No More Learning

Chapter 3
Maternal deprivation
[The] evidence is now such that it leaves no room for doubt . . . that the prolonged deprivation of a young child of maternal care may have grave and far reaching effects on his character and so on the whole of his future life. It is a proposition exactly similar in form to those regarding the evil after-effects of German measles before birth or deprivation of vitamin D in infancy.
(Bowlby 1953)
Statements implying that children who experience institutionalisation and similar forms of privation in early life commonly develop psychopathic or affectionless characters are incorrect.
(Bowlby, Ainsworth, Boston and Rosenbluth 1956)
Psychotherapy can be seen as a branch of social psychiatry, using psychological methods to reverse or mitigate the damaging effects of environmental failure. This immediately raises two questions. First, given that the damage is already done, how can mere talk undo past miseries? Second, given that many people survive unhappy childhoods without developing psychiatric disorder, are therapists justified in attributing present difficulty to previous trauma? The two quotations from Bowlby above illustrate the transition between his career as a clinician and psychoanalyst to that of a researcher and theorist. The therapist, faced with the patient in front of him, naturally attributes his difficulties to the history of environmental failures he recounts. The researcher, with a control group and a sense of a population at risk rather than just one individual, is forced to more cautious conclusions.
The answer to both questions, in brief, lies in the fact that environmental failure is not merely impressed on a passive organism,
38 Origins
but is experienced and given meaning by the afflicted individual. Psychotherapy is concerned with the way that stress is mediated psychologically - with why this person succumbs while others survive - and, by altering psychological responsiveness and the attribution of meanings, to change not the facts of history, but their context and significance. In this chapter I shall approach these issues through a discussion of 'maternal deprivation', and its corollary, 'that maternal care in infancy and early childhood is essential for mental health' (Bowlby 1952). However self-evident it may seem to us now - and this is largely the result of Bowlby's work - the idea of maternal deprivation as a cause of mental illness was in its day a revolutionary concept which became a paradigm (Kuhn 1962), setting the terms of debate and research in social psychiatry for the ensuing forty years.
CHILD CARE AND THE GROWTH OF LOVE
As Rutter (1981) points out, the phrase 'maternal deprivation', the central concept of Bowlby's WHO report Maternal Care and Mental Health, is a misnomer. His report was concerned primarily with privation (the absence of something which is needed), rather than de-privation (the removal of something that was previously there). The distinction is important because, as we shall see, the results of the complete lack of maternal care are almost always damaging to the child and have severe long-term consequences, while deprivation is less easy to define and much less predictable in its impact.
In its popular edition, Maternal Care and Mental Health was retitled Child Care and the Growth of Love - a significant shift, since it suggests a universal message about mothers and children rather than confining itself to questions of mental health. The book is far more than a scientific work (and indeed has been criticised for its handling of the evidence - Andry 1962), and is perhaps best seen as a landmark social document, comparable to the great nineteenth-century reports such as Elizabeth Fry's account of sanitary conditions in prisons, or Mayhew's descriptions of the plight of the London poor.
What marks Child Care and the Growth of Love out in the history of social reform is its emphasis on psychological as opposed to economic, nutritional, medical or housing difficulties as a root cause of social unhappiness:
Maternal deprivation 39
In a society where death rates are low, the rate of employment high, and social welfare schemes adequate, it is emotional instability and the inability of parents to make effective family relationships which are the outstanding cause of children becoming deprived of a normal family life.
(Bowlby 1952)
The evidence
The central thrust of Bowlby's work is the effort to substantiate this claim and to consider its clinical, professional, ethical and political consequences. The evidence upon which the book is based includes Bowlby's own studies of juvenile delinquents, Goldfarb's comparison of institution-raised children in the United States with those who had been placed in foster homes, and the accounts of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham from their residential nursery in Hampstead. All these studies strongly support the view that children deprived of maternal care, especially if raised in institutions from under the age of seven, may be seriously affected in their physical, intellectual, emotional and social development. Institution-raised children grow less well, and are retarded in their acquisition of language, and as they become older show evidence of impaired ability to form stable relationships - often tending to be superficially friendly but promiscuous (either metaphorically or literally) in their relationships. Based on his own finding that only two out of fourteen 'affectionless psychopaths' had not had prolonged periods of separation from their mothers in early childhood Bowlby asserts that 'prolonged separation of a child from his mother (or mother substitute) during the first five years of life stands foremost among the causes of delinquent character development' (Bowlby 1944; Bowlby 1952). It is worth noting that Bowlby was making very sweeping conclusions based on studies which had often only looked at relatively small numbers of cases - in his case fourteen, in Goldfarb's only fifteen, juvenile delinquents. By present-day standards these studies would also not be acceptable in that they often included no control groups, or, if they did, they were not rated blind by the researchers, who had a vested interest in establishing a link between deprivation and depravity. Bowlby was aware of these difficulties and,
40 Origins
anticipating the modern vogue for 'metaanalysis' (based roughly on the Maoist principle that '600 million Chinese people cannot be wrong'), suggested that, by combining many small studies, an overall trend emerges which is likely to have some validity.
Family care versus institutional care
Having established to his satisfaction that children without maternal care are indeed gravely disadvantaged, Bowlby goes on to contrast the quality of life in a family with that in an institution:
All the cuddling and playing, the intimacies of suckling by which a child learns the comfort of his mother's body, the rituals of washing and dressing by which through her pride and tenderness towards his little limbs he learns the values of his own, all these have been lacking.
(Bowlby 1952)
The tinge of sentimentality in this lyrical account has, as we shall see, been much criticised by feminist writers, as has his hymn of praise to what Winnicott was later to call the 'ordinary devoted mother':
The provision of constant attention night and day, seven days a week, 365 days in the year, is possible only for a woman who derives profound satisfaction from seeing her child grow from babyhood, through the many phases of childhood, to become an independent man or woman, and knows that it is her care which has made this possible.
(Bowlby 1952)
These much-quoted and sometimes derided overstatements have to be seen in context. The world was horrified in the 1990s by the revelation of the squalor and emotional deprivation in the orphanages of Romania. This was not just the result of a dictatorship but of an ideological devaluation of family life, and a belief in the power of public provision to overcome individual poverty. Bowlby was reacting against a similar trend to be seen throughout Europe and the United States in the post-war era, and indeed to a long tradition among the British middle classes, of which he had first-hand experience, of turning their sons and
Maternal deprivation 41
many of their daughters over first to nannies and then to institutional care in boarding schools from the age of seven! To the extent that Bowlby idealises motherhood - as opposed to offering a realistic appraisal of its central importance in child- rearing - this must be seen at least in part as a reflection of the deprivations which he and other members of his class had experienced in the nursery and at school. The long hand of the otherwise invisible nanny reached far.
The impact of Bowlby's advocacy has been enormous, and continues to the present day. It is now taken for granted, and enshrined in the 1989 Children Act, that individual care in foster homes is preferable to group care in nurseries, that 'bad homes are better than good institutions' (Bowlby 1952). The battle to replace institutional care for the mentally ill and mentally handicapped with care within the family, or at least provision of a family-type home atmosphere, is still being waged.
The need for professionalisation of child care
Critics have accused Bowlby of wanting to 'pin women down in their own homes' (Mead 1962). While it is true that he criticises cavalier attitudes towards elective separations of mothers from children under the age of three, he could rather be seen as arguing for a much greater valuation by society of motherhood - indeed, as being recruited in support of the feminist demand for state provision of 'wages for housework'. Whatever his views on housewives, he puts a strong case for the professionalisation for all child-care workers, including workers in day nurseries and children's homes, foster mothers and (we would now add, since this argument has also not been fully won) child minders. These workers must be skilled in understanding a deprived child's overwhelming needs: the craving for parental love; the need to idolise parents however flawed they are in reality; the importance of maintaining contact with absent parents, however fragmentary; the right to express pain, protest about separation, and to grieve loss. They must also be able to help parents in turn to recognise their children's and their own ambivalent feelings. He is intensely critical of case workers who 'live in the sentimental glamour of saving neglected children from wicked parents' (Bowlby 1952) (a comment still relevant today to the dilemmas presented by working with sexually abused children), and of actions which
42 Origins
'convert a physically neglected but psychologically well-provided child into a physically well-provided but emotionally starved one' (Bowlby 1952). All these principles are now enshrined at least in the theory of child-care practice, and for this too Bowlby is largely responsible.
Government action
Much of the debate about the de-institutionalisation of the mentally ill has centred on the question of funding. It was thought that community care must be cheaper than institutional care, and partly for this reason it received governmental support. Bowlby puts forward similar economic arguments in favour of family support for troubled children:
There are today governments prepared to spend up to ? 10 per week [this was 1952! ] on the residential care of infants who would tremble to give half this sum to a widow, an unmarried mother, or a grandmother to help her care for her baby at home. . . . Nothing is more characteristic of both the public and voluntary attitude towards the problem than a willingness to spend large sums of money looking after children away from their homes, combined with a haggling stinginess in giving aid to the home itself.
(Bowlby 1952)
Although, thanks to Bowlby and others, much has changed, much remains the same. For some things may be worse than in 1952: the haggling stinginess has returned, but is now accompanied by an unwillingness to spend large sums on public provision. The 1989 Children Act creates a partnership between parents and the local authorities to provide for 'children in need', a` la Bowlby, with cash payments if necessary, but no extra funding has been made available for this.
Vicious and benign circles
A major idea which emerges in Child Care and the Growth of Love is that of cycles of deprivation: 'the neglected psychopathic child growing up to become the neglectful psychopathic parent . . . a self-perpetuating social circle' (Bowlby 1952). Today's emotionally deprived child becomes tomorrow's neglectful parent: adverse experiences become internalised by the growing child in a way that leads on to further adverse experiences,
Maternal deprivation 43
thus perpetuating the vicious circle of neurosis. Writing in an era of social optimism, and with what, sadly, in hindsight must be seen as some nai? vety, Bowlby argued that, with concentrated social, economic and psychological effort, society could put these vicious circles into reverse, so that 'it may, in two or three generations, be possible to enable all boys and girls to grow up to become men and women who, given health and security, are capable of providing a stable and happy life for their children' (Bowlby 1952).
Psychoanalytical principles
One of the impressive features of Child Care and the Growth of Love is the way it presents psychoanalytical principles in an accessible and simple form. It is infused with the belief that it is always better to speak the truth, however painful, than to suppress it, and that to try to wipe the slate of the past clean is misguided and in any case impossible. Bowlby believed that children should be involved in any decisions about their welfare, and their own views and wishes taken into account - a principle which has only reached the statute book half a century later in the Children Act of 1989. He thought that children should be encouraged to express their ambivalent feelings about their parents. Children often believe themselves responsible for the calamities which befall them and their families, and child-care workers need to be aware of this and help put these feelings into perspective. For a child away from home 'the lack of a sense of time means that separation feels like an eternity', and this too needs to be understood. In a remarkable quotation from his psychoanalytic colleague Winnicott, a case is made that every child has a right to a primary home experience:
without which the foundations of mental health cannot be laid down. Without someone specifically oriented to his needs the infant cannot find a working relation to external reality. Without someone to give satisfactory instinctual gratifications the infant cannot find his body, nor can he develop an integrated personality. Without one person to love and to hate he cannot come to know that it is the same person that he loves and hates, and so cannot find his sense of guilt, and his desire to repair and restore. Without a limited human and physical environment he cannot find out the extent to which his aggressive ideas actually fail to destroy, and so cannot sort out the difference between fantasy and fact. Without a father and
44 Origins
a mother who are together, and who take joint responsibility for him, he cannot find and express his urge to separate them, nor experience relief at failing to do so.
(Winnicott and Britton in Bowlby 1952)
These principles are as relevant today as they were when they were written. The tragedy of contemporary 'community care' is that, while the need to avoid the negative aspect of institutions has been grasped, the primary home experience as described by Winnicott remains elusive.
Bowlby's outrage
Perhaps the greatest single thread in Bowlby's work, one which comes through strongly in Child Care and the Growth of Love, is his pain and outrage at the unnecessary separation of children from their parents. He could take heart at the changes in pediatric and obstetric practice it has led to. The book ends with this passionate outcry at a 'developed' society which has forgotten the fundamental importance of human attachment:
Finally let the reader reflect for a moment on the astonishing practice which has been followed in obstetric wards - of separating mothers and babies immediately after birth - and ask himself whether this is the way to promote a close mother- child relationship. It is hoped that this madness of western society will never be copied by so-called less developed societies.
(Bowlby 1952)
Sadly, there is increasing evidence that Bowlby's fears are being realised.
Bowlby's work has excited considerable reaction, ranging from uncritical acceptance to outraged dismissal. His critics can be divided into two groups. First, there are those who question the social and political implications of his work, mainly from a feminist perspective. A rather different group of researchers have examined the factual basis of the concept of maternal deprivation. These workers, who include Bowlby himself, have modified and refined our understanding of the short- and long-term implications of maternal separation and mishandling for the developing child.
Maternal deprivation 45
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE
Feminists have aimed three broad kinds of criticism at the idea of maternal deprivation. The first, and most simple, merely accuses Bowlby of overstating his case. The studies upon which he bases his conclusions were of children who had experienced almost complete lack of maternal care. To generalise from these to the view that any separation of mother from child in the first three years of life is likely to be damaging is unwarranted (Oakley 1981). There is abundant evidence, they claim (and, as we shall see later, the facts support this view), that when a mother entrusts her child for part of the day to the care of a trusted and known person - whether a grandmother, a metapalet in a kibbutz, or a responsible baby minder - no harm is done. They argue, on the contrary, that exclusive care by the mother alone can lead to less rather than greater security for the child, and that Bowlby was wrong in his concept of 'monotropism' (that is, exclusive attachment of the child to one preferred figure). The reality is that the child has a hierarchy of attachment figures, of whom the mother is usually the most important, but that fathers, grandparents, siblings and other relations and friends also play a part, and that in the absence of one, the child will turn to another in a way that does not equate with the emotional promiscuity of the institution-raised child. They also point to the emotional burden on the mother alone with her child, who, despite (or because of) 24-hour proximity to her child may be emotionally neglectful even if she is physically attentive (Chodorow 1978). The dangers which Bowlby repeatedly identifies in his later work - role reversal between mother and child, threats of suicide, or saying the child will be sent away - can all be seen in part as consequences of this burden and the exclusivity which he advocates for the mother-child bond.
The second plank upon which the feminist critique rests is more complex, and consists of an attempt to locate Bowlby's ideas in an historical, anthropological and sociological context. It starts from the historical context of post-war Europe where, as New and David (1985) put it, Bowlby
got an audience: women who had been working in munitions factories, obliged to send their children for nine or ten hours daily into indifferent nurseries, men who for years had been equating peace with the haven of the
46 Origins
family, governments which saw the social and financial potential of idealizing motherhood and family life.
The collective sense of loss, and guilt, and desire for reparation found an answer in the idea of maternal deprivation. Children had suffered terribly as a result of the war, and this needed to be faced, as had the 'internal children' of the adults who had witnessed the horrors of war. The valuation and at times sentimentalising of the mother-child relationship in post-war Europe could be compared with a similar process in the nineteenth century in the face of the brutality of the Industrial Revolution. Bowlby's tenderness towards little children carries echoes of Blake and Wordsworth, Dickens and Kingsley. There had to be a safe place which could be protected from the violence of the modern world, and the Christian imagery of mother and child reappears, in his work, as an icon for a secular society.
A slightly different slant was offered in the suggestion that governments welcomed the idea of maternal deprivation in that it appeared to let them off the hook of providing child care, pushing it back to individual and family responsibility. Winnicott wrote to Bowlby warning him that his views were being used to close down much-needed residential nurseries (Rodman 1987). Bowlby had not, of course, argued that money should be withdrawn, but rather transferred from institutional care to home care, but, as in the more recent case of the mentally ill and handicapped, governments were less keen on this part of the argument.
The heart of the feminist case against Bowlby is that, like Freud, he had wrongly assumed that anatomy is destiny. Implicit, they argue, in the concept of maternal deprivation is a view of the biological 'naturalness' of an exclusive mother-child relationship which, as Margaret Mead (1962) puts it, is a 'reification into a set of universals of a set of ethnocentric observations on our own society'. Anthropology shows that what is normal is for child care to be shared by a stable group of adults and older children, usually, but not always, related, and usually, but by no means always, female. Maternal care is an important but certainly not exclusive part of this. For infants to survive in non-industrial countries such shared care is essential. As an Object-Relations theorist Bowlby rejects Freudian drive theory, but, once attachment theory was developed, offered an evolutionary-
Maternal deprivation 47
ethological account of the mother-child bond. Feminists object that he is using biology to justify what is essentially a cultural product of our own 'patriarchal but father-absent' society (Leupnitz 1988), with its nuclear families, small numbers of children, weakened kinship networks, mobile population, and fathers who are away from home for long periods, or absent altogether.
A more tenuous sociological argument (Mitscherlich 1963; Parsons 1964) suggests that the family structure which Bowlby implicitly advocates, with strong, closely bonded mothers and children, and peripheral fathers, fits the needs of modern capitalist society. Paternal authority has been replaced by that of the headmaster or boss in school, office and factory, producing a docile workforce, while the mother controls her children by bribes and threats, thus preparing them for the social manipulations of advertising and manufactured need which an ever-expanding consumerist economy requires. This pattern is offered as the norm for 'adequate' family functioning, as it is in the functionalist account offered by such influential writers as Parsons (1964). Leupnitz, from a feminist family therapy perspective, sees this as enshrining a state of affairs that suits men, but leaves wives who are obese, sexually dissatisfied, psychosomatically ill, and prone to depression (Leupnitz 1988).
Child Care and the Growth of Love was written about children who had lost their mothers, usually for good, and described the psychological consequences of that privation. Until recently, Europe had enjoyed an unprecedented period of peace and stability (warfare, starvation, genocide and mass migration have continued apace, exported to the developing world). The problems facing the modern family are not so much maternal deprivation as of paternal deprivation due to weak, absent or abusive fathers, and 'implosion' of the children onto unsupported mothers. Chodorow (1978) and other feminist psychotherapists have written about the psychological consequences of these changes. In summary, they lead to identity difficulties for both men and women. Lacking a strong father with whom to identify, boys differentiate themselves from their mothers and sisters by a disparagement of women, which conceals a dread of their phantasised omnipotence. It is this, according to Horney (1924), not Freud's castration anxiety, which underlies male fear of women and their difficulties in intimacy. The elusive search for 'success' is an attempt to please
48 Origins
and appease the all-powerful mother. Girls, on the other hand, remain tied into their mothers, often taking on their pain and depression, and feeling intense guilt if they try to assert their independence and autonomy. The absent or seductive father makes a move towards him difficult or dangerous. Motherhood provides a temporary relief, but the girl again may feel caught in a mother- child dyad from which she still cannot escape, while the boy, now a father, feels excluded and jealous. As we shall see in later chapters, the Bowlbian concepts of avoidant and ambivalent attachment capture roughly these male and female patterns of anxious attachment in the modern family.
In summary, the feminist critique has questioned the logic of the implicit Bowlbian argument (one which in its simplistic form Bowlby would have been the first to repudiate) that since absent mothers lead to disturbed children, ever-present mothers will produce happy children. The feminists - in so far as it is possible to group them together - in turn have tended to overstate their case and failed to appreciate the importance which Bowlby has established for the role of the mother in her child's emotional development, both as a scientific fact and as a social and ethical principle. Bowlby's advocacy of the vital importance of mothers in the care of children, and the implications of his studies that good day-care facilities should be available for mothers who want or are forced by economic necessity to work, funded so that children can have individual and continuous relationships with care workers, should be seen as a step towards the liberation of women, increasing their range of choices and valuation by society.
Although still in print, it is now nearly fifty years since Child Care and the Growth of Love was first published. The terms of the debate have changed, so that, with less physical absence, but with ever-increasing difficulties in managing their lives, mothers are subject to enormous social pressures and their children are often the first casualties of this. For a more detailed examination of maternal deprivation from a contemporary perspective, and to a discussion of how children may be helped to escape or may remain ever more deeply trapped in deprivation we must turn now to the work of Michael Rutter.
Maternal deprivation 49
MATERNAL DEPRIVATION REASSESSED
Rutter's monograph (Rutter 1981) and numerous papers (for example, Rutter 1972; Rutter 1979) comprise the definitive empirical evaluation and update of Bowlby's work on maternal deprivation. His contribution has been to amass further evidence, and, based on this, to begin to tease out the many different social and psychological mechanisms which operate under the rubric of maternal deprivation.
Bowlby, it will be recalled, claimed that maternal deprivation produced physical, intellectual, behavioural and emotional damage. He further argued that even brief separations from the mother in the first five years of life had long-lasting effects, and in general that these problems perpetuated themselves in a cycle of disadvantage as such children themselves became parents. Rutter has examined each of these points in turn.
On the question of intellectual and physical disadvantage, and the effects of brief separation, it seems that Bowlby was only partially right, and often for the wrong reasons. While it is true that institution-raised children are intellectually disadvantaged, this is mainly in verbal as opposed to performance intelligence, and this is a consequence of the child's 'verbal environment', not the lack of parents per se. Children brought up in large families are similarly disadvantaged. It is lack of verbal stimulation that is the problem for the deprived children, not lack of mother. A similar picture emerges with 'deprivation dwarfism', which has been shown to be due, as might be expected, to lack of food intake rather than some mysterious emotional factor, and can be rapidly reversed by attentive feeding, whether by a nurse or mother.
Acute separation distress is also probably less damaging, and more complex than Bowlby first saw it. Preparation and care by known figures reduces distress, and even without these there is no evidence of long-term effects from a single brief separation however painful it may be at the time. An important point comes from Hinde's rhesus monkey studies (Hinde and McGinnis 1977), which show that the effects of separation depend on the mother- child relationship before the event: the more tense the relationship, the more damaging the separation. These kinds of findings indicate a move towards a more subtle appreciation of the nature of bonds, and away from simplistic event-pathology models. What matters is not so much the
50 Origins
separation itself but its meaning and the context in which it happens.
A similar conclusion applies to the relationship between antisocial behaviour and maternal deprivation. First, as Rutter (1979) puts it, 'the links are much stronger looking back than they are looking forward'. In 'Forty-four juvenile thieves', Bowlby found that a quarter of the thieves had had major separations from their parents in infancy, and in the sub-group of 'affectionless psychopaths' only two out of fourteen had not experienced maternal deprivation. In his later follow-up study of children who had been in a tuberculosis sanatorium he found that, compared with controls, the differences in social adjustment, while in the direction of less good adjustment for the sanitorium children, were not all that marked, and that at least half of the deprived children had made good social relationships (Bowlby et al. 1956). Second, the implication of the phrase 'maternal deprivation' is that antisocial behaviour is specifically linked to the loss of mother. Rutter's work (1971) suggests that antisocial behaviour is linked not to maternal absence as such, but to family discord which in divorcing families is often associated with temporary separations from mother. Children who have lost their mothers through death have a near-normal delinquency rate, while the rate is much raised when parents divorce, especially where there is a combination of active discord and lack of affection. Here too, presumably, it is the way in which the loss is handled, its antecedents (how secure the child has been with the separating parents), and meaning for the child that matter.
The importance of these refinements of the maternal deprivation hypothesis is that they mark a move away from Bowlby's medical analogy, exemplified by the Vitamin D-rickets comparison, to a psychological model which takes account of an individual's history, and of the way untoward events are 'processed' psychologically. It seems more plausible that maternal deprivation should act as a general 'vulnerability factor' (cf. Brown and Harris 1978) which raises a child's threshold to disturbance rather than as a causative agent in any simple sense. Delinquency is such a complex phenomenon, dependent on non-psychological issues such as policing policy, quality of schools and housing that it would be unlikely to be the result of any one single factor, however important childhood deprivation may be.
Maternal deprivation 51
For children unfortunate enough to be entirely deprived of maternal care, recent research has served to confirm Bowlby's original claims. Tizard's (1977) follow-up studies on institution- raised children have shown that, as the maternal deprivation hypothesis predicted, these eight-year-olds were more attention- seeking, restless, disobedient and unpopular compared with controls, while as infants they had shown excessive clinging and diffuse attachment behaviour. Her studies also indicate that, as Bowlby suggested, the period six months to four years may be critical for the capacity to form stable relationships, since children who had been adopted after four, despite forming close and loving bonds with their adoptive parents, remained antisocial in their behaviour at school.
DEVELOPMENTAL PATHWAYS THROUGH CHILDHOOD
Subsequent studies have also generally confirmed Bowlby's concept of cycles of disadvantage. People brought up in unhappy or disrupted homes are more likely to have illegitimate children, become teenage mothers, make unhappy marriages and to divorce. Parents who physically abuse their children tend to have had childhoods characterised by neglect, rejection and violence. Girls from disrupted homes when they become mothers tend to talk less to their babies, touch them less and look at them less (Wolkind et al. 1977). But not all children from unhappy homes suffer and fail in this way. A complex model is needed to explain individual differences that takes into account the child, the parent, events and their appraisal, and the social environment. This can be conceptualised as a series of pathways through childhood that lead in a more or less positive direction. A number of varied influences will determine which path a particular child takes (Rutter 1981). Figure 3. 1 attempts to summarise these.
As will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6, there is good evidence that parents' own childhood experiences are important in influencing the way they respond to their child. Events around the birth are also important: mothers separated from their babies soon after birth are less confident and competent as mothers in the subsequent months. The sex and birth position of the child matter: parents are more relaxed and less punitive with second children than with first-borns. Male children are generally more vulnerable to family discord than are females. The death of a
Figure 3. 1 Developmental pathways from maternal deprivation
Maternal deprivation 53
parent is more damaging for a same-sex child than if they are the opposite sex. Temperament plays an important part too: children who are less adaptable and more prone to negative moods are more likely to be targets of parental criticism than their more easy-going siblings, and are more likely to develop a childhood psychiatric disorder. Even in discordant homes, if the child has a good relationship with one parent or with a grandparent, this acts as a protective factor against conduct disorder. Finally, the social environment is important. Inner-city areas have much higher rates of childhood psychiatric disorder than country or small- town areas, and even within inner cities some schools are much more successful in helping their pupils to avoid delinquency than others.
IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOTHERAPY
Key issues for adult psychotherapists are the need to clarify more precisely the links between early childhood difficulty and emotional disorder in later life (Rutter 1986); the question of how some people survive and are even strengthened ('steeled') by adversity, while others go under (Rutter 1985); and the need for a model that will suggest at what points in the process psychotherapeutic intervention is likely to produce change (Holmes 1991).
Social psychiatry tends to emphasise present adversity in the causation of neurosis, while psychoanalytic explanations stress the past. The evidence suggests that both current and past difficulties are important, and that self-esteem is a crucial factor linking the two. Looking at adverse experiences in childhood, those who, despite loss or difficulty, manage to maintain a sense of self-esteem do well. Self-esteem in turn rests on two main foundations: self-efficacy and good relationships. Success at school - in social relationships (especially the capacity to generate humour), athletic prowess, musical ability or scholastic achievement - is correlated with better adjustment in institution- raised children in adult life (Rutter and Quinton 1984). There are likely to be a series of interlocking benign or vicious circles here. Good self-esteem means a child will be likely to cope with deprivation - chronic illness in a parent, for example - and the fact of coping will in itself enhance self-esteem, and give the individual a feeling that they will be able to cope in the future.
54 Origins
This in turn will influence their choice of partner and the kind of relationship they have with them. Conversely, as Beck et al. (1979) and Ryle (1990) argue, depressed people will expect themselves to cope badly, will perceive themselves as doing so, may do so in fact, all of which will be experienced as depression-reinforcing 'failure'.
Apart from coping and competence, the second important childhood component of self-esteem derives from good relationships. Psychotherapists have long suggested that a history of at least one good relationship in the past predicts good outcome in therapy (Malan 1976), and this too is confirmed by empirical studies. An important point about both self-efficacy and good relationships is that they can generalise, so that one positive feature will lead to good self-esteem, despite an otherwise gloomy picture. The opposite is the case in depression (Brown and Harris 1978), where adverse experiences are generalised into a global feeling of hopelessness.
Bion mocked the early psychoanalytic fellow travellers like Suttie for their simplistic overemphasis on past trauma: 'doctor put it in the past' (Pines 1991). Equal in importance to past influences in the adult outcome of maternal deprivation is, as several studies have shown, the quality of a person's current intimate relationships. Vulnerable women who experience loss are protected from depression by the presence of a confiding relationship with a spouse or partner (Brown and Harris 1978). Parker and Hadzi-Pavlovic (1984) found that people whose parents die in childhood are less prone to depression in adult life if they have an affectionate spouse. Rutter and Quinton (1984) report similar findings for institution-raised women, who in general have more psychosocial difficulties than controls, and were much more likely to react badly to stress, unless they had a supportive husband in a harmonious marriage. This suggests another important vicious circle, since maternally deprived girls are more likely to marry unstable and similarly deprived men: childhood difficulty leads to low self-esteem, which makes for poor choice of sexual partner, which in turn leaves women unprotected from stress in adult life. As Bowlby (1952) puts it, there are 'strong unconscious drives which lead husbands and wives to create the very problems of which they complain', and so produce 'the distorted light in which they see the behaviour of their spouse'.
Maternal deprivation 55
There are important implications of these findings for psychotherapy. There is an implicit contradiction in the psychoanalytic emphasis on the overwhelming importance of early experience - and even more so phantasies in early childhood - in determining adult difficulty and the claims for the efficacy of psychoanalytic therapy. If continuity between childhood and adult life is so strong, how is psychoanalysis likely to reverse it? The recent evidence suggests a much more subtle relationship between past and present, in which a person's partner plays a crucial role in determining outcome. Caspi and Elder (1988) found that 'difficult' children were more likely to demonstrate ill-tempered parenting and poor social control in adult life, but this only emerged if they were married to non-assertive men. Difficult behaviour in childhood made it more likely that these women would marry non-assertive men, but when they did not, then poor parenting was avoided. As we shall see in Chapter 8, therapy, through empathy and limit-setting, may play a similar role to marriage in helping to modify maladaptive behaviours. This may be particularly applicable to those whose early experiences have made it hard for them, despite a longing for intimacy, to sustain close relationships at all (Parker et al. 1992).
Apart from very severe cases, there is no simple one-to-one correlation between childhood mental states and adult difficulty. There are a number of environmental, and to some extent accidental, mediating factors which determine whether outcomes are favourable or not: the area a person grows up in, the school they go to, whether or not they happen to meet the right person at the right time. Nor is there a simple relationship between environmental stress and disturbance; the meaning and context of a particular event is critical. A teenager who storms out of the house after a row about what time he should come home, followed by the threat of 'You'll be the death of me', and who returns to find that his father has died suddenly is going to be more vulnerable to difficult relationships (perhaps characterised by avoidance and inhibition of anger and therefore poor conflict resolution), than one whose parent dies peacefully over several months with good opportunities for grieving. Also, it is important to see the 'victim' of deprivation not as a passive recipient of stress, but as an active agent, in a dynamic relationship with his environment, trying to make sense of experience, to master it and to cope as best he can, but also, via the benign and vicious circles of neurosis, as an active participant in his own downfall or deliverance.
56 Origins
CONCLUSIONS
Maternal deprivation emerges from this account not as the cause of neurosis, but as one, albeit vital, vulnerability factor among many in a complex web of developmental influences. Because nothing succeeds like success, and nothing fails like failure, these influences may summate in retrospect to give the impression of a simple choice between primrose or thorny paths, but there are in fact many roads less travelled (Frost 1954) and it is the psychotherapists' task to explore these. The circularity of neurotic patterns both in the present and over time is a central unifying concept, and suggests how and why many different kinds of intervention may be effective. Analytic therapy may be an example of how one good relationship can counteract many adverse influences: the nature of that good relationship will be considered further in Chapter 8. Cognitive-behavioural therapy concentrates on increasing a person's sense of self-efficacy, and reducing generalisation of bad feelings so that self-esteem remains intact despite loss. Family and marital therapy tackle relationships directly, thereby enhancing the buffering against stress. All types of time-limited therapy assume that if a person can be helped to re-engage with the benign cycles of normal life (although feminists argue that the definition of what constitutes a 'normal' family needs to be contested), then outcomes will be good, since, in Bowlby's (1952) words, 'there is in almost all families a strong urge to live together in greater accord, and this provides a powerful motive for favourable change'.
We have moved from simple privation to the complexities of relationships, from loss to the nature of the bond that is broken, from a simple model of environmental trauma to a consideration of its psychological impact. The stage is set for Bowlby's move from maternal deprivation to Attachment Theory, and after a short literary diversion, we shall, in the next and following two chapters, follow him there.
OLIVER TWIST: AN INTERLUDE
Dickens' Oliver Twist, with its mixture of realism, caricature, and fairy-tale, can be seen as a classic account of maternal deprivation. Oliver, orphaned at birth, brought up 'by hand' for the first few months of his life, spends his childhood in the 'parochial' orphanage, 'where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-
Maternal deprivation 57
laws rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing'. Protesting against the 'tortures of slow starvation', he 'asks for more', is sent out to work for his pains, and, after running away from further cruelty, falls among thieves and so begins his career as a delinquent, much as Bowlby would have predicted. But here, despite many reversals and cruel twists, his fortunes change. He is rescued first by the kindly Mr Brownlow, and a second time by the loving Rose Maylie. He is recognised as being in some way different from the run of juvenile thieves. In two crucial passages he is watched over by these parental figures in his sleep:
The boy stirred, and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and affection he had never known . . . some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by.
Later, anticipating Winnicott's (1965) concept of 'being alone in the presence of the mother', Oliver once again sleeps after a terrifying escapade of attempted robbery in which he is wounded, watched over by the tender Rose Maylie:
It is an undoubted fact, that although our sense of touch and sight be dead, yet our sleeping thoughts, and visionary scenes that pass before us, will be influenced . . . by the mere silent presence of some external object. [Italics in the original]
The book ends, of course, happily, with Oliver's affluent parentage established, evil (in the shape of Monks, Sykes and the Bumbles) vanquished, and with the beginning of secure attachment:
Mr Brownlow . . . from day to day filling the mind of his adopted child with stores of knowledge, and becoming attached to him, more and more, as his nature developed itself. . . . [My italics]
The universality of Dickens' message means that each generation can bring to the story its own themes and preoccupations. For the Victorians it was a social tract documenting the iniquities of the poor laws, and a contrast between the cruelties of the bad father and the benign love of Mr Brownlow. But this is no sentimental Victorian morality tale. The powers of good and evil
58 Origins
are evenly balanced. Mr Brownlow's benign Bowlbian view of the perfectibility of human nature is contrasted with the cynical realism of his friend Mr Grimwig, who, at least in the short run, wins his wager that Oliver will take Mr Brownlow's money and run.
A Kleinian reading might see in its exaggerations and description of unbearable hunger an account of the 'bad breast' and the projection into it of the child's hatred and rage. As Oliver's bad feelings are balanced by good 'therapeutic' experience, so he becomes strengthened in his resolve to escape from the clutches of Fagin and Sikes, and sees them and the Bumbles no longer as phantasmagoric creatures of enormous power but as the seedy petty criminals which they are.
The Bowlbian perspective on Oliver Twist starts with the mystery of Oliver's parentage. The book opens with the description of a place - the orphanage where Oliver was raised. It ends with a name - Agnes, Oliver's mother, a name on a tomb:
There is no coffin in that tomb. . . . But, if the spirits of the dead ever come back to earth, to visit spots hallowed by the love - the love beyond the grave - of those whom they knew in life, I believe that the shade of Agnes sometimes hovers round that solemn nook.
In finding his story, Oliver has found his lost mother even though he has never met her in reality, and can never do so, not even in her coffin. The movement from the concrete attachment to person and place of childhood to the possession as adults of a story, of a name which has been internalised, is a theme common to literature and to psychotherapy. The book is closed, the parents who nurtured (and failed to nurture) us are no longer there, but their characters remain with us - for good or ill. Therapy recreates past attachments so that they can live inside us again. The progress from attachment to narrative is part of the Bowlbian story too: we shall examine it more closely in the final section of the book.
Part II
Attachment Theory
Chapter 4
Attachment, anxiety, internal working models
All of us, from the cradle to the grave, are happiest when life is organised as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.
(Bowlby 1988)
In this and the following chapter we shall outline the main features of Attachment Theory, starting with the first of the two great themes described poetically by Bowlby as the 'making and breaking of affectional bonds'.
Bowlby was in some ways, like Freud, a late starter. Although he had a substantial body of related work behind him, it was not until around his fiftieth year, in a series of papers published between 1958 and 1963 (Bowlby 1958, 1960, 1961), that he began to formulate the main outlines of Attachment Theory. Perhaps psychological theorising, like novel writing, but unlike poetry or mathematics, requires a certain maturity; perhaps, like Freud too, Bowlby's revolutionary spirit was combined with a cautiousness of personality that meant that he needed to be absolutely certain of his ground before attempting to challenge the heavens. Bowlby had always felt some unease about the scientific status of psychoanalysis: his discovery of ethology in the 1950s provided him with the scientifically secure base from which to make his conceptual advance: 'The time is already ripe for a unification of psychoanalytic concepts with those of ethology, and to pursue the rich vein of research which this unification suggests' (Bowlby 1953c).
62 Attachment Theory
THE THEORETICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL BACKGROUND TO ATTACHMENT THEORY
Bowlby's earlier work had shown that separated or bereaved children experienced, no less than adults, intense feelings of mental pain and anguish: yearning, misery, angry protests, despair, apathy and withdrawal. He had shown too that the longterm effects of these separations could sometimes be disastrous, leading to neurosis or delinquency in children and adolescents, and mental illness in adults. In separating parent from child a delicate mechanism had been disrupted, a fundamental bond broken linking one human being to another. What is the nature of that bond, and how does it develop? These were the questions Bowlby set out to answer.
He had at his disposal two sets of theories. The first was psychoanalysis which, as we have seen, he had embraced and struggled with for the preceding twenty years. The second was ethology, to which his attention had only recently been drawn, when he read the English translation of Konrad Lorenz's King Solomon's Ring (1952) in draft form; soon after, he encountered Tinbergen's (1951) work, and began to collaborate with Robert Hinde (1982b, 1987). Other important influences were the ideas of Kenneth Craik (1943) who, like Bowlby, was a product of the Cambridge Psychology Department, and Ian Suttie (1935), whose book The Origins of Love and Hate was influential in the thirties and had contributed to Bowlby's views on social psychology.
Psychoanalysis offered two different accounts of the infant- mother bond: drive theory and object-relations theory. Both of these were, in Bowlby's eyes, seriously flawed. The first, 'classical', drive-theory account came from Freud's early formulations. Here the bond which links mother to infant is libido, or psychical energy. The newborn infant lives in a solipsistic world of 'primary narcissism' and experiences a build-up of tension - the need to feed, to suck the breast as an expression of his infantile sexuality. The mother provides the vehicle for the discharge of this libido. If she, or her breast, is absent, tension arises due to undischarged libido which is felt by the infant as anxiety. The baby learns to love the mother because she feeds him, and so reduces the inner tension which is felt as anxiety. Bowlby calls this the 'cupboard love' theory of relationships.
In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, Freud (1926) changed his theory of anxiety from one of dammed-up libido to the theory
Attachment, anxiety, internal working models 63
of signal anxiety. Here anxiety is felt whenever there is actual or threatened separation 'from someone who is loved and longed for'. The basis of this love, however, remains satisfaction of physiological need:
The reason why the infant in arms wants to perceive the presence of its mother is only because it already knows by experience that she satisfies all of its needs without delay. The situation, then, which it regards as a 'danger' and against which it wants to be safeguarded is that of non-satisfaction, of a growing tension due to need, against which it is helpless.
(Freud 1926)
Despite this retention of a physiological substratum to relationships, Freud now emphasises that 'it is the absence of the mother that is now the danger'. This shift towards regarding anxiety as based on object-loss is a decisive move towards the Object-Relations viewpoint that has become the predominant psychoanalytic paradigm, especially in Britain (Greenberg and Mitchell 1983). For Melanie Klein, the infant is linked psychologically as well as physiologically to the mother and her breast from birth. She sees an intimate link between the physiological processes of feeding and elimination, and the beginnings of mental and ethical structures in the mind of the infant. The satisfying, nourishing, comforting breast is the prototype of the 'good object'; the absent, withholding, empty breast is the 'bad object', containing not only the actual failures and unresponsiveness of the mother, but also the infant's reactions to those failures, projected into and attributed to the 'bad breast'.
For Bowlby, both Freud and Klein failed to take the all- important step of seeing attachment between infant and mother as a psychological bond in its own right, not an instinct derived from feeding or infant sexuality, but sui generis:
The young child's hunger for his mother's love and presence is as great as his hunger for food. . . . Attachment Theory provides a language in which the phenomenology of attachment experiences is given full legitimacy. Attachment is a 'primary motivational system' with its own workings and interface with other motivational systems.
(Bowlby 1973a)
64 Attachment Theory
He based his new theory of attachment partly on the findings of ethology, partly on his theoretical critique of psychoanalysis.
As a keen naturalist Bowlby had been particularly struck by the phenomenon described by Lorenz (1952) of following responses in some avian species. Newly hatched goslings follow their mother (or a mother-surrogate), and exhibit analogues of 'anxiety' (cheeping, searching) when separated from her, despite the fact that she does not directly provide them with food. Here bonding seems to be dissociated from feeding. The converse example is provided by Harlow's (1958) monkey studies, which became available around the time Bowlby was publishing his first papers on Attachment Theory. Harlow, in an article with the tongue-in-cheek title 'The nature of love', described how he separated infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers at birth and reared them with the help of surrogate 'wire mothers'. In one series of experiments the infant monkeys were presented with a wire 'mother' to which a feeding bottle had been attached, and another 'mother' without a feeding bottle, but covered with soft terry nappy material. The infant monkeys showed a clear preference for the 'furry' mother, spending up to 18 hours per day clinging to her (as they would with their real mothers) even though they were fed exclusively from the 'lactating' wire mother - a finding which Harlow, arguing as forcibly against a behavioural 'derived drive' theory of bonding as did Bowlby against the psychoanalytic 'secondary drive' hypothesis, concluded, 'is completely contrary to any interpretation of derived drive in which the mother form becomes conditioned to hunger- thirst reduction'.
Geese demonstrate bonding without feeding; rhesus monkeys show feeding without bonding. Thus, argues Bowlby, we must postulate an attachment system unrelated to feeding, which, adopting a biological approach from which psychoanalysis had increasingly become divorced, makes sound evolutionary and developmental sense.
By thinking in terms of primary attachment and bringing the ideas of neo-Darwinism to bear on psychoanalysis, Bowlby identified what he saw as some fundamental flaws in psychoanalytic metapsychology. First, it overemphasises internal dangers at the expense of external threat. The biological purpose of the attachment system is protection from predators which would have been a vital necessity in the environmental conditions
Attachment, anxiety, internal working models 65
in which early man evolved. Infants and small children need to stay close to their mothers at all times, and to signal separation if they are to remain safe from predation. Suttie (1935) called this an 'innate need for companionship which is the infant's only way of self-preservation'. Bowlby criticises psychoanalysts for their over-civilised view of man in which they discount environmental threat, and emphasise instead the projection of 'internal' dangers (feelings of rage and hatred, for example) onto a neutral or benign environment. Even in an urban setting external dangers are far from negligible and children who are victims of injuries in the home or from traffic accidents and sexual attacks are likely to be unprotected and unaccompanied.
Second, Bowlby is critical of the psychoanalytical picture of personality development in which each 'phase' - oral, anal, phallic and genital - succeeds each other in a linear fashion. He questions the idea that normal development can be derived from considering pathological states, and is unhappy with the idea of regression to fixation points as an adequate model of psychological illness. He contrasts Freud's 'homuncular' model in which each stage is predetermined according to some pre-existing plan of development, with an 'epigenetic' model (Waddington 1977) in which several lines of development are possible, the outcome of which depends on an interaction between the organism and its environment. Thus, although the developing child has a propensity to form attachments, the nature of those attachments and their dynamics will depend on the parental environment to which he or she is exposed. Also, the development of the attachment dynamic can be considered as a process in its own right independent of other dynamics - for example, sex or feeding - just as the different organs of the body develop relatively independently of one another.
Bowlby also rejects the teleological 'Lamarckian' view in which the 'purpose' of psychological functions can be determined by some a priori goal: for example, the 'purpose' of attachment is not the reduction of physiological need, but, in evolutionary terms, to increase the fitness of those possessed of it, so protecting them from predators. Finally, he is critical of 'hydraulic' models of drive- discharge, seeing human behaviour rather in terms of control theory whose aim is the maintenance of homeostasis. Infant monkeys separated from their mothers respond with a rise in pulse rate and a fall in body temperature. In humans, Brazelton
66 Attachment Theory
and Cramer (1991) have shown that mothers who have to return to work within a year after giving birth show higher levels of physiological disturbance than those who are able to stay with their babies, and that there is a correspondingly higher incidence of infection in the infants. Secure attachment provides an external ring of psychological protection which maintains the child's metabolism in a stable state, similar to the internal physiological homeostatic mechanisms of blood-pressure and temperature control.
The group of analysts to whom Bowlby felt his ideas were closest were the 'Hungarian School', especially Ferenczi (1955) and Michael Balint (1964). Ferenczi, originator of the famous phrase 'it is the physician's love which cures the patient', had fallen out with Freud over his emphasis on Freud's insistence on the 'real' (as opposed to transferential) nature of the relationship between patient and therapist, and his rather dubious propensity to kiss and hug his patients when he felt it necessary. Balint, his pupil, had postulated a 'primary love' and a primitive clinging instinct between mother and child that are independent of feeding. Bowlby also saw an affinity between his ideas and those of Fairbairn (1952) who, like Bowlby, had jettisoned drive theory in favour of primary object-seeking, and who refused to see adult dependency as a relic of orality, but rather conceived of development as a movement from infantile to mature dependence.
As described in the Introduction, the reaction of the analytic world to Bowlby's challenge was, on the whole, unfavourable. The Kleinians saw him as having betrayed analytic principles, contaminating psychoanalysis with behaviourism, trying to expunge the heart of psychoanalysis - its account of the inner world of phantasy. Anna Freud and her supporters could hardly fail to notice that the Oedipus complex and infantile sexuality - for them, the cornerstones of the psychoanalytic edifice - played virtually no part in Bowlby's writings. What started out as an attempt by Bowlby to modernise psychoanalytic metapsychology and to find a sound biological underpinning for Object-Relations Theory became, in the face of the rejection of his ideas by his psychoanalytic colleagues, increasingly to look like a new psychological paradigm. As we shall see in Chapters 6 and 8, recent developments in 'post-Bowlbian' research have opened out the possibility of reconciliation. But first we must focus more clearly on the nature of attachment theory.
Attachment, anxiety, internal working models 67
WHAT IS ATTACHMENT THEORY?
Attachment Theory is in essence a spatial theory: when I am close to my loved one I feel good, when I am far away I am anxious, sad or lonely. The child away from home for the night plays happily until she hurts herself or bedtime approaches and then feels pangs of homesickness. The mother who leaves her child with a new baby minder thinks endlessly about her baby and misses her dreadfully. Attachment is mediated by looking, hearing and holding: the sight of my loved one lifts my soul, the sound of her approach awakes pleasant anticipation. To be held and to feel her skin against mine makes me feel warm, safe and comforted, with perhaps a tingling anticipation of shared pleasure. But the consummation of attachment is not primarily orgasmic - rather, it is, via the achievement of proximity, a relaxed state in which one can begin to 'get on with things', pursue one's projects, to explore.
Definitions
It is useful to distinguish between the interrelated concepts of attachment, attachment behaviour, and the attachment behavioural system (Hinde 1982a), which represent roughly the psychodynamic, the behavioural and the cognitive components of Attachment Theory.
'Attachment' is an overall term which refers to the state and quality of an individual's attachments. These can be divided into secure and insecure attachment. Like many psychodynamic terms, 'attachment' carries both experiential and theoretical over-tones. To feel attached is to feel safe and secure. By contrast, an insecurely attached person may have a mixture of feelings towards their attachment figure: intense love and dependency, fear of rejection, irritability and vigilance. One may theorise that their lack of security has aroused a simultaneous wish to be close and the angry determination to punish their attachment figure for the minutest sign of abandonment. It is though the insecurely attached person is saying to themselves: 'cling as hard as you can to people - they are likely to abandon you, hang on to them and hurt them if they show signs of going away, then they may be less likely to do so'. This particular pattern of insecure attachment is known as 'ambivalent insecurity' (see below and Chapter 6).
68 Attachment Theory
Attachment behaviour is defined simply as being 'Any form of behaviour that results in a person attaining or retaining proximity to some other differentiated and preferred individual'. Attachment behaviour is triggered by separation or threatened separation from the attachment figure. It is terminated or assuaged by proximity, which, depending on the nature of the threat, may vary from being in sight, to physical closeness and soothing words without touching, to being tightly held and cuddled.
Attachment and attachment behaviour are based on an attachment behavioural system, a blueprint or model of the world in which the self and significant others and their interrelationship are represented and which encodes the particular pattern of attachment shown by an individual. The ambivalently attached person we have described might have a working model of others as desirable but unreachable, and of themselves as unworthy of support and love, and/or of an unreliable and rejecting attachment figure with a protesting, attacking self.
An attachment relationship can be defined by the presence of three key features (Weiss 1982).
1 Proximity seeking to a preferred figure
As parents of toddlers well know, small children have a maddening propensity to follow their attachment figures wherever they go. The distance at which the child feels comfortable depends on such factors as age, temperament, developmental history, and whether the child feels fatigued, frightened or ill, all of which will enhance attachment behaviour. Recent separation will lead to greater proximity seeking, or 'mummyishness', as Robertson's (1952) film so beautifully demonstrates. The extent of the proximity required will also depend on circumstances. A three- year-old collected from playgroup after her first day may rush up to the parent and bury her head in his lap and want to be held and cuddled for a long time. A month later she may be content to slip her hand quietly into that of her collecting parent and continue chatting to her friends as she walks down the road.
Of central importance to attachment theory is the notion that attachment is to a discriminated figure (or small group of figures). Bowlby originally explained this by analogy with the phenomenon of imprinting in which young birds will attach themselves to any mobile figure to which they are exposed at the 'sensitive period'
Attachment, anxiety, internal working models 69
in their development. Studies on primates suggest that imprinting does not occur in the same way as in birds, and that attachment, rather than being an all-or-none phenomenon, develops as a result of a gradual process of genetically programmed development and social learning (Rutter 1981; Bretherton 1991b).
The fact that attachment is, in Bowlby's word, 'monotropic' - that is, occurs with a single figure, most usually the mother - has profound implications for psychological development and psycho- pathology throughout the life cycle.
It is because of this marked tendency to monotropy that we are capable of deep feelings, for to have a deep attachment to a person (or a place or a thing) is to have taken them as the terminating object of our instinctual responses.
(Bowlby 1988a)
Monotropy is by no means absolute: a small child's attachments can best be thought of as a hierarchy usually, but not necessarily, with the mother at the top, closely followed by the father (or, rarely, the father followed by the mother), grandparents, siblings, godparents and so on. Inanimate objects such as transitional objects are also important.
Attachment Theory accepts the customary primacy of the mother as the main care-giver, but there is nothing in the theory to suggest that fathers are not equally likely to become principal attachment figures if they happen to provide most of the child care. The theory is a two-person psychology and has little to say directly about the different roles of mother and father, and of sexuality in psychological life. This has the advantage that its findings are perhaps more generally applicable across cultures than mainstream psychoanalysis, but means that it does not address the fact that individuals' identity is intimately bound up with their sexual roles.
Three-person psychology enters into Attachment Theory via separation and loss. The growing child has to learn that the figure to whom he is attached must also be shared with her sexual partner and other siblings, which forms the basis for the Oedipal situation, and makes separation and loss an inherent part of the attachment dynamic. For Melanie Klein (1986), the 'depressive position' represents the realisation that the loved and gratifying breast/ mother and the hated and rejecting breast/mother are one and
70 Attachment Theory
the same. For Bowlby, the human dilemma turns on the central importance of an attachment that cannot be entirely reliable, must perforce be shared, and will be lost, eventually (and often prematurely). The capacity to separate from attachment figure(s) and to form new attachments represents the developmental challenge of adolescence and young adulthood. The cycle repeats itself as parents attach themselves to their children only to let them go as they reach adolescence. Finally, as death of one's loved ones, and one's own death approaches, the 'monotropic' bond to life itself has gradually to be relinquished.
2 The 'secure base' effect
Mary Ainsworth (1982) first used the phrase 'secure base' to describe the ambience created by the attachment figure for the attached person. The essence of the secure base is that it provides a springboard for curiosity and exploration. When danger threatens we cling to our attachment figures.