No More Learning

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. But there is reason to believe that the motivational systems with which this work is concerned, namely those mediating attachment behaviour, are those affected in a very large proportion of the most severe and persisting cases of frustration, especially when the agent of frustration is, wittingly or unwittingly, the attachment figure himself/herself.
The reason that anxiety about and hostility towards an attachment figure are so habitually found together, it is therefore concluded, is because both types of response are aroused by the same class of situation; and, to a lesser degree, because, once intensely aroused, each response tends to aggravate the other. As a result, following experiences of repeated separation or threats of separation, it is common for a person to develop intensely anxious and possessive attachment behaviour simultaneously with bitter anger directed against the attachment figure,. and often to combine both with much anxious concern about the safety of that figure. 2
Because of the tendency for anger and hostility directed towards a loved person to be repressed and/or redirected elsewhere (displaced), and also for anger to be attributed to others instead of to the self (projected), and for other reasons too, the pattern and balance of responses directed towards an attachment figure can become greatly distorted and tangled. Furthermore, because models of attachment figures and expectations about their behaviour are built up during the years of childhood and tend thenceforward to remain unchanged, the behaviour of a person today may be explicable in terms, not of his present situation, but of his experiences many years earlier.
____________________
1 A principal point of difference is that in much of his work Fairbairn tends to identify
attachment with feeding and orality and so to attribute proportionally greater significance
to a child's first year or two than is attributed by the present writer.
2 Frustrations of another kind that can engender much anger towards a parent occur when a
parent demands that his (or her) child act as a caretaker to him (or her), thus, as noted above (p. 244 ), inverting the usual parent and child roles.
-256-
It is, indeed, because of these complexities that the nature and origin of our feeling and behaviour are often so obscure, not only to others but to ourselves as well. These are all matters to be considered further in the third volume.
-257-
197
Chapter 18
Anxious Attachment and the 'Phobias' of Childhood
Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.
RUDYARD KIPLING, Something of Myself
Phobia, pseudophobia, and anxiety state
It is argued earlier (Chapter 14) that an individual's susceptibility to respond with fear whenever he meets a potentially alarming situation is determined in very large part by the type of forecast he makes of the probable availability of attachment figures, and that these forecasts derive from the structure of the working models of attachment figures and of self with which he is operating. In the same chapter it is argued, further, that these models are probably built up throughout the years of childhood and adolescence and that they tend thereafter to remain comparatively stable; and, finally, that the particular forms that a person's working models take are a fair reflection of the types of experience he has had in his relationships with attachment figures during those years, and may perhaps be having still. Evidence regarding the nature of the experiences that lead to increased susceptibility to fear is considered in Chapters 15 and 16.
In this chapter and the next the potential usefulness of the theory is illustrated by applying it to certain clinical syndromes in which overt anxiety and fear are prominent. The conditions selected are those commonly grouped under the label 'phobia', a label which, as currently used by psychiatrists and psychologists (e. g. Andrews 1966; Marks 1969), includes a broad range of conditions in which anxiety and fear are the main symptoms. Principal instances to be examined are 'school phobia' and 'agoraphobia'.
Although when the condition is of recent onset some patients
-258-
so labelled respond to fairly simple therapy (e. g. Friedman 1950; Kennedy 1965), others pose a much greater problem. A majority of those whose condition has been present for a long time, it is now agreed, suffer also from a wide variety of other emotional troubles. Most are timid individuals prone not only to fear situations of many kinds but to become depressed, and apt to develop various psychosomatic symptoms as well. In all such cases the feature to which the term phobia is applied, for example fear of school (school phobia) and of crowded places (agoraphobia), is found to be only a small, and sometimes even negligible, part of a deep-seated disturbance of personality that has been present for many years.
There is, however, a small minority of long-standing cases of phobia that appear to be very different. The individuals concerned, to whom Marks ( 1969) has drawn attention, are intensely afraid of some particular animal but, in all other respects, are stable personalities not given to psychological disturbance. Marks presents evidence that, in regard to personality functioning and psychophysiological responses, these individuals not only resemble people
198
who are psychiatrically healthy but differ markedly from those diagnosed agoraphobic. They differ from agoraphobics also in the age when difficulty begins. Whereas agoraphobic symptoms usually appear after the age of ten years, a specific and limited animal phobia has usually been present since before the age of seven years. The specific phobia appears to be due to the persistence into later life of the tendency to fear animals that is found commonly during the early years of childhood but usually diminishes to moderate or negligible proportions before or during adolescence.
Discussion here concentrates on the majority group, namely people who suffer from deep- seated disturbances of personality. The minority group, comprising people who suffer from specific animal phobias, probably present a different type of problem and are touched on only briefly.
In what follows the term phobia is used only because so much of the descriptive material with which we are concerned is to be found in the literature under that head. It is placed in quotation marks in the chapter title in order to indicate a belief that, when applied to patients in the majority group, it is being misapplied.
Others also have held that many of the cases commonly labelled phobic are mislabelled. Brun ( 1946) distinguishes a group that he terms 'pseudophobic', and includes in it all cases of agoraphobia. Snaith ( 1968) similarly argues that agoraphobia
-259-
is best regarded as a pseudophobia (although he uses the term in a way different from Brun). In the present work it is argued that not only is agoraphobia best regarded as a pseudophobia but so also is school phobia. By contrast, intense fear of a specific animal or of some other discrete situation in a person of otherwise healthy personality can sometimes be regarded as a case of true phobia.
The distinction between the two conditions is readily defined in terms of the present theory. In the case of a phobic person, what is most feared is the presence of some situation that other people find much less frightening but that he either takes great pains to avoid or else urgently withdraws from. In the case of a pseudophobic person, what is most feared is the absence or loss of an attachment figure, or some other secure base, towards which he would normally retreat. Whereas in the case of phobia the clinician identifies the feared situation correctly, in the case of pseudophobia the true nature of the feared situation often goes unrecognized and the case is misdiagnosed as one of phobia.
Although the label pseudophobia helps to draw attention both to the problem itself and to the tangled misconceptions about underlying psychopathology that abound in the literature, it is hardly suitable for regular use. A far better way to deal with the pseudophobias is to classify them simply as anxiety states and thereby to combine them with the many cases in which anxiety is said to be 'free-floating'. For cases of pseudophobia and anxiety state not only have in common the same age-range of onset but 'overlap considerably in their clinical features' ( Marks 1969). Indeed, once the role that anxious attachment plays in these conditions is firmly grasped, it becomes clear that patients said to be suffering from free-floating anxiety, no less than those labelled here as pseudophobic, are in an acute or chronic state of anxiety about the availability of their attachment figure(s). ?
199
In support of our thesis we devote most of this chapter to an examination of school phobia, about which there is a large and revealing literature; subsequently we consider afresh two cases of childhood phobia that have long been classics in the literature of psychoanalysis and of learning theory respectively. Special attention is given to the patterns of interaction that appear to have characterized the children's families. In the chapter following we examine agoraphobia in the light of our discussion of school phobia.
-260-
'School phobia' or school refusal
During the past fifteen years there has grown up an extensive literature on a condition known usually as school phobia ( Johnson et al. 1941) or, and better, school refusal ( Warren 1948). These terms apply when children not only refuse to attend school but express much anxiety when pressed to go. Their non-attendance is well known to their parents, and a majority of the children remain at home during school hours. Not infrequently the condition is accompanied by, or masked by, psychosomatic symptoms of one kind or another -- for example, anorexia, nausea, abdominal pain, feeling faint. Fears of many kinds are expressed -- of animals, of the dark, of being bullied, of mother coming to harm, of being deserted. Occasionally a child seems to panic. Tearfulness and general misery are common. As a rule, the children are well behaved, anxious, and inhibited. Most come from intact families, have not experienced long or frequent separations from home, and have parents who express great concern about their child and his refusal to attend school. Relations between child and parents are close, sometimes to the point of suffocation.
In all these respects the condition differs from truancy. Truants from school do not express anxiety about attending, do not go home during school hours, and usually pretend to their parents that they are attending. Often they steal or are otherwise delinquent. Commonly they come from unstable or broken homes, and have experienced long and/or frequent separations or changes of mother figure. Relations between a truant and his parents are likely to be quarrelsome or distant.
The validity of the distinction between school phobia and truancy is well attested, notably by the study of Hersov ( 1960a), who compares a series of fifty cases of school refusal with a matched series of fifty truants and with another contrast group, also drawn from a clinic population. Although several other studies are based on a series of cases seen in clinical practice, in none of them are results treated statistically. Instead, observations are presented descriptively and interwoven with a greater or less measure of theoretical interpretation. Among such studies, each based on a series of between twenty and thirty cases, are those by Talbot ( 1957), Coolidge and his colleagues ( 1957; 1962), Eisenberg ( 1958), and Davidson ( 1961). For her two papers Sperling ( 1961; 1967) draws on experiences with fifty-eight children, some of whom had long analytic treatment.
-261-
Kennedy ( 1965) reports on fifty cases of recent and acute onset dealt with by simple brisk methods. Weiss reports the treatment and follow-up some years later of fourteen children and adolescents treated as inpatients ( Weiss & Cain 1964; Weiss & Burke 1970). A number of empirically based articles on the family background of school refusers are published in the Smith College Studies in Social Work and reviewed by Malmquist ( 1965). A book by Clyne (
200
1966), based on fifty-five cases seen in general practice, gives a vivid description of the many and varied clinical pictures encountered. Among other publications are early papers by Broadwin ( 1932) and E. Klein ( 1945), a book by Kahn & Nursten ( 1968), reviews by Frick ( 1964), Andrews ( 1966), and Berecz ( 1968), and several papers reporting on small numbers of cases that have been treated by one or another method, including some by behaviour therapy (e. g. Lazarus 1960; Montenegro 1968).
At an empirical level there is substantial agreement among these many authors, both in regard to the personalities, behaviour, and symptoms presented by the children and in regard to the personalities, behaviour, and symptoms presented by the parents. Furthermore, there is widespread agreement that what a child fears is not what will happen at school, but leaving home. With the exception of Frick ( 1964), who expresses doubt, almost all students of the problem conclude that disagreeable features of school, for example a strict teacher or teasing or bullying from other children, are little more than rationalizations. In keeping with this view, Hersov ( 1960b) found that only a minority of his fifty school-refusing children made any complaint about teacher or schoolmates. Many of the children he studied stated that once in school they felt quite secure. Thus, unlike what occurs in genuine phobias, exposure to the alleged phobic situation does not exacerbate the sufferer's fear. Several other authors confirm this finding, and also that fear is often at its height either just before leaving home or on the journey to school. The subjects of a follow-up study by Weiss & Burke ( 1970), looking back on their problem, confirm that it arose from difficulties in family relations.
Because the situation feared is that of leaving home, the term school phobia is an obvious misnomer. 1 In order to
____________________
1 In the early 1920s the term school phobia was applied by Burt, and applied appropriately,
to a very different condition, namely to children who were afraid of going to school because of having gone there for shelter during air-raids (referred to by Tyerman 1968).
-262-
emphasize the family dynamic which she, like others, holds to be all-important, Johnson abandoned the term school phobia, which she herself had advocated in 1941, and replaced it with that of 'separation anxiety' ( Estes, Haylett & Johnson 1956). As a name for a clinical syndrome, however, separation anxiety is ill fitted. Of the terms at present in use 'school refusal' is probably the best, by virtue of its being at once the most descriptive and the least laden with theory.
In the course of these empirical studies a considerable body of theory has been elaborated. Three main influences are apparent.
One, that stems from Freud's classical paper on the analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy known as Little Hans ( Freud 1909), is couched in terms of the child's individual psychopathology and gives a central role to the process of projection. In that tradition concepts frequently drawn upon include those of dependency and overdependency, over- gratification and spoiling, linked as a rule to a theory of fixation at, or regression to, one or another level of psychological development. Sperling ( 1967), for example, points to the anal erotic (especially anal sadistic) stage of libidinal development, and Clyne ( 1966) to Winnicott's concept of an infantile transitional stage in the development of object relations.
201
The second main influence on theory stems from a seminal paper by Johnson and her colleagues ( 1941). Basing their views on experience gained in the practice of child and family psychiatry, they lay especial emphasis on family interactions and the role that one or other parent is playing in instigating and maintaining the condition. They describe parents who, for emotional reasons, cling to their child and, in effect, stop him from going school.
The third main influence is learning theory which, like traditional psychoanalysis, is conceived in terms of individual psychopathology. Nevertheless, as Andrews ( 1966) points out, the practitioners of behaviour therapy are often far more alive to the importance of interpersonal relations and family dynamics than their theory would lead us to expect.
Four Patterns of Family Interaction
A reading of the clinical literature shows that, although workers may approach the problem of school refusal from very different theoretical standpoints, when they come to assess actual cases the features to which they draw attention tend to be much the
-263-
same. It is therefore possible to treat the array of clinical findings as reasonably well authenticated and to proceed to consider how they can be understood in terms of the theory of anxious attachment outlined in earlier chapters. When viewed in that light a large majority of cases of school refusal can be understood as the products of one or more of four main patterns of family interaction:
Pattern A -- mother, or more rarely father, is a sufferer from chronic anxiety regarding attachment figures and retains the child at home to be a companion
Pattern B -- the child fears that something dreadful may happen to mother, or possibly father, while he is at school and so remains at home to prevent it happening
Pattern C -- the child fears that something dreadful may happen to himself if he is away from home and so remains at home to prevent that happening
Pattern D -- mother, or more rarely father, fears that something dreadful will happen to the child while he is at school and so keeps him at home.
Though in most cases one or another of these four interaction patterns is dominant, the patterns are not incompatible and mixed cases occur. Pattern A is the commonest and may be combined with any of the other three.
Family Interaction of Pattern A
A family pattern in which a mother or father suffers from anxiety over attachment figures and retains the child at home to be a companion is now widely recognized. In a majority of cases mother is the principal agent and for that reason, and to simplify exposition, it is mothers who are referred to in what follows. Yet it must not be forgotten that a father can also be a principal agent in the condition: Eisenberg ( 1958), Choi ( 1961), Clyne ( 1966), and Sperling ( 1967) are among those who describe illustrative cases.
A mother who retains her child at home to act as a companion for herself may do so deliberately and consciously or may be unaware of what she is doing and why.
202
An example of the former is the mother of a ten-year-old boy who had been kept at home for more than a year when the family was referred to a clinic. Although initially mother claimed that she pressed her son to return to school, after the
-264-
family had been in treatment for some months she admitted frankly that she did not want him to go. In a burst of candour she explained how for many years during her childhood she had been away in an institution and had had no one to love, how her son was the first person she had ever had to love in her life, and how she could not be expected to relinquish him now. The boy's father was aware of what was happening but preferred to stay inactive to avoid upsetting his wife. The boy also, it emerged, was well aware of the situation. 1
More often a mother is unaware, or only partly aware, of the pressures she is putting on her child and believes more or less sincerely that she is doing everything possible for his benefit. In some cases the train of events begins when the child contracts some minor ailment, and mother treats the condition as of much more consequence than it really is. The child is kept at home, ostensibly to convalesce, but is gradually presented with a picture of himself as being unfitted for the rough world of school and as being, therefore, in constant need of his mother's care. Unkind teachers, bullying boys, and chronic ill health are inculpated as the villains of the piece. This pattern and its many variants, in which a mother exploits some temporary upset or anxiety of her child, are described in almost every paper on the topic. Eisenberg ( 1958) gives vignettes of mothers who, on arrival at school with their child, exhibit intense reluctance to relinquish him and behave in such a way that he is made anxious about school and perhaps guilty at enjoying the company of anyone but mother. Weiss & Cain ( 1964) describe mothers who, while claiming to protect their children from the horrors of the world, not only burden them with their personal and marital worries but seek their undivided support. Clyne ( 1966) describes cases in which a mother develops psychosomatic symptoms herself after her child has returned to school. Others ( Estes, Haylett & Johnson 1956) have noted how, after one child has been released from his parent's grip, another child is sometimes fastened on and held.
Whenever a family pattern of this kind is present, the parent concerned is found to be intensely anxious about the availability of her own attachment figures and unconsciously to be inverting the normal parent-child relationship by requiring the child to be the parent figure and adopting the role of child herself. Thus the child is expected to care for the parent and the parent seeks
____________________
1 I am grateful to my colleague, Dr Marion Mackenzie, for information about this family.
-265-
to be cared for and comforted by the child. As a rule the inversion is camouflaged. Mother claims that the person who is in special need of care and protection, and who is receiving it, is the child; and a clinician inexperienced in family work may even come to believe that the trouble arises because the child is being 'spoiled' by having his 'every whim gratified'. In effect what is happening is very different and much sadder. Unknown to herself, mother (or father) is seeking belated satisfaction of her desire for the loving care she either never had as a child or perhaps lost, and, simultaneously, is preventing the child from taking part in play or
203
school activities with his peers. So far from being 'over-indulged', such children are chronically frustrated and, because allegedly given everything, are not even free to expostulate. During treatment one nine-year-old boy illustrated how he felt by repeatedly winding the window cord around himself and explaining, 'See, I'm in a spider's web and can't get out' ( Talbot 1957). Another boy, aged eleven, drew a dog on a tight leash led by a lady and made clear he felt the dog was himself, furious at being tied to his mother ( Colm 1959). 1
To present the picture thus may seem one-sided and to be unfairly biased against parents. Yet, once the parents' own difficulties are examined and the origins of these difficulties traced to the very troubled childhoods that they too have experienced, not only does their behaviour as parents become intelligible but our sympathy is enlisted. Time and again it is found that the pathological behaviour of a parent is a reaction against, or a reflection or residue of, a deeply disturbed relationship that she has had, and is perhaps still having, with her own parents. Recognition of this quickly dispels any disposition to see the parent as a villain, even though the way she is treating her child may be patently pathogenic. Instead, she is seen as the unhappy product of an unhappy home and, as such, a person fully as much sinned against as sinning.
For an adequate understanding of the dynamics and historical origins of families in which a parent inverts the relationship with the child by requiring him to care for her we should need
____________________
1 Sometimes the term 'symbiosis' is used to describe these suffocatingly close relationships
between mother and child. The term is not happily chosen, however, since in biology it is used to denote an adaptive partnership between two organisms in which each contributes to the other's survival; whereas the relationship with which we are concerned here is certainly not to the child's advantage and often is not to the parent's either.
-266-
to have far more systematic data than are yet available regarding the personalities and childhood histories of the parents and grandparents concerned. On grandparents no data appear to be on record, except anecdotally. As regards parents, not only are systematic data on representative samples of the parents of school-refusing children scarce, but in so far as there are any they do not distinguish between parents in terms of the four patterns of family interaction considered here. Such systematic data as are available are presented therefore only after all four patterns have been considered (see p. 282 ).
Nevertheless it is not too difficult, in the light of the theory outlined, to discern the main features of the psychopathology of parents in families showing pattern A. Once again it must be remembered that, although reference continues to be made to mothers and maternal grandmothers, almost exactly the same dynamics can occur with a father and a paternal grandmother in the principal roles, and also with one or other grandfather.
Very commonly a mother who inverts the relationship with her child has had, and may still be having, a close but intensely anxious and ambivalent relationship with her own mother. In such cases a mother believes, often with good reason, that she was unwanted or at least less wanted than one of her siblings. As a result she has felt that she has always had to fight for such affection and recognition as she has got. Yet in only a few cases in which pattern A obtains has she been wholly rejected. Far more often the maternal grandmother's feeling for
204
her daughter is ambivalent; and not infrequently the older woman seems to be making strong, insistent, and unjustified demands upon her daughter. Thus, while on the one hand mother has never had the spontaneous care and affection a child desires, and usually receives, on the other she has often been put under duress to provide care for her own dominating and demanding mother. Responding to these pressures, mother may meet her mother's demands but only at the price of feeling bitter with suppressed resentment against her.
It will perhaps be noticed that the intensely ambivalent relationship between mother and grandmother, of the kind sketched above, is likely itself to be an example of an inverted parent-child relationship. For in many cases maternal grandmother is demanding from her daughter just that same parentaltype care and affection that mother, in her turn, is demanding from her school-refusing child. That this is truly so in some instances is shown by the fact that, in every series studied, there
-267-
are cases reported of mothers (or fathers) who, when children, had themselves been school refusers. For example, in a study by Goldberg ( 1953) of seventeen cases, about half the parents are reported to have had symptoms during their childhood identical with those shown by their children. In Davidson study ( 1961) of thirty cases, mother had herself been a school refuser in three, and three other mothers had had to remain at home to look after their own sick mother or younger siblings. Sperling ( 1967) reports the case of a father who was in analysis for phobic anxieties when his son began refusing to go to school. Although at first it appeared that John was clinging to his father, it soon became clear that father was demanding that the boy keep him company. During analysis father began to recognize that his own father had treated him in exactly the same way that he was now treating his son, using him thus, presumably, in an attempt to deal with his own anxieties. Whenever possible, then, it is desirable that in future studies the childhood histories and psychopathology of grandparents should be explored.
Not unexpectedly, the marital relations of the parents of school-refusing children are usually very disturbed. Forms of disturbance vary greatly and it would take us too far from our theme adequately to discuss their variety. One form frequently described is of a wife locked in mutually ambivalent relationships both with her own mother and with her school-refusing child, and having a rather passive husband who tends to opt out of his roles as husband and father. The way this relationship comes into being is not accidental. Few men other than passive ones are willing to marry and stay married to a woman who not only consistently gives preference to the never-ending demands of her own mother but may also try to dominate her husband in the same way that her mother dominates her. As it was put by Mrs Q, who had evidently had many admirers as a girl, only her husband among them had been willing to tolerate the extent to which she was daily entangled with her own very disturbed mother and to put up with the hysterical outbursts that, engendered in her relationship with her mother, she had been wont to vent on each of her boyfriends successively.
No doubt the mirror-image of this relationship, in which the husband is entangled with his mother and the wife is the passive one, also occurs. In either case sexual relations are likely to be sparse or absent.
Let us return to our main theme, the relationship of one or
205
-268-
other parent, usually mother, to the school-refusing child. When that is examined it is found, time and again, that mother treats the child as though he were a replica of her own mother, the child's maternal grandmother. Not only does mother seek from her child the care and comfort she had sought, perhaps in vain, from maternal grandmother, but she may behave towards him as though he were the dominant figure. While at one moment she may be smouldering with resentment at what she feels to be her child's rebuff, as she does at those from her mother, at the next she may be treating him with the same anxious deference that she shows an elderly mother who rules the family by means of invalidism.
Examples of parents who are part of a family showing one or another variant of pattern A are to be found throughout the literature. Talbot ( 1957) calls attention to the mother who allows her child to dominate her in exactly the same way that she has always allowed her own mother to. In their account of the case of a boy of nine, Johnsonet al. ( 1941) describe a mother whose own mother had been in bed for years with a hysterical disorder and had demanded her daughter's constant attention. The boy's mother was hypochondriacal about him, on the one hand, insisting on endless medical examinations, and, on the other, under the guise of believing that he was in greater need of love from her than were her other children, she made extreme demands upon him. During a late phase of her treatment, however, this mother was able to describe how she had always longed for love herself, how she felt she was unable to give it, and how she even competed with her son for attention. In describing another variant of the pattern Davidson ( 1961) reports how a mother referred to her school-refusing daughter protectively as 'small and white like Grandma'. Weiss & Cain ( 1964) observe that a mother is inclined to treat her child as her confidant in regard to her difficult family relationships and that the child is apt to respond by adopting an inappropriately grown-up manner, both to his parents and to strangers.