, still often aroused by her mother, had become redirected (displaced) towards Stephen. Even during the period of treatment, Mrs Q admitted shamefacedly, she still had occasional outbursts of violence, when crockery was smashed, saucepans dented, and Stephen's pram damaged. It was not always clear what precipitated these outbursts because Mrs Q was eager to forget about them as soon as possible and for long she hardly referred to them during treatment.
When Stephen was seven and a half Mrs Q reported that he sometimes expressed fear that she might die, and was afraid to go to school. For some months the origin of this fear remained obscure. Then the solution became clear. Having herself grown up in such deeply distressing circumstances, Mrs Q had been determined that her own son should fare better. She had therefore done everything she could to make Stephen's life secure and happy, and had in many respects succeeded. Yet, during her outbursts of violence, her good resolutions vanished. On those occasions, she now admitted, she said the most dreadful things, the very same things, in fact, that her mother had said to her when she was a girl. Stephen's fear that his mother might die was a direct reflection of his mother's threats of suicide, made during comparatively rare outbursts but with an intensity that might alarm anyone.
Once the facts were known it was possible to arrange some joint sessions with mother and son during which mother, with real regret, acknowledged making the threats and Stephen explained how terrified they made him. Mother assured Stephen that she would never do it really. All was not well thereafter, but recognition that Stephen's fears were well based and an
-232-
opening of communication between mother and son eased the situation.
There can be little doubt that great numbers of parents are extremely reluctant to admit to a professional person that they sometimes threaten their child in the ways described. Many are aware that it is a bad thing to do and are ashamed of it. Others may themselves have mixed feelings about it, but are aware that professional people would disapprove. For these reasons it is probable that parents hardly ever volunteer the information and, until they have gained much confidence, are likely to deny it if questioned. Children, moreover, habitually take their cue from their parents and are similarly reluctant to divulge the truth. Even when she was in her mid-thirties, Mrs Q was still intent on protecting her mother's reputation. Not only is a child afraid of what a parent might say and do should he discover that the child had 'split' on him, but children are deeply reluctant to admit even to themselves that their own mother or their own father can behave in these frightening ways. Thus children are often willing conspirators in silence, even though simultaneously they may be yearning for someone to come to their aid.
180
Incidence of 'Attempted' Suicide by Parents
The incidence of completed suicide among parents of children under the age of eighteen years is low because most suicides occur in the older age-groups. By contrast, the incidence of socalled 'attempted' suicide among parents in this category is relatively high because such acts occur most frequently in both sexes between the ages of twenty and thirty years. Since most attempts are not intended to end in death but to frighten or coerce others, the term is placed in quotation marks in the heading of this section. 1
Figures for attempted suicide in the city of Edinburgh are available for the past decade, and from them a number of rough estimates can be made. 2 For all women between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four years there was an average annual
____________________
1 To deal with the difficulty Kreitman and his colleagues ( 1969) have proposed
'parasuicide'; but Walk ( 1972) has raised serious etymological objections.
2 I am indebted to Norman Kreitman, Director of the MRC Unit for Epidemiological Studies in Psychiatry, for making some recent figures available. Owing to rising rates and for other reasons, the estimates given for mothers and fathers over a twenty-year period are
extremely
-233-
incidence of attempted suicide of about 0? 3 per cent and there is reason to think that this figure holds for women with children as well as for those without. Over a twenty-year period, during which children are being born and are reaching mature years, it can be estimated that about 4 per cent of mothers will have attempted suicide and, of these, one-third will have done so more than once. The incidence for men is lower and seems likely, over a similar twenty-year period, to amount to between 2 and 2? 5 per cent. Even allowing for the possibility that in some families both mother and father will have attempted suicide, it seems that not less than one in twenty of all children growing up in Edinburgh during recent years will have had experience of a suicidal attempt by a parent. For most children the attempt will have occurred before they have reached their tenth birthday.
The incidence of attempted suicide is not spread evenly throughout a population, so that in some sectors the rate, with age and sex held constant, may be several times what it is in others. Whereas the incidence in socio-economic classes I, II, and III is below average for the population of Edinburgh, that for class V is much above. Children growing up in certain subcultural groups are therefore at high risk of being exposed to the suicidal attempts of their parents. There is evidence also that in certain family networks a very high rate of attempted suicide may be due to its having become a recognizable mode of social communication. Women below the age of thirty-five years seem especially likely to be influenced by such family patterns ( Kreitman, Smith & Tan 1970).
Since no figures appear to be available to indicate the incidence of threats to commit suicide, we can only speculate. Presumably very many children who are exposed to suicidal attempts by a parent are exposed also to threats. Mrs Q is a case in point. In addition, there must be many others who, like Stephen Q, are exposed to threats but not to attempts. All in all the
181
proportion of children who are exposed to threats or attempts, or to both, must be considerable. Both clinical experience and common sense suggest not only that such people will be more than usually prone to anxiety about the availability of attachment figures while they are still children but that they will often continue so long after they are grown up.
____________________
rough. They have been calculated by me, and are given on my sole responsibility, in order to show the order of magnitude of the problem.
-234-
What is so surprising is that, as a source of heightened susceptibility to anxiety, threats of and attempts at suicide by parents should have attracted so little attention, whether from psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, or those engaged in child psychiatry.
Fear of Parental Desertion after a Quarrel
When parents quarrel seriously a risk that one or other will desert is always there. Not infrequently, moreover, it is made explicit. In such conditions children usually hear a great deal more than parents like to believe. Although, therefore, the kind of situation that leads a child to fear abandonment is different from one in which threats to abandon him are directed punitively at him, the effects may still be very unsettling.
Here again it is not unusual for professional workers whom parents may consult about their child's behaviour to be kept in the dark about what is happening at home, and for such workers, ignorant of the true situation, to resort to 'deep' interpretations invoking projection and the inner world to explain a child's symptoms. During the practice of child and family psychiatry and also in work with adolescents and adults it is prudent always to assume that only after some months of work, including joint family interviews, are we likely to have obtained even a reasonably accurate picture of how members of a family behave towards one another and what they say. When after much patience the facts become known, it is usually far less difficult to understand how a child has come to be disturbed and why he fears whatever he does.
Earlier in this chapter it was pointed out that, in studies of the effects on a child of separation, the factors that lead the effects to persist in one child and not to do so in another have in the past been difficult to identify. Review of evidence available today suggests that we may be nearer a solution. We can indeed be confident that when a child is threatened with being abandoned by his parents, either as a disciplinary measure or because of marital discord, the effects on him of any actual separation will not only be magnified but be likely to persist.
When the high incidence of such threats in the lives of children is borne in mind, along with the cumulative effects of actual separations, of threats of separation, of unstable substitute care, and of unstable family life, the fact that many
-235-
children grow up to be anxiously attached becomes explicable. In the light of these findings, moreover, a number of clinical syndromes can be better understood (see Chapters 18 and 19).
182
-236-
Chapter 16
'Overdependency' and the Theory of Spoiling
The child is all the more clinging the more it has an inner conviction that separation will repeat itself.
BURLINGHAM & FREUD ( 1944)
Some contrasting theories
Following presentation of some of the evidence on which the theoretical position adopted here is based, it is useful to consider briefly the whole array of hypotheses that have been proposed to account for why a particular individual is prone to a high degree of overdependency or separation anxiety, the terms by which anxious attachment is usually known. Hypotheses advanced by psychoanalysts and others working in a psychoanalytic tradition not only give varying weight to constitutional and environmental factors but also inculpate different and in some respects contradictory factors in each class. The five main hypotheses, each of which has adherents, are outlined briefly below. Two lay emphasis on constitutional factors, as follows:
1. Some children have inherently a greater amount of libidinal need in their constitution than others, and so are more sensitive than others to an absence of gratification ( Freud 1917b).
2. Some children have inherently a stronger death instinct than others, which manifests itself in unusually strong persecutory and depressive anxiety ( Klein 1932).
Three lay emphasis on environmental factors:
3. Variations in the birth process and severe traumata occurring during the first weeks of
postnatal life may increase the (organic) anxiety response and heighten the anxiety potential, thereby causing a more severe reaction to later (psychological) dangers met with in life ( Greenacre 1941; 1945).
-237-
Some children are 'spoiled' by excess of early libidinal gratification; they therefore demand more of it and, when not gratified, miss it more ( Freud 1905b; 1917b; 1926a).
Some children are made excessively sensitive to the possibility of separation or loss of love through experiencing either actual separation ( Edelston 1943; Bowlby 1951) or threats of abandonment or loss of love ( Suttie 1935; Fairbairn 1941).
It should be noted that whereas hypotheses 1, 4, and 5 are framed to account for a person's liability to a high degree of anxiety about separation in particular, hypotheses 2 and 3 are intended to account for liability to a high degree of anxiety of any kind.
In regard to the first two of these hypotheses there is no evidence either to support or to refute them since, with present research techniques, there is no way of determining differences of these kinds in constitutional endowment. That heritable differences play some part in determining why some people grow up to be more anxious than others is not unlikely; but
183
whether either Freud's or Klein's formulation of the nature of the difference will prove useful seems doubtful.
Clear evidence in support of a hypothesis of the third type comes from the work of Ucko ( 1965) who found that children suffering from neonatal asphyxia are unusually prone to respond to separations and other changes of environment with anxiety. Her findings are described in Chapter 13. While supporting the third hypothesis, they do not conflict with either of the remaining hypotheses.
The fourth and fifth hypotheses, because they raise immediate and practical issues of how to treat children, are perhaps the most controversial of the set, and particularly so since the lessons they hold for how to rear children are of exactly opposite kinds.
The fourth hypothesis, that an excess of parental affection spoils a child by making him exceptionally demanding and intolerant of frustration, is one that was very widely held during the first half of this century and that still dies hard. Freud not only committed himself to it at an early stage of his work but held to it firmly and consistently until the end. Since this view of Freud's has had a deep and lasting influence on psychoanalytic theory and practice, quotations may be useful.
Freud first reference to spoiling is in his Three Essays on theTheory of Sexuality
-238-
Theory of Sexuality, first published in 1905. There, after commending the mother who strokes, rocks, and kisses her child and thereby teaches him to love, he nevertheless warns against excess: '. . . an excess of parental affection does harm by causing precocious sexual maturity and also because, by spoiling the child, it makes him incapable in later life of temporarily doing without love or of being content with a smaller amount of it' ( SE 7: 223). The same theme runs through much of Freud theorizing about 'Little Hans' ( 1909); though, paradoxically, it is in his discussion of this small boy's separation anxiety that he comes nearest the view adopted here. He attributes part of the anxiety to the fact that Little Hans had been separated from his mother at the time of his baby sister's birth ( SE 10: 114 and 132). Nevertheless, both in the Introductory Lectures ( 1917b, SE 16: 408) and in his late work, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety ( 1926a), Freud makes no reference to such origins and instead explicitly adopts the theory of spoiling:
The undesirable result of 'spoiling' a small child is to magnify the importance of the danger of losing the object (the object being a protection against every situation of helplessness) in comparison with every other danger. It therefore encourages the individual to remain in the state of childhood ( SE 20: 167).
The theoretical context within which Freud advanced these views is referred to in an earlier chapter (Chapter 5) and described rather more fully in Appendix I.
Despite its wide popularity, no evidence of substance has ever been presented to support the theory that anxious attachment is a result of an excess of parental affection. As already indicated, all the evidence points the other way. ? The question arises, therefore, why Freud (and many others also) should have favoured the theory. Possible answers are offered at the
184
end of the chapter. Meanwhile, let us consider further the fifth type of theory, the one favoured here.
However cogent the evidence may be that some cases of anxious attachment are a consequence of separation, or of threats of being abandoned, or of risks of losing a parent inherent when parents quarrel, it is still possible that not all cases are to be explained in this way. Are there perhaps other cases that arise from causes other than those so far considered? To answer this question it is necessary to turn to the results of
-239-
studies conceived on different lines from the studies discussed so far. Studies of 'overdependency' and its antecedents
Despite very frequent references to overdependency in the clinical literature there seem to be few studies in which a clinician has selected a sample of adult patients on the criterion of overdependency and then examined the family experiences these individuals have had during their childhood and compared them with the experiences of an appropriately selected contrast group. Some of the literature on agoraphobia is in fact relevant (see Chapter 19) although the criterion for patient selection, namely fear of leaving home without a companion, is ostensibly quite different.
Studies of the family backgrounds of children selected as being overdependent are also few in number. With regard to these, moreover, a difficulty that has to be borne in mind is the ambiguity of the term overdependent, for it is found to cover two distinct conditions. One comprises children who are exhibiting typically anxious attachment. The other comprises children who are less able than are others of their age to do ordinary little tasks, such as feeding or dressing, for themselves and, instead, ask mother to do them for them.
This distinction emerges clearly in a study undertaken by Stendler ( 1954). A group of twenty six-year-old children, selected by teachers as being markedly overdependent, was found to fall into two subgroups. On the one hand were six children who turned to mother to do everything for them. On the other was a group of fourteen who had no difficulty in doing things for themselves but who were upset by mother's absence and created a scene whenever she went out and left them behind. Not unexpectedly, the family experiences of these two subgroups were radically different.
The six children who constantly turned to mother for help came from stable homes. All six, however, had a mother who was excessively protective and tended to discourage her child from learning to do things for himself.
Of the fourteen children who were anxiously attached eleven had had a very unsettled home life. Changes of caretaker, from mother to grandmother and back again, father constantly coming or going, frequent shifts of residence, and similar instability had been the rule. For the fourteen anxiously attached children taken as a group, the total number of such
-240-
185
discontinuities that had occurred during the period between nine months of age and the third birthday was fifty-two, an average of nearly four apiece. For a control group of twenty children, picked from the same school classes, the equivalent total was twenty-six, giving an average of 1? 3 apiece.
So far as they go, therefore, the results of this small study are consistent with the view that most, if not all, cases of anxious attachment can be understood as being the consequence of a series of separations and similar experiences. A much larger study, by McCord and others ( 1962), gives strong support to this type of hypothesis.
In their study McCord and his colleagues draw on the detailed case records of some 255 boys aged between nine and seventeen years who constituted the 'treatment group' of the Cambridge-Somerville project. All lived in a high-density industrial area and were mainly from the working classes. Half of these boys had been selected, when between the ages of nine and thirteen, by teachers and others in the community as potential delinquents. The other half were selected similarly as developing in a relatively normal way. All these boys and their families were then given such support and help as could be arranged in order to see whether delinquent development could be averted. Since supportive work continued for five years, a great deal of information was amassed both about the boys themselves and about their families. 1 Some years later the information was rated by independent raters who had taken no part in the study. For purposes of this analysis a sub-sample, of forty-three boys, was identified as showing 'overdependent behaviour' and another, of 105 boys, as showing, in this respect, the normal culturally expected pattern of development.
Three-quarters of the overdependent boys showed markedly dependent behaviour towards adults and can almost certainly be regarded as anxiously attached. A minority (eleven) showed dependent behaviour only towards peers and were rather remote from adults; it is an open question whether that behaviour can be regarded as anxious attachment. In the presentation of the results, however, findings for the majority are not distinguished from those for the minority.
When compared with the control group, the overdependent boys were found to be more likely to express feelings of inferiority
____________________
1 Included in the study also were a comparable pair of samples who were not given support.
Because little information on them and their families became available these cases cannot be used for the present analysis.
-241-
(51 per cent against 12 per cent) and to be more prone to 'abnormal fears' (56 per cent against 36 per cent), though unfortunately details of the fears are not specified.
When the family backgrounds and attitudes of parents of boys in the two groups were compared a set of highly consistent findings was obtained. Nearly twice as many of the dependent boys as of the controls were rated as being rejected by father (51 per cent compared with 28 per cent) and/or by mother (39? 5 per cent and 20 per cent). No less than 56 per cent of the dependent boys were found constantly to be compared unfavourably with their siblings; that proportion compares with only 17 per cent of the controls. No data on
186
separations and losses are given. Quarrels between parents and mutual disparagement were reported for almost every home in the overdependent sub-sample; though it must be admitted that in this workingclass neighbourhood a fairly high incidence of such happenings is reported also in the families of the controls. Not unexpectedly, the feelings expressed by some of these overdependent boys towards their mothers were the reverse of warm: one-third of them expressed active dislike, or fear, or contempt of her.
Such other evidence as is available on conditions associated with overdependency, or anxious attachment, is consistent with the findings so far considered. For example, in the previous chapter reference is made to two studies that focus attention on parental behaviour when the children are four or five years old and describe the variety and incidence of different methods of child care used in a particular community; these are the studies by Newson & Newson ( 1968) of families in the English midlands and by Sears, Maccoby & Levin ( 1957) of families in New England. Although in neither study are the effects on the children of different family experiences at the centre of interest, each presents some data relevant to our problem.
The Newsons' findings on overdependency are given in the previous chapter (pp. 213-14).
Most of the children who at four years of age were afraid of separation were found to have experienced a separation: either they or their mothers had been hospitalized, or some other separation had taken place.
Sears, Maccoby & Levin ( 1957) report the results of interviewing 379 mothers of five-year- old children attending kindergarten in the suburbs of a large metropolitan area in New England. Among the questions they asked about the children were four designed to give information about 'dependency'.
No evidence was found that separations had played any part in
-242-
the development of those children who, on the basis of mothers' reports, were assessed as most dependent; but the authors point out that the incidence of separation in the sample was very low.
The principle finding of Sears's study in regard to dependency is that the more irritable, scolding, and impatient a mother was when her child was clinging or desirous of attention the more 'dependent' he was likely to be. This significant correlation is appreciably increased in the case of mothers who were initially rejecting but later gave in. The researchers also found a significant correlation between a high degree of dependency and parents who used withdrawal of love as a disciplinary measure, including threats to abandon a child. These findings are consistent with the present hypothesis.
Another of their findings, however, could be taken to support the theory of spoiling. A small group of mothers was assessed as being 'exceptionally demonstrative' of affection, and these were more likely than others to have children rated as 'quite dependent'; the correlation is low but significant.
An explanation of this finding that seems not unlikely is that the children assessed by the researchers as overdependent fell, like Stendler's, into two groups, those who showed anxious attachment and those who looked to mother to do everything for them. If this was so and if
187
Stendler's findings were confirmed, then a number of the mothers assessed by Sears and his colleagues as exceptionally demonstrative would have been found to be not only affectionate but inclined also to discourage their child from doing things for himself.
Further and substantial evidence that strongly supports the hypothesis favoured here, and equally strongly challenges the theory of spoiling, comes from studies of the family backgrounds of individuals who grow up to be notably self-reliant. This is presented in the penultimate chapter.
How came it, then, that Freud should have adopted the theory of spoiling? Apart from the likelihood that he was more influenced than he realized by the accepted opinion of his day, there is some evidence that he was misled by the show of affection and over-protection that is so frequently present either as an over-compensation for a parent's unconscious hostility to a child or as part of the parent's own desire to cling to the child. This explanation is suggested by a passage in Three Essays, immediately following that quoted earlier, in which he refers to 'neuropathic parents, who are inclined as a rule to display excessive affection, [as] precisely those who are
-243-
most likely by their caresses to arouse the child's disposition to neurotic illness' (SE 7: 223). In fact, when such cases are investigated in a psychoanalytically oriented family clinic, it is found, probably invariably, that the child's heightened anxiety over separation and loss of love is a reaction not to any real 'excess of parental affection' but to experiences of an almost opposite kind. On the one hand are threats by a parent either to withdraw love or to abandon the child, threats that, as already discussed, are apt to be kept very secret. On the other are cases in which a parent demands, either overtly or covertly, that the child act as a caretaker to him (or her), thereby inverting the normal parent-child roles. In such cases it is the parent, not the child, who is overdependent or, to use the better term, anxiously attached. These cases are discussed in Chapters 18 and 19.
To some it may seem a trifle absurd to go to such lengths to demonstrate that uncertainty regarding the availability of an attachment figure commonly results in anxious attachment. Yet, so long as terms such as 'overdependent' and 'spoiled' are in use to describe the individuals in question and a theory is current that attributes their condition to an excess of gratification during their early years, children and especially adults who manifest this type of behaviour will meet with scant sympathy or understanding. Once it is recognized that the condition is one of anxiety over the accessibility and responsiveness of attachment figures, and that it develops as a result of bitter experience, there is good prospect not only of helping those who have grown up insecure but of preventing others from doing so.
-244-
188
Chapter 17
Anger, Anxiety, and Attachment Anger: a response to separation
Time and again in preceding chapters reference is made to the anger that is engendered towards a parent figure by a separation or a threat of separation. It is time now to consider this response more systematically and in particular how it is related to attachment and fear.
In the first chapter an account is given of the systematic study by Heinicke & Westheimer ( 1966) of ten children aged from thirteen to thirty-two months during and after a stay of two or more weeks in a residential nursery. When comparisons were made between the separated children and a contrast group of children who remained in their own homes the increased tendency of the separated children to respond aggressively was clear. For example, during their stay in the nursery a doll-play test was administered to the separated children on at least two occasions, at an interval of eight days; and the same tests were administered to the children in the contrast group at the same interval at home. On each occasion episodes of hostile behaviour occurred four times as frequently in the doll play of the separated children as they did in the play of the children living at home. Objects attacked tended to be the parent dolls. Of the separated children eight attacked a doll that had already been identified by the child as a mother or father doll; none of the children living at home did so.
Six weeks after the separated children had returned home, and after an equivalent period for the non-separated children, doll-play tests were again administered; and they were repeated ten weeks later. On neither of these occasions, however, were significant differences in hostility found between the children in the two groups. The reason for this was that, six weeks and more after reunion, the children who had been separated were no longer particularly aggressive in their play, a change for the better that was itself significant.
Nevertheless, it was apparent from mothers' reports that
-245-
during the months after return home a number of the separated children were still behaving hostilely in the home, especially towards mother. During the period from the second to the twentieth week after reunion six of the ten separated children behaved towards mother with an intensity of ambivalence reported for none of the children who had remained in their own homes.
Other observers to have reported notably aggressive and/or destructive behaviour during a period of separation are Burlingham & Freud ( 1944), Robertson ( 1958b), Bowlby ( 1953), Ainsworth & Boston ( 1952), and also Heinicke in an earlier study ( 1956) in which he compared the behaviour of a small sample of children during a short stay in a residential nursery with that of a similar group starting to attend a day nursery.
Others to have noted intensely ambivalent behaviour after a child has returned home include Robertson ( 1958b), Robertson & Robertson ( 1971), and Moore ( 1969b; 1971).
189
Anger: functional and dysfunctional
Although sometimes the aggressive behaviour of a child who has experienced a separation appears to be directed towards all and sundry, often, as in the doll-play sessions mentioned above, it is plainly directed towards a parent or parentsubstitute and is an expression of anger at the way he has been treated. Sometimes it is the anger of hope; sometimes the anger of despair.
On occasion a child's hostility to a parent takes the form of a reproach for his having been absent when wanted. For example, Robertson ( 1952) describes the angry reproaches of Laura, a child of two years and four months whom he had filmed during an eight-day stay in hospital for a minor operation. Some months after her return home Robertson was showing an early version of his film to her parents for their comments, while Laura was in bed believed asleep. As it happened, she awoke, crept into the room and witnessed the last few minutes of the film, in which she is seen on the day of her return from hospital, at first distressed and calling for her mother, later when her shoes are produced delighted at the prospect of going home and finally departing from hospital with her mother. The film over and the lights switched up, Laura turned away from her mother to be picked up by her father. Then, looking reproachfully at her mother, she demanded 'Where was you, Mummy? Where was you? ' Similarly, Wolfenstein ( 1957), in her study of
-246-
responses to disaster, relates how a small girl who had been apart from her father during a tornado, when reunited with him afterwards, hit him angrily and reproached him for having been away from her.
Both these little girls seemed to be acting on the assumption that parents should not be absent when their child is frightened and wants them there, and were hopeful that a forceful reminder would ensure that they would not err again.
In other cases a child's anger is the anger of despair. For example, in Chapter 1 there is a description (quoted from Burlingham & Freud 1944) of Reggie who was being cared for in the Hampstead Nurseries and who, by the age of two and a half years, had already had a number of mother figures. Then, two months later, the nurse to whom he was attached left to get married. Not only was Reggie 'lost and desperate' after her departure, but he refused to look at her when she visited him a fortnight later. During the evening after she had left he was heard to remark: 'My very own Mary-Ann! But I don't like her. '
In the case of Reggie we are dealing with a response, not to a single temporary separation, but to repeated prolonged separations each of which amounts to a loss. Although loss is the topic of our third volume, it is useful at this point to trespass briefly across the boundary.
In several papers (e. g. Bowlby 1960b; 1961b; 1963), the present writer has drawn attention to the frequency with which anger is aroused after a loss, not only in children but in adults also, and has raised the question of what its biological function might be. The answer proposed is that whenever separation is only temporary, which in the large majority of cases it is, it has the following two functions: first, it may assist in overcoming such obstacles as there may be to reunion; second, it may discourage the loved person from going away again.
190
Whenever loss is permanent, as it is after a bereavement, anger and aggressive behaviour are necessarily without function. The reason that they occur so often none the less, even after a death, is that during the early phases of grieving a bereaved person usually does not believe that the loss can really be permanent; he therefore continues to act as though it were still possible not only to find and recover the lost person but to reproach him for his actions. For the lost person is not infrequently held to be at least in part responsible for what has happened, in fact to have deserted. As a result, anger comes to be directed against the lost person, as well as, of course, against
-247-
any others thought to have played a part in the loss or in some way to be obstructing reunion.
Further research on responses to bereavement supports this line of reasoning. In her study of the responses of children and adolescents to the death of a parent, Wolfenstein ( 1969) confirms that anger is extremely common, certainly in disturbed children, and endorses the view that it is linked to strong hopes of recovering the lost parent. Parkes ( 1971a) likewise in his study of the responses of widows to loss of husband finds anger to be common, though not universal. He also sees it as part of the bereaved's attempts to recover the lost person.
Thus, whenever a separation has proved to be temporary, and also whenever it is believed that a separation now in train will prove only temporary, anger with the absent figure is common. In its functional form anger is expressed as reproachful and punishing behaviour that has as its set-goals assisting a reunion and discouraging further separation. Therefore, although expressed towards the partner, such anger acts to promote, and not to disrupt, the bond.
Angry coercive behaviour, acting in the service of an affectional bond, is not uncommon. It is seen when a mother, whose child has run foolishly across the road, berates and punishes him with an anger born of fear. It is seen whenever a sexual partner berates the other for being or seeming to be disloyal. It is seen, again, in some families when a member becomes angry whenever his approaches to another member are met by an unresponsive silence ( Heard 1973). It occurs also in nonhuman primates. For example, when he sights a predator a dominant male baboon may behave aggressively towards any wandering members of his own group who may be at risk. Frightened thereby, their attachment behaviour is aroused and they quickly come closer to him, so obtaining the protection inherent in proximity ( Hall & DeVore 1965).
Dysfunctional Anger
Angry behaviour that has coercion as its function and is compatible with a close tie has tended to be neglected by clinicians. Very probably this is because it can so readily become dysfunctional and it is the dysfunctional forms that are usually met with clinically.
Dysfunctional anger occurs whenever a person, child or adult, becomes so intensely and/or persistently angry with his partner that the bond between them is weakened, instead of strength-
-248-
191
ened, and the partner is alienated. Anger with a partner becomes dysfunctional also whenever aggressive thoughts or acts cross the narrow boundary between being deterrent and being revengeful. It is at this point, too, that feeling ceases to be the 'hot displeasure' of anger and may become, instead, the 'malice' of hatred. 1
Clinical experience suggests that the situations of separation and loss with which this work is concerned are especially liable to result in anger with an attachment figure that crosses the threshold of intensity and becomes dysfunctional. Separations, especially when prolonged or repeated, have a double effect. On the one hand, anger is aroused; on the other, love is attenuated. Thus not only may angry discontented behaviour alienate the attachment figure but, within the attached, a shift can occur in the balance of feeling. Instead of a strongly rooted affection laced occasionally with 'hot displeasure', such as develops in a child brought up by affectionate parents, there grows a deep-running resentment, held in check only partially by an anxious uncertain affection.
The most violently angry and dysfunctional responses of all, it seems probable, are elicited in children and adolescents who not only experience repeated separations but are constantly subjected to the threat of being abandoned. In Chapter 15 descriptions are given of the intense distress produced in young children by such threats, especially when the threats are given a cloak of verisimilitude. During the treatment of Mrs Q it seemed that nothing had caused her greater pain and distress than her mother's realistic threats either to abandon the family or to commit suicide. From experiencing such intense pain it is only a short step to feeling furiously angry with the person who inflicts it. It was in this light that the intensity of anger that Mrs Q felt at times towards her mother seemed most readily understood.
A similar conclusion was reached some years ago by Stott ( 1950), a British psychologist who lived for four years in an approved school studying the personalities and home backgrounds of 102 youths aged fifteen to eighteen years who had been sent there because of repeated offences. The information he gathered was derived from long interviews with the boys themselves and with their parents, and also from many informal contacts he had with the boys during their stay in the school. The boys, he found, were deeply insecure and their delinquencies
____________________
1 Definitions given in the Oxford English Dictionary.
-249-
in many cases seemed to have been acts of bravado. Adverse parental attitudes and disrupted relationships were found to have been common, as is usual in such studies, and were thought to account for much of the boys' sense of insecurity. Nevertheless, what impressed Stott more than anything else was evidence that in many cases mother, and in a few cases father, had used threats to desert as a means of discipline and how intensely anxious and angry these threats had made the boys. Although Stott gives particulars of some typical cases, he expresses himself reluctant to give numbers, partly because it was only late in the inquiry that he realized how immensely important such threats probably are and partly because there were a number of cases in which he felt fairly confident that threats had played an important role despite the fact that their use in these cases had been strenuously denied by both boy and parents.
192
Stott draws attention to the combination of intense anxiety and intense conflict inevitably aroused by threats of this kind. For, while on the one hand a child is made furiously angry by a parent's threat to desert, on the other he dare not express that anger in case it makes the parent actually do so. This is a main reason, Stott suggests, why in these cases anger at a parent usually becomes repressed and is then directed at other targets. It is a reason also why a child or adolescent who is terrified of being deserted tends instead to complain of being afraid of something else, perhaps of the dark or of thunder or of an accident. In the next two chapters a shift of exactly this kind as regards the situation allegedly feared is held to explain the symptomatology of a large proportion of patients at present diagnosed as phobic.
It seems not unlikely that a number of individuals who become literally murderous towards a parent are to be understood as having become so in reaction to threats of desertion that have been repeated relentlessly over many years. For example, in an early paper that calls attention to the traumatic effects of separation, Kestenberg ( 1943) describes a girl of thirteen who had been deserted by her parents and who had been cared for by a succession of other people. She trusted no one and responded to any disappointment by some vengeful action. During the course of treatment this girl pictured herself as grown up and so able to revenge herself on her mother by killing her. Many analysts who have treated patients with this type of background could give similar examples.
-250-
In another paper that also relates anger to separation, Burnham ( 1965) makes brief reference to two patients who actually engaged in matricide. One, an adolescent who murdered his mother, exclaimed afterwards 'I couldn't stand to have her leave me'. Another, a youth who placed a bomb in his mother's luggage as she boarded an airliner, explained 'I decided that she would never leave me again'. The hypothesis proposed makes these statements less paradoxical than they appear.
These admittedly are no more than clinical anecdotes, and no adequate history of previous family relationships is given for any case. Furthermore, so far as is known, no researcher since Stott has made a systematic study to test a possible causal link between violent anger directed towards an attachment figure and a history of being subjected by that figure to repeated threats of being abandoned. At present, therefore, the suggested link is hardly more than a conjecture; but as a lead for research it seems promising.
A Test for Appraising Responses to Separation
Psychoanalysts and others who adopt an object-relations approach have for many years regarded the balance of a persons's disposition to love, to become angry with, and to hate his attachment figure as a principal criterion in making a clinical assessment. In recent years Hansburg ( 1972), by taking as his starting-point certain measures of how a person responds to separation, has begun to put this onto a more systematic footing.
The clinical test Hansburg is developing comprises a dozen pictures, all but three of which depict a situation in which either a child is leaving his parents or a parent is leaving his child. Some of the situations, such as a child leaving to go to school or mother leaving her child at bedtime, are of a kind that any child of over six would be expected to take in his stride. Others are of a more disturbing character. They include a picture in which the child's mother is being taken by ambulance to hospital, and another in which the child is going off to live
193
permanently with his grandmother. Under each picture is written a title making explicit what the picture represents.
In its present form the test is suitable for children and young adolescents in the age-range ten to fifteen years. Hansburg reports that, despite the upsetting nature of some of the scenes, administering the test has not created difficulties. Should the test prove as useful as it promises to be, versions suitable for
-251-
younger children and also for older adolescents and adults could readily be designed.
In presenting each picture the clinician asks the child being tested, first, 'Did this ever happen to you? ' and then, if the answer is no, 'Can you imagine how it would feel if it did happen? ' The child is then presented with a series of seventeen statements of how a child might be expected to feel in such a situation, and is invited to tick as many of them as he thinks would fit. Although for each picture the seventeen statements are phrased a little differently, the range of feelings described is similar. The following selection of eight statements illustrates part of the range of feeling covered:
'feeling alone and miserable' 'feeling sorry for his parents' 'feeling that he doesn't care what happens' 'feeling he will do his best to get along' 'feeling angry at somebody' 'feeling that, if he had been a good child, it would not have happened' 'feeling that his house will now be a scary place to live in' 'feeling that it is not really happening, it's only a dream'.
Preliminary findings show, among other things, that children growing up in stable families give two or three times as many responses that express distress and concern at what is happening as responses that express anger and blame. By contrast, disturbed children who have experienced long and/or repeated separations, many of whom come from rejecting families, give at least as many angry and fault-finding responses as they do responses expressing distress and concern. This very marked difference in the balance of responses is especially evident in respect of pictures that represent a major disruption of a child's bond with his parents; in respect of pictures that represent only a routine and transient separation the difference in balance is less evident.
Another interesting difference of balance, also seen especially in response to pictures representing a major disruption, is in the proportion of responses that indicate that the child will do his best to get along on his own or that he will be happier as a result of the event. While these form only a small minority of the responses given by children from stable homes, they are much in evidence in the responses of children who have experienced long and repeated separations or who come from
-252-
unhappy homes. There is reason to believe that most such responses are expressions of a forced and premature attempt at autonomy that will prove brittle, a condition described by Winnicott ( 1955a) as a 'false self'. Some characteristics of persons who, by contrast, show a stable autonomy, and the conditions in which such autonomy develops, are the subject of Chapter 21.
194
Anger, ambivalence, and anxiety
In the schema proposed, a period of separation, and also threats of separation and other forms of rejection, are seen as arousing, in a child or adult, both anxious and angry behaviour. Each is directed towards the attachment figure: anxious attachment is to retain maximum accessibility to the attachment figure; anger is both a reproach at what has happened and a deterrent against its happening again. Thus, love, anxiety, and anger, and sometimes hatred, come to be aroused by one and the same person. As a result painful conflicts are inevitable.
That a single type of experience should arouse both anxiety and anger need cause no surprise. At the end of Chapter 8 it is pointed out that students of animal behaviour have observed that in certain situations either form of behaviour may be aroused and that whether an animal responds with attack or withdrawal, or with a combination of both, depends on a variety of factors that have the effect of tipping the balance either one way or the other. Between anxious attachment and angry attachment an analogous type of balance appears to obtain. A child who at one moment is furiously angry with a parent may at the next be seeking reassurance and comfort from that same parent. A similar sequence may be seen in lovers' quarrels. It is not by chance that the words 'anxiety' and 'anger' stem from the same root ( Lewis 1967). 1
____________________
1 It is of interest that in one of the reports of an infant chimpanzee brought up by humans
this same mixture of anger and anxiety is described as occurring when separation threatens ( Kellogg & Kellogg 1933). The authors, who adopted a female chimpanzee, Gua, at the age of seven months, discuss the nature of what are commonly described as 'temper tantrums', and the situations that elicit them. 'By far the most frequent occasion for the appearance of a tantrum', they report, 'was when she was left alone or when . . . it was momentarily impossible for her to get into the protecting arms of one of the experimenters. . . . In the more violent type of tantrum, such as that which resulted when we
-253-
Psychoanalysts have for long been especially interested in the interrelationships of love, fear, and hate, since in clinical work it is common to find patients whose emotional problems seem to spring from a tendency to respond towards their attachment figure with a turbulent combination of all three: intense possessiveness, intense anxiety, and intense anger. Not infrequently vicious circles develop. An incident of separation or rejection arouses a person's hostility and leads to hostile thoughts and acts; while hostile thoughts and acts directed towards his attachment figure greatly increase his fear of being further rejected or even of losing his loved figure altogether.
To account for the intimate connections found between attachment, anxiety, and anger, a number of hypotheses have been advanced. Some are based on an assumption that the aggressive component is reactive to frustration of some kind; others hold that aggressive impulses well up within and find expression almost irrespective of what an individual's experience may be. Among leading analysts who have regarded ambivalence to a loved figure as a key issue in psychopathology and have proposed solutions, Fairbairn ( 1952) advocates a frustration-aggression type of hypothesis; while Melanie Klein ( 1932; 1948b) holds that all aggressive feeling and behaviour is an expression of a death instinct that wells up within and must be directed outwards.
195
Because of the great influence that Melanie Klein has had on many psychoanalysts and child psychotherapists we consider her views first.
The clinical phenomenon to which Klein drew especial attention during the 1920s and 1930s is that some children who are attached to mother with unusual intensity are, paradoxically, possessed of strong unconscious hostility also directed towards her. In their play they may express much violence towards a mother figure and then become concerned and anxious lest they have destroyed or alienated mother herself. Often after an outburst a child runs from the analytic room, not only for fear
____________________
ran away faster than Gua could follow, she seemed to become "blind with fear" and would utter a series of shrill vibrant screams. . . . ' She would then run almost at random and occasionally bump headlong into bushes or other obstacles. Ultimately she would fall to the ground, and grovel in the sand. In their discussion, the Kelloggs are in doubt whether to regard the tantrum as expressing rage or fear. Their account suggests that it contains elements of both.
-254-
of consequences from the analyst, but also, it is suggested, to assure himself that mother is still alive and loving. Observations of this kind are now amply confirmed; and much other evidence demonstrates without doubt that the presence of hostile impulses, whether conscious or unconscious, directed towards a loved figure can greatly increase anxiety. (Witness Mrs Q's acute anxiety for her son's safety arising from her own impulses to throw the child out of the window, recounted in Chapter 15. ) Thus the value of many of Klein's observations remains intact whether or not we accept her ideas in regard to the origin of anger and aggression.
It must, however, be remembered that just as hostility directed towards a loved figure can increase anxiety, so can being anxious, especially that an attachment figure may be inaccessible or unresponsive when wanted, increase hostility. It is of both great theoretical and great practical importance to determine how these vicious circles begin. Does increased anxiety precede increased hostility, is it the other way round, or do they spring from a common source? When looking backwards from data provided by a patient in analysis it is notoriously difficult to unravel the sequence, as Ernest Jones noted many years ago ( Jones 1929); and this difficulty holds no less during the treatment of young children than it does for older patients. Neglect of this methodological difficulty and insufficient attention to family relationships have, it is held, led Klein to one-sided conclusions.
Logically it is clearly possible for intense anxiety to precede intense hostility in some cases, for the sequence to be reversed in others, and for them to spring from a single source and so be coincidental in yet a third group. Such possibilities, however, are not allowed for by Klein's formulation. Instead, her basic tenet is that increased anxiety is always both preceded by and caused by increased hostility; that anxiety may sometimes be independent of, sometimes itself provoke, and often be aroused by the same situation as, increased hostility is not conceded.
Fairbairn addresses himself to the same clinical problem as Klein but proposes a very different solution. In the absence of frustration, he holds, an infant would not direct
196
aggression against his loved object. What leads him to do so is 'deprivation and frustration in his libidinal relationships--and more particularly . . . the trauma of separation from his mother' ( Fairbairn 1952).
-255-
The position consistently adopted by the present writer (e. g. Bowlby 1944; 1951; 1958a), and, as will already be apparent, adopted also in this work, is close to Fairbairn's. 1 Anger and hostility directed towards an attachment figure, whether by a child or an adult, can be understood best, it is held, as being in response to frustration. Frustration, it is true, can affect motivational systems of any kind.