No More Learning

There is abundant evidence that almost every child habitually prefers one person, usually his mother-figure, to whom to go when distressed but that, in her absence, he will make do with someone else, preferably someone whom he knows well. On these occasions most children show a clear hierarchy of preference so that, in extremity and with no one else available, even a kindly stranger may be approached. Thus, whilst attachment behaviour may in differing circum- stances be shown to a variety of individuals, an enduring attachment, or attachment bond, is confined to very few. Should a child fail to show such clear discrimination, it is likely he is severely disturbed.
The theory of attachment is an attempt to ex- plain both attachment behaviour, with its episod- ic appearance and disappearance, and also the enduring attachments that children and other in- dividuals make to particular others. In this theory the key concept is that of behavioural system. This is conceived on the analogy of a physiologic- al system organized homeostatically to ensure that a certain physiological measure, such as
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? ? ? body temperature or blood pressure, is held between appropriate limits. In proposing the concept of a behavioural system to account for the way a child or older person maintains his re- lation to his attachment figure between certain limits of distance or accessibility, no more is done than to use these well-understood principles to account for a different form of homeostasis, namely one in which the set limits concern the organism's relation to clearly identified persons in, or other features of, the environment and in which the limits are maintained by behavioural instead of physiological means.
In thus postulating the existence of an internal psychological organization with a number of highly specific features, which include represent- ational models of the self and of attachment fig- ure(s), the theory proposed can be seen as having all the same basic properties as those that charac- terize other forms of structural theory, of which the variants of psychoanalysis are some of the best known, and that differentiate them so sharply from behaviourism in its many forms. Historically attachment theory was developed as a variant of object-relations theory.
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? ? ? The reason why in this account I have given so much space to the concept and theory of attach- ment is that, once those principles are grasped, there is little difficulty in understanding how the many other phenomena of central concern to clinicians are explained within the framework proposed.
Separation anxiety
For example, a new light is thrown on the prob- lem of separation anxiety, namely anxiety about losing, or becoming separated from, someone loved. Why 'mere separation' should cause anxi- ety has been a mystery. Freud wrestled with the problem and advanced a number of hypotheses (Freud, 1926; Strachey, 1959). Every other lead- ing analyst has done the same. With no means of evaluating them, many divergent schools of thought have proliferated.
The problem lies, I believe, in an unexamined assumption, made not only by psychoanalysts but by more traditional psychiatrists as well, that fear is aroused in a mentally healthy person only in situations that everyone would perceive as in- trinsically painful or dangerous, or that are per- ceived so by a person only because of his having
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? ? ? become conditioned to them. Since fear of separ- ation and loss does not fit this formula, analysts have concluded that what is feared is really some other situation; and a great variety of hypotheses have been advanced.
The difficulties disappear, however, when an ethological approach is adopted. For it then be- comes evident that man, like other animals, re- sponds with fear to certain situations, not be- cause they carry a high risk of pain or danger, but because they signal an increase of risk. Thus, just as animals of many species, including man, are disposed to respond with fear to sudden move- ment or a marked change in level of sound or light because to do so has survival value, so are many species, including man, disposed to re- spond to separation from a potentially caregiving figure and for the same reasons.
When separation anxiety is seen in this light, as a basic human disposition, it is only a small step to understand why it is that threats to abandon a child, often used as a means of control, are so very terrifying. Such threats, and also threats of suicide by a parent, are, we now know, common causes of intensified separation anxiety. Their ex- traordinary neglect in traditional clinical theory
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? ? ? is due, I suspect, not only to an inadequate theory of separation anxiety but to a failure to give prop- er weight to the powerful effects, at all ages, of real-life events.
Not only do threats of abandonment create in- tense anxiety but they also arouse anger, often also of intense degree, especially in older children and adolescents. This anger, the function of which is to dissuade the attachment figure from carrying out the threat, can easily become dys- functional. It is in this light, I believe, that we can understand such absurdly paradoxical behaviour as the adolescent, reported by Burnham (1965), who, having murdered his mother, exclaimed, 'I couldn't stand to have her leave me. '
Other pathogenic family situations are readily understood in terms of attachment theory. One fairly common example is when a child has such a close relationship with his mother that he has difficulty in developing a social life outside the family, a relationship sometimes described as symbiotic. In a majority of such cases the cause of the trouble can be traced to the mother who, hav- ing grown up anxiously attached as a result of a difficult childhood, is now seeking to make her own child her attachment figure. So far from the
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? ? ? child being over-indulged, as is sometimes asser- ted, he is being burdened with having to care for his own mother. Thus, in these cases, the normal relationship of attached child to caregiving par- ent is found to be inverted.
Mourning
Whilst separation anxiety is the usual response to a threat or some other risk of loss, mourning is the usual response to a loss after it has occurred. During the early years of psychoanalysis a num- ber of analysts identified losses, occurring during childhood or in later life, as playing a causal role in emotional disturbance, especially in depressive disorders; and by 1950 a number of theories about the nature of mourning, and other re- sponses to loss, had been advanced. Moreover, much sharp controversy had already been en- gendered. This controversy, which began during the 30s, arose from the divergent theories about infant development that had been elaborated in Vienna and London. Representative examples of the different points of view about mourning are those expressed in Helene Deutsch's Absence of Grief (1937) and Melanie Klein's Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States (1940).
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? ? ? Whereas Deutsch held that, due to inadequate psychic development, children are unable to mourn, Klein held that they not only can mourn but do. In keeping with her strong emphasis on feeding, however, she held that the object mourned was the lost breast; and, in addition, she attributed a complex fantasy-life to the in- fant. Opposite though these theoretical positions are, both were constructed using the same meth- odology, namely by inferences about earlier phases of psychological development based on observations made during the analysis of older, and emotionally disturbed, subjects. Neither the- ory had been checked by direct observation of how ordinary children of different ages respond to a loss.
Approaching the problem prospectively, as I did, led me to different conclusions. During the early 1950s Robertson and I had generalized the sequence of responses seen in young children during temporary separation from mother as those of protest, despair, and detachment (Robertson and Bowlby, 1952). A few years later, when reading a study by Marris (1958) of how widows respond to loss of husband, I was struck by the similarity of the responses he describes to
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? ? ? those of young children. This led me to a system- atic study of the literature on mourning, espe- cially the mourning of healthy adults. The se- quence of responses that commonly occur, it be- came clear, was very different from what clinical theorists had been assuming. Not only does mourning in mentally healthy adults last far longer than the six months often suggested in those days, but several component responses widely regarded as pathological were found to be common in healthy mourning. These include an- ger, directed at third parties, the self, and some- times at the person lost, disbelief that the loss has occurred (misleadingly termed denial), and a tendency, often though not always unconscious, to search for the lost person in the hope of re- union. The clearer the picture of mourning re- sponses in adults became, the clearer became their similarities to the responses observed in childhood. This conclusion, when first advanced (Bowlby, 1960, 1961), was much criticized; but it has now been amply supported by a number of subsequent studies (e. g. Parkes, 1972; Kliman, 1965; Furman, 1974; Raphael, 1982).
Once an accurate picture of healthy mourning has been obtained, it becomes possible to identify
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? ? ? features that are truly indicative of pathology. It becomes possible also to discern many of the con- ditions that promote healthy mourning and those that lead in a pathological direction. The belief that children are unable to mourn can then be seen to derive from generalizations that had been made from the analyses of children whose mourning had followed an atypical course. In many cases this had been due either to the child never having been given adequate information about what had happened, or else to there having been no one to sympathize with him and help him gradually come to terms with his loss, his yearning for his lost parent, his anger, and his sorrow.
Defensive processes
The next step in this reformulation of theory was to consider how defensive processes could best be conceptualized, a crucial step since defensive pro- cesses have always been at the heart of psycho- analytic theory. Although as a clinician I have in- evitably been concerned with the whole range of defences, as a research worker I have directed my attention especially to the way a young child be- haves towards his mother after a spell in a
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? ? ? hospital or residential nursery unvisited. In such circumstances it is common for a child to begin by treating his mother almost as though she were a stranger, but then, after an interval, usually of hours or days, to become intensely clinging, anxious lest he lose her again, and angry with her should he think he may. In some way all his feel- ing for his mother and all the behaviour towards her we take for granted, keeping within range of her and most notably turning to her when frightened or hurt, have suddenly vanished--only to reappear again after an interval. That was the condition James Robertson and I termed detach- ment and which we believed was a result of some defensive process operating within the child.
Whereas Freud in his scientific theorizing felt confined to a conceptual model that explained all phenomena, whether physical or biological, in terms of the disposition of energy, today we have available conceptual models of much greater vari- ety. Many draw on such interrelated concepts as organization, pattern, and information; while the purposeful activities of biological organisms can be conceived in terms of control systems struc- tured in certain ways. With supplies of physical energy available to them, these systems become
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? ? ? active on receipt of certain sorts of signal and in- active on receipt of signals of other sorts. Thus the world of science in which we live is radically different from the world Freud lived in at the turn of the century, and the concepts available to us immeasurably better suited to our problems than were the very restricted ones available in his day.
If we return now to the strange detached beha- viour a young child shows after being away for a time with strange people in a strange place, what is so peculiar about it is, of course, the absence of attachment behaviour in circumstances in which we would confidently expect to see it. Even when he has hurt himself severely, such a child shows no sign of seeking comfort. Thus signals that would ordinarily activate attachment behaviour are failing to do so. This suggests that in some way and for some reason these signals are failing to reach the behavioural system responsible for attachment behaviour, that they are being blocked off, and the behavioural system itself is thereby immobilized. What this means is that a system controlling such crucial behaviour as at- tachment can in certain circumstances be rendered either temporarily or permanently
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? ? ? incapable of being activated, and with it the whole range of feeling and desire that normally accompanies it is rendered incapable of being aroused.
In considering how this deactivation might be effected I turn to the work of the cognitive psy- chologists (e. g. Norman, 1976; Dixon, 1971, 1981) who, during the past 20 years, have revolution- ized our knowledge of how we perceive the world and how we construe the situations we are in. Amongst much else that is clinically congenial, this revolution in cognitive theory not only gives unconscious mental processes the central place in mental life that analysts have always claimed for them, but presents a picture of the mental appar- atus as being well able to shut off information of certain specified types and of doing so selectively without the person being aware of what is happening.
In the emotionally detached children described earlier and also, I believe, in adults who have de- veloped the kind of personality that Winnicott (1960) describes as 'false self' and Kohut (1977) as 'narcissistic', the information being blocked off is of a very special type. So far from its being the routine exclusion of irrelevant and potentially
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? ? ? distracting information that we engage in all the time and that is readily reversible, what are being excluded in these pathological conditions are the signals, arising from both inside and outside the person, that would activate their attachment be- haviour and that would enable them both to love and to experience being loved. In other words, the mental structures responsible for routine se- lective exclusion are being employed--one might say exploited--for a special and potentially patho- logical purpose. This form of exclusion I refer to--for obvious reasons--as defensive exclusion, which is, of course, only another way of describ- ing repression. And, just as Freud regarded re- pression as the key process in every form of de- fence, so I see the role of defensive exclusion. 3 A fuller account of this, an information-processing approach to the problem of defence, in which de- fences are classified into defensive processes, de- fensive beliefs, and defensive activities, is given in an early chapter of Loss (Bowlby, 1980).
An alternative framework
During the time it has taken to develop the con- ceptual framework described here Margaret Mahler has been concerned with many of the
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? ? ? same clinical problems and some of the same fea- tures of children's behaviour; and she also has been developing a revised conceptual framework to account for them, set out fully in her book The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975). To compare alternative frameworks is never easy, as Kuhn (1962) emphasizes, and no attempt is made to do so here. Elsewhere (e. g. Bowlby, 1981) I describe what I believe to be some of the strengths of the framework I favour, including its close related- ness to empirical data, both clinical and develop- mental, and its compatibility with current ideas in evolutionary biology and neurophysiology; whilst what I see as the shortcomings of Mahler's framework are trenchantly criticized by Peterfre- und (1978) and Klein (1981).
In brief, Mahler's theories of normal develop- ment, including her postulated normal phases of autism and symbiosis, are shown to rest not on observation but on preconceptions based on tra- ditional psychoanalytic theory and, in doing so, to ignore almost entirely the remarkable body of new information about early infancy that has been built up from careful empirical studies over the past two decades. Although some of the
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? ? ? clinical implications of Mahler's theory are not very different from those of attachment theory, and her concept of return to base to 'refuel' is similar to that of use of an attachment figure as a secure base from which to explore, the key con- cepts with which the two frameworks are built are very different.
RESEARCH
Nothing has been so rewarding as the immense amount of careful research to which the early work on maternal deprivation has given rise. The literature is now enormous and far beyond the compass of an account of this sort to summarize. Fortunately, moreover, it is unnecessary since a comprehensive and critical review of the field has been published by Rutter (1979) who concludes by referring to the 'continuing accumulation of evidence showing the importance of deprivation and disadvantage on children's psychological de- velopment' and expressing the view that the ori- ginal arguments 'have been amply confirmed'. A principal finding of recent work is the extent to which two or more adverse experiences interact so that the risk of a psychological disturbance fol- lowing is multiplied, often many times over. An
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? ? ? example of this interactive effect of adverse ex- periences is seen in the findings of Brown and Harris (1978) derived from their studies of de- pressive disorders in women. (During the last decade this group has published many further findings of the greatest interest, see Harris (1988). )
Not only is there this strongly interactive effect of adverse experiences but there is an increased likelihood for someone who has had one adverse experience to have another. For example, 'people brought up in unhappy or disrupted homes are more likely to have illegitimate children, to be- come teenage mothers, to make unhappy mar- riages, and to divorce' (Rutter, 1979). Thus ad- verse childhood experiences have effects of at least two kinds. First they make the individual more vulnerable to later adverse experiences. Se- condly they make it more likely that he or she will meet with further such experiences. Whereas the earlier adverse experiences are likely to be wholly independent of the agency of the individual con- cerned, the later ones are likely to be the con- sequences of his or her own actions, actions that spring from those disturbances of personality to which the earlier experiences have given rise.
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? ? ? Of the many types of psychological disturbance that are traceable, at least in part, to one or an- other pattern of maternal deprivation, the effects on parental behaviour and thereby on the next generation are potentially the most serious. Thus a mother who, due to adverse experiences during childhood, grows up to be anxiously attached is prone to seek care from her own child and thereby lead the child to become anxious, guilty, and perhaps phobic (see review in Bowlby, 1973). A mother who as a child suffered neglect and fre- quent severe threats of being abandoned or beaten is more prone than others to abuse her child physically (DeLozier, 1982), resulting in the adverse effects on the child's developing person- ality recorded, amongst others, by George and Main (1979). Systematic research into the effects of childhood experiences on the way mothers and fathers treat their children has only just begun and seems likely to be one of the most fruitful of all fields for further research. Other research leads are described in a recent symposium edited by Parkes and Stevenson-Hinde (1982).
My reason for giving so much space in this ac- count to the development of theory is not only because it has occupied so much of my time but
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? ? ? because, as Kurt Lewin remarked long ago, 'There is nothing so practical as a good theory', and, of course, nothing so handicapping as a poor one. Without good theory as a guide, research is likely to be difficult to plan and to be unproduct- ive, and findings are difficult to interpret. Without a reasonably valid theory of psychopath- ology, therapeutic techniques tend to be blunt and of uncertain benefit. Without a reasonably valid theory of aetiology, systematic and agreed measures of prevention will never be supported. My hope is that in the long term the greatest value of the theory proposed may prove to be the light it throws on the conditions most likely to promote healthy personality development. Only when those conditions are clear beyond doubt will parents know what is best for their children and will communities be willing to help them provide it.
1 Ronald Hargreaves's premature death in 1962, when professor of psychiatry at Leeds, was a grievous loss to preventive psychiatry.
2 This is the term Thomas Kuhn (1974) now uses to re- place 'paradigm', the term he used in his earlier work (Kuhn, 1962).
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? ? ? 3 As Spiegel (1981) points out, my term 'defensive ex- clusion' carries a meaning very similar to Sullivan's term 'selective inattention'.
3
PSYCHOANALYSIS AS ART AND SCIENCE
During the summer of 1978 I was invited to give a number of lectures in Canada. Among the in- vitations was one from the Canadian Psycho- analytic Society to give their academic lecture to the annual meeting of the Society to be held in Quebec City. The topic I selected is one which had concerned me for some years, and about which I believe there is still a great deal of con- fused thinking.
In taking as my theme psychoanalysis as art and science I want to draw attention to what I believe to be two very different aspects of our discip- line--the art of psychoanalytic therapy and the science of psychoanalytic psychology--and in do- ing so to emphasize, on the one hand, the dis- tinctive value of each and, on the other, the gulf that divides them--in regard both to the contrast- ing criteria by which each should be judged and
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? ? ? the very different mental outlook that each de- mands. In emphasizing these distinctions, I can- not help regretting that the word psychoanalysis came early to be used ambiguously as Freud him- self described it. 'While it was originally the name of a particular therapeutic method', he writes in his autobiography (1925), 'it has now also become the name of a science--the science of unconscious mental processes'.
The distinction I am drawing, of course, is not confined to psychoanalysis. It applies in every field in which the practice of a profession or a craft gives birth to a body of scientific know- ledge--the blacksmith to metallurgy, the civil en- gineer to soil mechanics, the farmer to plant physiology, and the physician to the medical sci- ences. In each of these fields the roles differenti- ate. On the one hand are the practitioners, on the other the scientists, with a limited number of in- dividuals attempting to combine both roles. As history shows, this process of differentiation of- ten proves painful and misunderstandings are frequent. Since I believe differentiation is bound to come also in our own field, and is perhaps already overdue, let us consider some of the diffi- culties and misunderstandings to which it may all
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? ? ? too easily give rise in the hope of avoiding them or mitigating their consequences.
I start by contrasting the roles of practitioner and research scientist and do so under three headings, using the case of medicine as an example.
FOCUS OF STUDY
The aim of the practitioner is to take into account as many aspects as he can of each and every clin- ical problem with which he is called upon to deal. This requires him not only to apply any scientific principle that appears relevant but also to draw on such personal experience of the condition as he may have acquired and, especially, to attend to that unique combination of features met with in each patient. Knowing how greatly patients dif- fer, the experienced clinician recognizes that a form of treatment well suited to one would be totally inappropriate to another.
Taking all factors into account and giving each its due weight is the art of clinical judgement.
The outlook of the research scientist is quite different. In his efforts to discern general pat- terns underlying individual variety he ignores the particular and strives to simplify, risking thereby
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? ? ? over- simplification. If he is wise he will probably concentrate attention on a limited aspect of a limited problem. If in making his selection he proves sagacious, or simply lucky, he may not only elucidate the problem selected but also de- velop ideas applicable to a broader range. If his selection proves unwise or unlucky he may merely end up knowing more and more about less and less. That is the risk every researcher runs.
The art of research lies in selecting a limited manageable problem and the methods that will best help solve it. This brings me to my second point.
MODES OF ACQUIRING INFORMATION
In the methods available to him for acquiring in- formation the practitioner has certain great ad- vantages over the research scientist but also cer- tain great disadvantages. Let us start with the advantages.
In his role of giving help the practitioner is per- mitted access to information of certain kinds that remain closed to the scientist: as a friend of mine is fond of saving, it's only surgeons who are al- lowed to cut you open to see what's inside. In an analogous way it is only by treating a patient
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? ? ? therapeutically that a psychoanalyst is given ac- cess to much of importance going on in a person's mind. In both professions, moreover, practition- ers are permitted to intervene in specified ways and privileged to observe what the consequences of such interventions are. These are immense ad- vantages and psychoanalysts have not been slow to exploit them.
Yet no science can prosper for long without en- listing new methods to cross-check on observa- tions made and on hypotheses born of older methods. Here the research scientist is likely to have the advantage. In the medical sciences, physiologists and pathologists have made im- mense advances by means of animal experi- ments, tissue culture, biochemical analyses, and a thousand other ingenious techniques. Indeed, it is a hallmark of a creative scientist that he devises new means by which phenomena, perhaps already well studied by other methods, can be ob- served in some new way.
It is in this area, I believe, that the ambiguous use of the word psychoanalysis has done greatest harm. For it has led some analysts to suppose that the only method of enquiry appropriate for the advancement of psychoanalytic science is that
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? ? ? of treating a patient psychoanalytically. Since I believe this to be a profound misunderstanding I shall be saying a good deal more about it. Before doing so, however, I want to say a word about the place of scepticism and faith in the respective worlds of scientist and practitioner.
SCEPTICISM AND FAITH
In his day-to-day work it is necessary for a scient- ist to exercise a high degree of criticism and self- criticism: and in the world he inhabits neither the data nor the theories of a leader, however ad- mired personally he may be, are exempt from challenge and criticism. There is no place for authority.
The same is not true in the practice of a profes- sion. If he is to be effective a practitioner must be prepared to act as though certain principles and certain theories were valid; and in deciding which to adopt he is likely to be guided by those with ex- perience from whom he learns. Since, moreover, there is a tendency in all of us to be impressed whenever the application of a theory appears to have been successful, practitioners are at special risk of placing greater confidence in a theory than the evidence available may justify.
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? ? ? From the standpoint of clinical practice this is no bad thing. On the contrary, there is abundant evidence that the great majority of patients are helped by the faith and hope that a practitioner brings to his work; whilst it is often the very lack of these qualities that makes so many excellent research workers sadly ill-suited to be therapists.
Yet, though faith in the validity of particular data and in particular theories is out of place in a scientist, I do not wish to imply that he is nothing but a sceptic. On the contrary, his whole way of living is founded on faith, faith that in the long run the best route to reliable knowledge is the ap- plication of scientific method.
I am, of course, aware that there are many psy- choanalysts who do not share this faith and who believe that the types of problem with which we deal lie far outside the scope of science. This is a view I respect, though I do not share: nor, of course, did Freud. Yet even those of us who are most enthusiastic about applying scientific meth- od in our field must recognize that there may well be problems that it can never solve. We simply do not know. Our task, as I see it, is to apply our method as skilfully as we can, on the one hand believing that the area of reliable knowledge will
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? ? ? thereby be expanded and, on the other, accepting that there are likely always to remain still greater areas lying beyond the scope of any existing mode of scientific enquiry.
To many of you, I am afraid, engaged in thera- peutic practice but also hoping to contribute to the advance of psychoanalytic science, the con- trasts I am drawing between the roles of practi- tioner and scientist will hardly be welcome. Yet I believe that it is only by recognizing these differ- ences and acting accordingly that the strengths of each role can be used to fullest advantage--or that any one person can occupy both of them with any hope of success. As practitioners we deal in complexity; as scientists we strive to simplify. As practitioners we use theory as a guide; as sci- entists we challenge that same theory. As practi- tioners we accept restricted modes of enquiry; as scientists we enlist every method we can.
Earlier I remarked on the need for every devel- oping science to devise new methods for obtain- ing data. The reason for this is that, however pro- ductive any one method may be, it is bound to have its limitations, whilst there is always a pro- spect that some other method may compensate for them. Thus the new method may be in no way
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? ? ? superior to the old; indeed it may have great lim- itations. Its usefulness lies simply in the fact that its strengths and its limitations are different. Per- haps I can illustrate the point by reference to my own work.
When I qualified in psychoanalysis in 1937, members of the British Society were occupied in exploring the fantasy worlds of adults and chil- dren, and it was regarded as almost outside the proper interest of an analyst to give systematic attention to a person's real experiences. That was a time when Freud's famous about-turn of 1897 regarding the aetiology of hysteria1 had led to the view that anyone who places emphasis on what a child's real experiences may have been, and per- haps still are being, was regarded as pitifully nai? ve. Almost by definition it was assumed that anyone interested in the external world could not be interested in the internal world, indeed was al- most certainly running away from it.
To me as a biologist this contrast of internal with external, of organism with environment, never appealed. Furthermore, as a psychiatrist engaged in work with children and families and deeply influenced by the insights of two analytic- ally oriented social workers, I was daily
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? ? ? confronted with the impact on children of the emotional problems from which their parents suffered. Here are two examples I still recall vividly. In one a father was deeply concerned about his 8-year-old son's masturbation and in reply to my enquiries explained how, whenever he caught him with his hand on his genitals, he put him under a cold tap. This led me to ask fath- er whether he himself had ever had any worry about masturbation, and he launched into a long and pathetic tale of how he had battled with the problem all his life. In another case a mother's punitive treatment of her 3-year-old's jealousy of the new baby was as quickly traced to the prob- lem she had always had with her own jealousy of a younger brother.
Observations of these kinds led me to conclude that it is just as necessary for analysts to study the way a child is really treated by his parents as it is to study the internal representations he has of them, indeed that the principal focus of our studies should be the interaction of the one with the other, of the internal with the external. Be- lieving that that would be possible only if we had far more systematic knowledge about the effects on a child of the experiences he has during his
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? ? ? early years within his family, I concentrated my attention on this area. The reasons that I selected as my special field of study the removal of a young child from his home to a residential nurs- ery or hospital rather than the broader field of parent-child interaction were several. First it was an event that I believed could have serious ill ef- fects on a child's personality development. Se- condly there could be no debate whether it had occurred or not, in this regard contrasting strongly with the difficulty of obtaining valid in- formation about how a parent treats a child. Thirdly it appeared to be a field in which prevent- ive measures might be possible. And perhaps I should add, fourthly, that I was stimulated by the sheer incredulity with which my views were met by some, though by no means all, of my col- leagues when I first advanced them just before the war.
The results of our ensuing studies, undertaken by two researchers both of whom subsequently qualified as analysts, James Robertson and Christoph Heinicke, are now well-known; and I believe them to have had a significant effect on psychoanalytic thinking. The points I wish to make now, however, concern research strategy.
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? ? ? Despite the pioneer work of such distinguished analysts as Anna Freud, Rene? Spitz, Ernst Kris, Margaret Mahler, and others, for long there has been a tendency in analytic circles to regard the direct observation of young children and the re- cording of what they say as no more than an aux- iliary method of research, the results of which are of interest when they confirm conclusions already reached by the traditional method of treating pa- tients but which are unable to contribute any- thing original. The notion that the direct observa- tion of children--in and out of the family set- ting--is not only a valuable method for advancing psychoanalytic science but is indispensable to it has been slow to be accepted.
The principal contributions of these direct studies, I believe, are to cast light on how chil- dren develop emotionally and socially, on what the ranges of variation are in respect to a very large number of relevant parameters, and what types of family experience tend to influence chil- dren to develop in one way rather than another. Let me give some examples of findings by col- leagues working in our sister sciences of ethology and developmental psychology that I believe to be highly germane to our clinical understanding.
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? ? ? The first example is from the work of Mary Sal- ter Ainsworth (1977), formerly at Johns Hopkins University and now at the University of Virginia. Trained initially as a clinical psychologist, Mary Ainsworth worked with us at the Tavistock dur- ing the early 50s and then spent a couple of years studying mothers and infants in Uganda. Her definitive study has concerned the development of mother-infant interaction during the first year of life in white middle-class homes in Baltimore, Maryland. She has had a personal analysis and is keenly alive to the types of problem analysts re- gard as important.
During her study of mothers and infants in Uganda Ainsworth was struck how infants, once mobile, commonly use mother as a base from which to explore. When conditions are favourable an infant moves away from mother on explorat- ory excursions and returns to her again from time to time. By eight months of age almost every in- fant observed who had had a stable mother-figure to whom to become attached showed this beha- viour; but, should mother be absent, such organ- ized excursions became much less evident or ceased. As a result of these and similar findings, both for human and for monkey infants, the
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? ? ? notion has been developed that an ordinary de- voted mother provides a child with a secure base from which he can explore and to which he can return when upset or frightened. Similar observa- tions, of course, have been made by Margaret Mahler (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975), though she interprets them in terms of a theoret- ical framework different to the one which Ainsworth and I use. This concept of the secure personal base, from which a child, an adolescent, or an adult goes out to explore and to which he returns from time to time, is one I have come to regard as crucial for an understanding of how an emotionally stable person develops and functions all through his life.
In her project in Baltimore, Ainsworth was not only able to study this kind of behaviour more closely but described many individual variations of it to be seen in a sample of 23 infants at 12 months of age. Observations were made of the in- fants' exploratory and attachment behaviour, and the balance between them, both when the infants were at home with mother and also when they were placed in a slightly strange test situation. In addition, having obtained data on the type of mothering each infant had been receiving
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? ? ? throughout his first year of life (by means of pro- longed observation sessions at three weekly inter- vals in the child's home), Ainsworth was in a pos- ition to propose hypotheses linking certain types of emotional and behavioural development at 12 months with certain types of preceding mother- ing experience.
The findings of the study (see the review by Ainsworth, 1977) show that the way a particular infant of 12 months behaves with and without his mother at home and the way he behaves with and without her in a slightly strange test situation have much in common. Drawing on observations of behaviour in both types of situation it is then possible to classify the infants into three main groups, according to two criteria: (a) how much or how little they explore when with mother or without her, and (b) how they treat moth- er--when she is present, when she departs, and, especially, when she returns.
There were eight children whose overall beha- viour at their first birthday Ainsworth was dis- posed to regard as promising well for the future. Such infants explored actively, especially in mother's presence, and used mother as a base by keeping note of her whereabouts, exchanging
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? ? ? glances, and from time to time returning to her to share in enjoyable mutual contact. When mother had been absent for a short time she was greeted warmly on her return. I will call these group X.
There were no less than eleven children whose overall behaviour gave cause for concern and whom I will call group Z. Three of them were passive, both at home and in the test situation; they explored little and, instead, sucked a thumb or rocked. Constantly anxious about mother's whereabouts, they cried much in her absence but were contrary and difficult on her return. The other eight in this group alternated between ap- pearing very independent and ignoring mother altogether, and then suddenly becoming anxious and trying to find her. Yet, when they did find her, they seemed not to enjoy contact with her, and often they struggled to get away again. In fact, they presented a classical picture of ambivalence.
The remaining four of the 23 children studied were judged to occupy a position intermediate between those given a good prognosis on their first birthday and those given a guarded one. I will call them group Y.
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? ? ? Since every three weeks throughout these in- fants' short lives the researchers had spent a three-hour session in the child's home observing and recording mother and infant behaviour, they had much first-hand data from which to rate a mother's behaviour towards her child. In making these ratings Ainsworth used four distinct nine- point rating scales; but, since ratings on these scales intercorrelate highly, for present purposes one scale is sufficient--a scale that measures the degree of sensitivity or insensitivity that a mother shows to her baby's signals and communications. Whereas a sensitive mother seems constantly to be 'tuned in' to receive her baby's signals, is likely to interpret them correctly, and to respond to them both promptly and appropriately, an in- sensitive mother will often not notice her baby's signals, will misinterpret them when she does no- tice them, and will then respond tardily, inappro- priately, or not at all. When the ratings on this scale for the mothers of infants in each of the three groups are examined, it is found that the mothers of the eight infants in group X are rated uniformly high (range 5. 5 to 9. 0), those of the el- even infants in group Z are rated uniformly low (range 1. 0 to 3. 5), and those of the four in group
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? ? ? Y are in the middle (range 4. 5 to 5. 5). Differences are statistically significant.
Plainly a great deal of further work is necessary before it is possible to draw conclusions with any high degree of confidence. Nevertheless, the overall patterns of personality development and of mother-child interaction visible at 12 months are sufficiently similar to what is seen of person- ality development and of parent-child interaction in later years for it to be plausible to believe that the one is the forerunner of the other. At the least, Ainsworth's findings show that an infant, whose mother is sensitive, accessible, and re- sponsive to him, who accepts his behaviour and is co-operative in dealing with him, is far from be- ing the demanding and unhappy child that some theories might suggest. Instead, mothering of this sort is evidently compatible with a child who is developing a limited measure of self-reliance by the time of his first birthday combined with a high degree of trust in his mother and enjoyment of her company.
Conversely mothers who are insensitive to their children's signals, perhaps because they are preoccupied and worried about other things, who ignore their children, or interfere with their
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? ? ? activities in an arbitrary way, or simply reject them, are likely to have children who are un- happy or anxious or difficult. Anyone who has worked in a clinic seeing disturbed children or adolescents will hardly be surprised by that.
Although Ainsworth's finding of a correlation between a mother's responsiveness to her infant and the infant's way of behaving towards her at 12 months is highly significant statistically and has been confirmed by subsequent studies, it is always possible to argue that the partner who plays the greater role in determining whether in- teraction develops happily or not is the infant and not the mother. Some infants are born difficult, so the argument runs, and the mothers' adverse reactions to them are only to be expected.
I do not think the evidence supports this view. For example, the observations made during the first three months of these infants' lives showed no correlation between the amount of crying a baby did and the way his mother was treating him; whereas by the end of the first year mothers who had attended promptly to their crying babies had babies who cried much less than did the ba- bies of mothers who had left them to cry.
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? ? ? There are other findings, some of which are re- ferred to in Lecture 6, that also support the view that in all but a small minority of cases it is the mother who is mainly responsible for how inter- action develops.
Drawing on her own home observations, Ainsworth has given a graphic account of what can happen. For example, she describes how she has sat in homes hearing a baby crying and crying and counted the minutes until the mother has re- sponded. In some cases a mother sits it out as long as she can bear to, believing that it would be bad for the baby and make him cry more were she to attend to him--a belief that Ainsworth's findings firmly disprove. In other cases a mother may be too engaged in something else to go. In yet others it appears as though a mother has alto- gether failed to register that her baby is crying--a situation an observer finds extremely painful to sit through. Usually these are women suffering from anxiety and depression and who are really incapable of attending to anything else.
Now it will be evident to everyone that detailed and accurate observations of these kinds, which demonstrate how enormously different the ex- periences of different children can be, are
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? ? ? obtainable only by the methods used by these re- searchers. Had the observers not been present to see and hear what was going on but had relied in- stead on what the mothers told them, the pictures they would have got would in many cases have been entirely false; and all hope of finding signi- ficant correlations between the way a child devel- ops and the way he is treated by his mother and father would have vanished. Yet, as we have seen, when reliable methods of observation are used, even with quite small samples, highly significant correlations are found.
In emphasizing the determining role a mother plays in setting the pattern of interaction with her baby, to which I believe the evidence clearly points, I lay no blame. Looking after a baby, or a toddler, or an older child for that matter, is not only a skilled job but also a very hard and exact- ing one. Even for a woman who has had a happy childhood and who is now enjoying the help and support of her husband, and perhaps also of her own mother, and who has not been filled with mistaken advice about the dangers of spoiling her baby, it is a taxing one. That a woman with none of these advantages gets into an emotional hassle is hardly surprising and certainly not an occasion
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? ? ? for blame. Yet there now seems little doubt that when infants and young children are the subjects of insensitive mothering, mixed perhaps with oc- casions of outright rejection, and later to separa- tions and threats of separation the effects are de- plorable. Such experiences greatly increase a child's fear of losing his mother, increase his de- mands for her presence and also his anger at her absences, and may also lead him to despair of ever having a secure and loving relationship with anyone.
Although ideas of this sort are much more fa- miliar and also more acceptable in analytic circles today than they were a generation ago, thanks to the influence of Balint, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and many others, I am inclined to think that their im- plications, both for theory and for practice, are still a long way from being digested.
Let me illustrate the point by considering the aetiological and therapeutic problems presented by the type of patient who in the United Kingdom is likely to be described as a schizoid personality (Fairbairn, 1940) or as having a false self (Win- nicott, 1960) and in North America as being a borderline personality or suffering from
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? ? ? pathological narcissism (e. g. Kohut, 1971; Kern- berg, 1975).
The picture such a person presents is one of as- sertive independence and emotional self-suffi- ciency. On no account is he going to be beholden to anyone and, in so far as he enters into relation- ships at all, he makes sure he retains control. For much of the time he may appear to manage won- derfully well, but there may be times when he be- comes depressed or develops psychosomatic symptoms, often for no reason he knows of. Only should symptoms or a bout of depression become severe is there any possibility of his seeking treat- ment, and then more likely than not he will prefer drugs to analysts.
When such a person does come for analysis he is careful to keep the analyst at arm's length and to control what happens. What he tells us is lucid, but he avoids any reference to feeling, except per- haps to say how bored he gets. Holidays or other interruptions he welcomes as saving his time. Perhaps he finds the analysis an 'interesting exer- cise'; although he is not convinced it is much use. And in any case he could probably do a better job by analysing himself!
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