No More Learning

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. Once danger passes, their presence enables us to work, relax and play - but only if we are sure that the attachment figures will be there if we need them again. We can endure rough seas if we are sure of a safe haven. Anderson (1972) made a naturalistic study of mothers and their toddlers in a London park. The mothers sat on the park benches, reading or chatting while their children toddled and played on the surrounding grass. He found that each child had an invisible radius - a Maginot line - beyond which it would not venture to go. When it neared the limit it would begin to look anxiously towards the mother. Attachment exerted an invisible but powerful pull on the child, just as heavenly bodies are connected by gravitational forces. But unlike gravity, attachment makes its presence known by a negative inverse square law: the further the attached person is from their secure base, the greater the pull of attachment. The 'elastic band' which constitutes the attachment bond is slack and imperceptible in the presence of a secure base. If the secure base becomes unreliable or the limits of exploration are reached, the bond tugs at the heart-strings.
The example of the mother who leaves her child with the child minder and then worries about and misses her dreadfully suggests that attachment behaviour is not confined to infancy and applies to care-givers as well as care-seekers. Heard and Lake (1986) have extended the secure base concept in their model of an adult
Attachment, anxiety, internal working models 71
attachment dynamic in which they postulate a fundamental need for 'companionable interaction' based on 'preferred relationships in the attachment network'. These comprise, as in parent-child attachment, a mixture of support and exploration, with a sense of psychological proximity as the precondition for such companionship. Where no secure base exists, the individual is in a state of 'dissuagement', and resorts to defensive manoeuvres (such as splitting off anger; inhibition of sexuality; or conversely compulsive sexualisation of relationships) in order to minimise the pain of separation anxiety, and, if needs be, to manipulate support at the expense of truly reciprocal companionship.
Violence and a social facade
Jennifer, a successful painter, was forty when she entered psychotherapy. Her complaint was that she could never be her 'real self' in close relationships. In social situations she could be jolly and cheerful and was well liked; by herself she often felt depressed and anxious, but could cope, especially when she was painting. In her marriages (she had had two) she never felt at ease, unable to share feelings openly or to feel relaxed with her husbands. She had rather desperately sought some affirmation of herself through affairs, but in the end these left her feeling empty and valueless. Naturally enough these patterns were repeated transferentially in therapy and she bent her best efforts towards trying to please, seduce and sometimes (via projective identification) to exclude her therapist. She dated the death of her straightforward 'companionable self' and the shattering of her secure base to an incident where her much-feared father (who had been away at the war for the first three years of her life) was playing with her older brother and sister when Jennifer was about four. She tried to gain his attention but was ignored; she pinched his leg harder and harder until suddenly and terrifyingly he threw her across the room. From that day (and similar episodes were repeated in various ways throughout her childhood) she could only get attention, playfulness, support from others by means of pleasing them, controlling them, or vicariously caring for herself through her care for them (this characterised her relationship with her mother, herself chronically depressed). This illustrates in an extreme form a typical family pattern of absent-father/depressed- mother that so often underlies the lack of a secure base, and leads
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to defensive postures by the children who grow up in such an atmosphere. Progress in therapy only began when this woman had tested her therapist again and again for his reliability and had, inevitably, found him wanting, but still felt safe enough to reveal the extent of her disappointment and rage towards him.
3 Separation protest
Try to prise a limpet away from its rock and it will cling all the harder. The best test of the presence of an attachment bond is to observe the response to separation. Bowlby identified protest as the primary response produced in children by separation from their parents. Crying, screaming, shouting, biting, kicking - this 'bad' behaviour is the normal response to the threat to an attachment bond, and presumably has the function of trying to restore it, and, by 'punishing' the care-giver, of preventing further separation. The clinical implications of separation protest are very important and will be dealt with in subsequent chapters. For example, Ainsworth used it in devising her 'strange situation', the basic tool used for classifying the quality of attachment in children (see Chapter 6), and the analysis of patient responses to weekend and holiday 'breaks' are a basic theme in analytic psychotherapy (see Chapter 8).
A remarkable feature of attachment bonds is their durability. The persistence of attachment in the face of maltreatment and severe punishment has enormous implications for child and adult psychopathology. Harlow's monkeys clung ever more tightly to their cloth 'mothers' even when 'punished' by them with sudden blasts of compressed air (Rutter 1980)! It is hard to explain this phenomenon on the basis either of the psychoanalytic 'cupboard love' theory, or of reward-reinforcement learning theory. It is explicable along the ethological lines of Attachment Theory since stress will lead to an enhancement of attachment behaviour even when the source of that stress is the attachment figure itself. The 'frozen watchfulness' of the physically abused child is eloquent proof of the phenomenon of ambivalent attachment and its inhibition of normal exploration and playfulness.
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ATTACHMENT SYSTEM
The human infant is born in a state of great immaturity (a consequence, evolutionary biologists suggest, of the need to get the huge human brain through the pelvic floor before it is too late! ). It is not surprising therefore that, unlike in ducks, monkeys and other animals, the human attachment system takes several months to develop. Only after six months does the baby begin to exhibit the full triad of proximity seeking, secure base effect and separation protest that we have described. The ontogeny of the attachment system can be conveniently divided into four phases.
1 0-6 months: orientation and pattern recognition
Although newborn babies cannot distinguish one person from another, they are highly responsive to human contact. Centrally important in this process is the sight of the human face, which evokes intense interest. The onset of the smiling response around four weeks marks the beginning of the cycles of benign interaction that characterise the relationship between the baby and his caregivers. The baby's smile evokes a mirroring smile in the mother; the more she smiles back the more the baby responds, and so on. As we shall see in Chapter 6, maternal responsiveness is a key determinant of the quality of attachment as development proceeds. Winnicott (1971) famously states: 'What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother's face? I am suggesting that ordinarily what the baby sees is him or herself. ' He goes on in the same paper to suggest that what happens in psychotherapy is 'a long term giving the patient back what the patient brings. It is a complex derivative of the face that reflects what is there to be seen' (Winnicott 1971).
Daniel Stern (1985), from a perspective of developmental psychology, and Kenneth Wright (1991), from a psychoanalytical viewpoint, both see the mutual looking between mother and baby as a key element in the development of an internal world in which attachment can be represented and regulated. The invariability of the mother's face, the recognition of it as a pattern, give the baby a primitive sense of history, of continuity through time that is integral to the sense of self. To evoke her smile provides a sense of agency and effectiveness. Her mirroring response is the first link between what is perceived out there, and what is felt in here.
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For Wright the mother's face is the first symbol; her face is not part of the self and yet, because it is responsive, feels intimately connected to the self. In the Kleinian account of the origin of symbol formation - based on Freud's idea of hallucinatory wish-fulfilment - images are thought to arise as a consequence of loss or absence: 'no breast; so imagine a breast', thinks the Kleinian infant. Wright proposes a more harmonious theory in which the separation is simply spatial: the face is over there, held off and so is available for thinking about, contemplation, meditation. To watch a 3-month-old baby at the breast is to get visible proof of the rhythm of feeding and mutual gazing that constitutes the mother-child relationship at this stage. Freud, in his discussion of Leonardo (Freud 1910), seems to see looking as a sort of visual incorporation, a drinking in with the eyes, rather than a modality of relating with its own dynamic. The complexity and specificity of the visual world, as opposed to the gustatory world, is what makes looking the basis of attachment: 'Wine comes in at the mouth, love comes in at the eyes. ' The world is mapped through the visual system: the mother's face is imaged on the retina and visual cortex before it is imagined in the inner world. We shall consider later some of the implications of the failure of this mirroring process.
As with looking, so with holding, a term used by Winnicott (1971) in his phrase 'the holding environment' to denote not just the physical holding of the baby by the mother but the entire psychophysiological system of protection, support, caring and containing that envelops the child, without which it would not survive physically or emotionally. The reliability and responsiveness of the holding environment form the nucleus of the emergent attachment patterns as the child begins the process of separation-individuation.
In the second half of the first six months the beginnings of an attachment relationship starts to be evident. The baby becomes much more discriminating in his looking. He listens out for and responds differently to his mother's voice; cries differently when she departs compared with other people; greets her differently; and begins to put his arms up towards her in a request to be picked up. She in turn responds to the physiological and social cues from her baby in a way that leads to the establishment of a
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homeostasis. An interactive matrix is established, felt as a mutual 'knowing' of each other that is the hallmark of a secure mother-infant relationship.
2 6 months-3 years: 'set-goal' attachment
In the second half of the first year several developmental changes occur which mark the onset of attachment proper. Children removed from foster homes into permanent adoptive homes before 6 months show little distress, whereas after that watershed they show increased crying, clinging, apathy, and feeding and sleep disturbance (Bretherton 1985). Around 7 months the baby will begin to show 'stranger anxiety', becoming silent and clingy in the presence of an unknown person (Spitz 1950).
These changes coincide with the onset of locomotion in the child, which entails a much more complex system of communication if the baby is to remain in secure contact with the mother. The immobile baby is bound to remain where he is. The mother of the mobile baby needs to know that the child will move towards her at times of danger, and the child needs to be able to signal protest or distress when necessary to a mother who now feels she can put him down for a few minutes.
Bowlby conceives the attachment system at this stage as being based on 'set-goals', which he compares to the setting on a thermostat, maintained by a system of feedback control. The 'set-goal' for the infant is to keep 'close enough' to the mother: to use her as a secure base for exploration when environmental threat is at a minimum, and to exhibit separation protest or danger signalling when the need arises.
Figure 4. 1 attempts to summarise the features of the attachment system at this stage. Several points should be made about this diagram. First, attachment behaviour, although usually discussed from the point of view of the attached person, is a reciprocal relationship. The parent is simultaneously offering complementary care-giving behaviour that matches, or should match, the attachment behaviour of the child. For example, when put in a new situation the child will, through social referencing, make eye contact with the mother, looking for cues which will sanction exploration or withdrawal. Second, and as a consequence, parent- child attachment systems can be seen in terms of continuously monitored distance-regulation (Byng-Hall 1980), with many opportunities for problematic variants. The over-anxious parent may inhibit the child's exploratory behaviour, making them feel
Figure 4. 1 The attachment behavioural system
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mutual system of feedback and stifled or smothered; conversely, the neglectful parent may inhibit exploration by failing to provide a secure base, leading to feelings of anxiety or abandonment. Third, inherent in the model is the notion of an internal map or 'internal working model' which represents the relative whereabouts of the self and attachment figure. To the analytically minded psychotherapist this may seem like a rather uninteresting predominantly 'cognitive' map, but this would be mistaken. What is stored in the 'internal working model' is not so much an ordnance survey picture but an affective model which, if it could be translated into words, might be along the lines of 'I feel tense when my mummy goes out of the room so I must keep a good eye out for her and scream if necessary', or 'when my mummy comes so close to me while I am playing I feel uncomfortable, so I'll try to move away a bit, without discouraging her so much that she loses interest' (cf. Beebe and Lachmann 1988).
We have moved from a discussion of set-goals which keep toddler and parent in eyesight and earshot of each other to the idea of a relationship, and to a consideration of what internal processes might regulate it. This brings us to the attachment system in its fully fledged form which, Bowlby maintains, is established by the third birthday and persists from then on throughout life.
3 3 years onwards: the formation of a reciprocal relationship
As Bowlby first conceived it, the attachment system in the toddler was something like a 'homing device' in which the child was programmed to focus on the parent with the 'set-goal' of maintaining proximity. With the advent of language and the expanding psychological sophistication of the three- to four-year- old a much more complex pattern arises that cannot be described in simplistic behavioural terms. The child now can begin to think of his parents as separate people with their own goals and plans, and to devise ways of influencing them. If the mother is going to leave the child for the evening he may plead, bribe, charm or sulk in an attempt to maintain attachment, rather than crying or clinging as he would have done a year or two earlier. Attachment Theory at this point merges into a general theory about relationships (or 'affectional bonds', as Bowlby likes to call them) and how they are maintained, monitored and may go wrong.
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INTERNAL WORKING MODELS
A key concept here is that of the 'internal working model'. This is Bowlby's way of describing the internal world of the psychoanalysts, but couched in characteristically practical terms. The idea of an internal 'model' of the world derives from Kenneth Craik's (1943) influential The Nature of Explanation, in which he argues that
Thought models, or parallels reality . . . the organism carries a 'small-scale model' of external reality and its own possible actions within its head which enable it to react in a fuller, safer, and more competent way to the emergencies which face it'.
Wright (1991) has remarked how, until the advent of Winnicott's influence, the work ethic dominated the language of psychoanalysis: working through, getting the patient to work on their problems, forming a working alliance, and Bowlby's internal working models. Wright sees Winnicott as representing the female, maternal influence, a reaction against the paternal force of Freud. Bowlby in turn was in part reacting against the powerful women who had trained him, his analyst Joan Riviere, and supervisor, Melanie Klein. The idea of a 'working model' implies a practical mechanism, a down-to-earth title which he claimed 'allows for greater precision of description and provides a framework that lends itself more readily to the planning and execution of empirical research' (Bowlby 1981c).
Although derived from the psychoanalytic perspective, the idea of internal working models is perhaps closer to that of cognitive therapy (Beck et al. 1979) (itself also a development of and a reaction against the psychoanalytic paradigm). The developing child builds up a set of models of the self and others, based on repeated patterns of interactive experience. These 'basic assumptions' (Beck et al. 1979), 'representations of interactionsthathavebeengeneralised'(Stern1985),'rolerelationshipmodels'and'self- other schemata' (Horowitz 1988), form relatively fixed representational models which the child uses to predict and relate to the world. A securely attached child will store an internal working model of a responsive, loving, reliable care-giver, and of a self that is worthy of love and attention and will bring these assumptions to bear on all other relationships. Conversely,aninsecurelyattachedchildmayviewtheworldasadangerous place in which other people are to be treated with great caution, and see himself as ineffective and unworthy of love. These assumptions are relatively stable and enduring: thosebuiltupintheearlyyearsoflifeareparticularlypersistentandunlikelytobemodified by subsequent experience.
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Bowlby wished to recast psychoanalytic theory in terms of a systems approach in which feedback loops are a key element. They underlie the 'epigenetic' stability of psychological phenomena: the benign circles of healthy development, and the vicious circles of neurosis in which negative assumptions about the self and others become self-fulfilling prophecies.
THEORIES OF NEUROSIS: AVOIDANT AND AMBIVALENT ATTACHMENT
Bowlby uses the notion of faulty internal working models to describe different patterns of neurotic attachment. He sees the basic problem of 'anxious attachment' as that of maintaining attachment with a care-giver who is unpredictable or rejecting. Here the internal working model will be based not on accurate representation of the self and others, but on coping, in which the care-giver must be accommodated to. The two basic strategies here are those of avoidance or adherence, which lead to avoidant or ambivalent attachment (see Figure 4. 2).
In avoidant attachment the child tries to minimise his needs for attachment in order to forestall rebuff, while at the same time remaining in distant contact with the care-giver whose rejection, like the person's own neediness, is removed from consciousness by what, based on Dixon's (1971) concept of perceptual defense, Bowlby calls 'defensive exclusion'. The ambivalent strategy involves clinging to the care-giver, often with excessive submissiveness, or adopting a role-reversal in which the care-giver is cared for rather than vice versa. Here feelings of anger at the rejection are most conspicuously subjected to defensive exclusion. A third pattern of insecure attachment, 'insecure disorganised', less common than the first two but probably associated with much more severe pathology, has also been delineated. All three patterns will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 6.
Although these strategies have the function of maintaining attachment in the face of difficulties, a price has to be paid. The attachment patterns so established are clearly restricted and, if repeated in all relationships, will be maladaptive. Also, defensive exclusion means that models cannot be updated in the light of new experience. Bowlby visualises the coexistence of incompatible models - for example, 'the good mother who lets me come near understood as primarily based on feeding, so adult pair- bonding cannot be adequately explained by sexuality. Sex
Figure 4. 2 Patterns of insecure attachment
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to her (if I look after her)', and the 'bad mother who rejects me and makes me angry (and who I'll try not to think about)' - which lead to sudden changes of mood and poor adaptation. A central problem created by defensive exclusion is the lack of opportunity for emotional processing of painful affect, particularly evident in pathological mourning, which leads to the persistence of primitive feelings of hate and abandonment and restricts emotional growth and development.
ATTACHMENT IN ADULT LIFE
This consideration of internal working models has been a necessary diversion in our discussion of attachment across the life cycle. It is through internal working models that childhood patterns of attachment are carried through into adult life and, as we shall discuss in Chapter 6, are transmitted to the next generation.
As children grow older and begin to reach adolescence they tolerate increasing periods of separation from their parents. Does this mean that the attachment 'phase' has been outgrown, to be superseded by, say, 'adult genitality'? According to Bowlby's 'epigenetic' model, emphatically not! As he sees it, attachment and dependency, although no longer evident in the same way as in young children, remain active throughout the life cycle. For adolescents the parental home still remains an important anchor point, and the attachment system will become re-activated at times of threat, illness or fatigue. The turbulence of adolescence can be seen in Bowlbian terms as springing from the complexity of detachment and re-attachment which the adolescent must accomplish. To disengage from parental attachments, to mourn that loss, to move on via the transitional phase of peer group attachment to the pair-bonding of adult life is no easy task.
Bowlby saw marriage, or its equivalent, as the adult manifestation of attachment whose companionship provides a secure base allowing for work and exploration, and a protective shell in times of need. Like Fairbairn (1952), but unlike Freud (1929) for whom affection was 'aim-inhibited sexuality', Bowlby saw bodily pleasure not as an aim in itself but as a 'signpost to the object', and so tends rather to downplay the role of sexuality in marriage. Just as the mother-infant relationship cannot, in Bowlby's eyes, be
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without attachment and sexless marriages are both all too common, and suggest that the attachment system and sexual behaviour are separable psychological entities, however much society might wish that this were not so. 'In sickness and in health' is a reminder that the psychological purpose of marriage is to provide a secure base and an attachment system which can be awakened in times of need. The unconscious operation of the attachment system via internal working models probably plays an important part in the choice of marital partner and relationship patterns in marriage. Holmes (1993) has described a pattern of 'phobic- counterphobic' marriage in which an ambivalently attached person will be attracted to an avoidant 'counter-phobic' spouse in a system of mutual defence against separation anxiety.
The steeplejack's wife
A young woman developed multiple phobic symptoms soon after the birth of her first baby. At first her fears were of harming the baby; later she became severely agoraphobic, and took to phoning her mother several times a day for reassurance. She insisted on moving house so as to be within easy reach of her mother. Her mother 'helped' by looking after the baby for much of the day, and would herself telephone frequently to check if the baby was 'all right'. When the patient told her mother of a dream in which her son had fallen under a lorry, the mother (who was unlikely to have read Freud) told her that this meant that she wanted to kill her son! As a child the patient had lacked a secure base with this mother whom she felt neglected her in favour of two younger sisters, one of whom had been chronically ill with kidney disease, while the other was epileptic, and to whom she had devoted all her attention.
In an initial phase of individual therapy she was able to link her fears of harming the baby with aggressive feelings towards her younger sisters and her angry dependency on her mother, but her symptoms persisted. Marital therapy was then offered. At the first session she proudly announced that her husband - unlike herself - was afraid of nothing. He accepted the compliment rather diffidently, but confirmed that he had been more or less self-reliant since the age of ten, when his parents
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had divorced and he and his younger brother had been left to fend for themselves on the rough estate where they lived. He worked as a scaffolder on high buildings. When asked if it was true, as his wife believed, that he was frightened of nothing, he confessed that he had slipped on a plank that morning and had been very scared, and that since the birth of the baby he had been much less of a daredevil. His wife seemed surprised at this revelation, but visibly relaxed and perked up. He then admitted that he saw it as his task to conceal his fears and worries from his wife because of her 'illness'. For example, he resented his mother-in-law's intrusions into their family life, but was petrified by the idea of confronting her. Given the task of answering the phone when she rang, and explaining that his wife was too busy to speak, he became quite shaky and said that he would much rather be asked to go up a chimney-stack in a high wind! The patient was asked to rehearse him in this by role-playing her mother, and the session ended in laughter, with a much less anxious patient and subsequent good clinical improvement.
This example shows how attachment patterns are stored as internal working models. The patient saw herself as uncared for, unworthy of care and therefore unable to care for her baby, whom she perceived, in a sense correctly, as in danger of neglect or attack. Lacking a secure base inside herself she was unable to provide one for others, and her anger and frustration about this lack of care interfered with her capacity to look after her baby. The intrusiveness of her mother and the detachment of her husband (due in turn to their own faulty attachment patterns) served to reinforce her sense of an absent secure base. Her demandingness and dependency represented a desperate effort to create an ideally safe attachment, and her protest about the lack of it. Giving her an opportunity to nurture her husband made her feel better about herself, and the affective release of anger and laughter in the sessions enabled her to revise her internal working models towards a more realistic assessment of her capacities.
We shall discuss in Chapter 6 important evidence showing how, as Winnicott (1965) suggested, the advent of parenthood calls into being the new parent's own attachment history. As the life cycle unfolds, each parent is presented with new challenges to their capacity to hold, respond
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to, attune with and release their children. With increasing age the depth and strength of attachment bonds increases. At the same time losses begin to accumulate. Divorce, and separation and death begin to take their toll. We shall see in the next chapter how Attachment Theory provides a schematic map of the painful terrain of depression, disappointment and bereavement.
CONCLUSION: THE MEDIATION AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF ATTACHMENT
Bowlby's original mission was to find links between major life events such as parental loss or neglect and the development of psychiatric symptoms in children and adults. In 'Forty-four juvenile thieves' he linked such disruptions with the two major psychiattic disorders of childhood: conduct disorders and phobias. He anticipated that there would be connections between problems of attachment in childhood and adult conditions such as depression, agoraphobia and psychopathic disorders. He made a fundamental distinction between secure and anxious attachment, seeing the latter as the precursor of developmental difficulty and adult psychiatric disease.
In his early formulations he saw anxious attachment as resulting from gross disruptions of parenting such as parental death or divorce. He also incriminated major qualitative difficulties in parenting which included depression and unresponsiveness on the part of a parent; threats of suicide directed at the child; threats to send or give the child away; and situations of role reversal in which the child is expected to 'mother' the parent and be a care- giver for her, either overtly, or as in the case of the steeplejack's wife, by becoming an 'ill' child to whom the anxious parent can cling.
Bowlby the systematiser and theoretician relied greatly on collaborators to provide the experimental evidence upon which his ideas rested. James Robertson's (1952) research and films confirmed his ideas about maternal deprivation, and Mary Ainsworth (1982, 1989) is generally seen as the co-author of Attachment Theory. Since his original formulations the research of Ainsworth and her students has extended and to some extent modified Bowlby's original ideas. In particular, the focus has shifted away from gross disruptions of care such as bereavement,
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which, as discussed in Chapter 3, do not in themselves necessarily result in psychopathology if conditions are otherwise favourable. The contemporary emphasis is much more on the subtleties of parent-child interaction which contribute to the qualitative features of the attachment bond. Maternal responsiveness and the ability to attune to her child are seen as key features in determining the security or otherwise of attachment bonds.
We have assumed in this chapter that the mother is likely to be the primary care-giver in the first year of life. Changing patterns of family life mean that this is not necessarily the case.
The evidence, such as it is (Brazelton and Cramer 1991), suggests that fathers are as capable of providing responsive attunement as mothers, and for the purposes of the arguments presented in this and subsequent chapters mothers and fathers should for the most part be considered as interchangeable. But here too there are subtle differences. Mothers are more likely to offer a containing 'envelope' for infant activity, while fathers tend to interact more intensely but for much shorter periods, in which can be found the beginnings of organised play as development proceeds.
Other important new themes to emerge from the work of the post-Bowlbians have been the emphasis on narrative and 'autobiographical competence' (Holmes 1992) as manifestations of secure attachment. These and other research findings relevant to Attachment Theory will be reviewed in Chapter 6. But we must turn now to the second of Bowlby's great themes, the breaking of affectional bonds, and the need for affective processing so as to mitigate the psychological impact of separation and loss.
Chapter 5
Loss, anger and grief
A liability to experience separation anxiety and grief are the ineluctable results of a love relationship, of caring for someone.
(Bowlby 1973a)
Towards the end of his long life Bowlby advised one of his former research students: 'Always choose a central topic when doing research. That way you know you can get sufficient data. That's why I studied separation. You can't miss it. Whatever people say, it is there in the data' (Hamilton 1991). As we have seen in Chapter 3, Bowlby's insistence that people had missed the significance of separation and loss as a cause of unhappiness, delinquency and psychiatric illness met a receptive audience in the post-war era of recuperation and reparation. The early work of Bowlby and his associates on loss comprised a systematic description of the psychological reactions to separation and bereavement in children and adults (Bowlby 1953b: Bowlby et al. 1952; Parkes 1964); once Attachment Theory was in place, he could then go on to develop a theoretical account of mourning, based on psychoanalysis but supplemented by the insights of ethology (Bowlby 1980).
EARLY STUDIES
Bowlby's first attempts to understand the effects of separation on psychological development were retrospective studies based on the histories of children and adolescents referred to the child guidance clinics where he worked. In his study of 'Forty-four juvenile thieves' (Bowlby 1944), 40 per cent of the offenders had had prolonged separations of 6 months or more from their mothers or foster-mothers during the first
Loss, anger and grief 87
five years of their life, compared with only 5 per cent of controls. Of the 'affectionless' thieves, twelve out of fourteen had had prolonged separations, compared with only five of the remaining thirty. Bowlby saw two main factors as being of etiological significance. First, the separation itself:
Thus the essential factor which all these separations have in common is that, during the early development of his object- relationships, the child is suddenly removed and placed with strangers. He is snatched away from the people and places which are familiar and whom he loves and placed with people and in surroundings which are unknown and alarming.
(Bowlby 1944)
This must have struck many a sympathetic chord in readers who had survived six years of wartime evacuation, enforced separation and bereavement.
The second factor connecting delinquency and the 'affectionless character' with separation was the 'inhibition of love by rage and the phantasies resulting from rage'. The separated child responds to the absence of his parent with feelings of fury and destructiveness. Normally, as Klein and later Bion described, the soothing presence of the parent would enable these phantasies to be modified by reality, and therefore to give up their dominance in the child's mind. But if the mother is absent, or is herself aggressive and liable to retaliate rather than accept her child's anger, the growing child may be left harbouring phantasies of revenge and hatred which then become manifest in delinquent behaviour. This may be accompanied by an indifference born of
[the] determination at all costs not to risk again the disappointment and resulting rages and longings which wanting someone very much and not getting them involves . . . a policy of self-protection against the slings and arrows of their own turbulent feelings.
(Bowlby 1944)
We see in this early work the prefigurings of three of Bowlby's most insistent themes: the centrality of loss as a determinant of disturbance, the importance of the mother in neutralising and defusing the destructive effects of rage in response to loss, and the use of affective withdrawal as a defense against the pain of unmet longing or anger faced alone. Bowlby had already identified
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the importance of expression of anger, rather than its repression, and the role of the parents in fostering or holding this back, in his pre-war study of aggression:
Take the child away from the fire, deny it a second piece of cake, but avoid being angry or hurt or disapproving if a scream of rage or a kick on the shins is the immediate consequence of thwarting a child's will to happiness. To permit children to express their feelings of aggression, whilst preventing acts of irremediable destruction is, we suggest, one of the greatest gifts that parents can give to their children.
(Durbin and Bowlby 1938)
As we saw in Chapter 3, Bowlby's own retrospective findings were buttressed by his review of the world literature on the effects of separation, and here too he emphasises the importance of active protest as a mark of a positive response to separation: 'a violent reaction is normal and an apathetic resignation a sign of unhealthy development' (Bowlby 1965).
PROSPECTIVE STUDIES: CHILDREN IN HOSPITAL
Together with James Robertson (Robertson and Bowlby 1952b), Bowlby was next able to establish by direct observation the effects on children of temporary separation from their parents. They studied the reactions of children who were taken into hospital, which in those days required almost complete absence of contact with parents during the admission (for fear of cross-infection), and a series of constantly changing carers in the hospital ward. Profound effects were noted,especiallyintheyoungeragegroups. Thechildreninitiallybecametearful, crying and calling bitterly for their parents, and rejecting the staff's attempts to mollify or distract them. Later, bored indifference and apathy seemed to take over, with the children isolating themselves from their peers, sitting listlessly staringintospace,playingandeatinglittle. Finally,childrenappearedto'recover' and to become active once more, but if hospitalisation was prolonged their relationshipswithadultsandotherchildrenappearedsuperficialandself-centered compared with before.
These three phases were described by Bowlby as the stages of protest, withdrawal and detachment. Feelings of protest reemerged when these separated children were reunited with their parents, who were subjected to a mixture of rejection (even to the point of failing to recognise them), angry attacks and clinging in the days following return from hospital.
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Some of these changes were long-lived and could be detected up to two years later. They also found that the effects of separation could be mitigated by a number of common-sense measures including regular hospital visiting by parents, preliminary reconnaissance visits to the hospital ward, allowing children to take familiar comforting objects like teddy-bears with them when they went into hospital, and in the case of separations not involving hospital, placing them with adults who were previously known and trusted. All of these moves have by now become part of routine parental and pediatric practice.
AN ANATOMY OF MOURNING
The 1960s saw two important developments in the understanding of the psychological impact of loss. First, Bowlby was joined at the Tavistock by Colin Murray Parkes who undertook a systematic study of bereavement in adults which complemented and confirmed Robertson's (1952) earlier work with children (Parkes 1975). Second, the crystallisation of Attachment Theory provided a theoretical basis on which to understand these empirical findings.
Bowlby's theory of bereavement is essentially an extension of his theory of separation anxiety which we have considered in the previous chapter. He sees anxiety as realistic response to separation or threatened separation of a vulnerable individual from his care- giver. Since care-seeker and care-giver form a reciprocal partnership, and since the attachment dynamic continues throughout adult life, separation anxiety will arise whenever the parent-child, adult-spouse or adult-companion relationship is threatened. The components of separation anxiety include a subjective feeling of worry, pain and tension; angry protest, whose function is to register displeasure and to punish the errant partner so as to prevent repetition; and a restless searching for the missing person.
Bowlby sees the grief reaction as a special case of separation anxiety, bereavement being an irreversible form of separation. He believes that the psychological response to the trauma of separation is biologically programmed in the same way that the inflammatory response is an orderly sequence of physiological responses to physical trauma - redness, swelling, heat and pain. The early phases of grief consist of an intense form of separation anxiety. The later phases result from the confusion and misery that arise from the realisation that the secure base to whom the
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bereaved individual would turn for comfort in distress is the very person who is no longer available. With this in mind, let us look now at the four phases of mourning (Bowlby 1980, 1982a, 1988a) in more detail.
Stage 1: numbing
A soldier wounded on the field of battle may feel no pain and continue to fight until help is at hand. In the same way, perhaps, the very earliest response to a sudden bereavement may be an apparent calmness based on emotional shutdown in which all feelings are suppressed, or reality denied, until the bereaved person is in a safe enough situation to let go a little.
A bereaved wife in the casualty department
A young scaffolder was brought into the casualty department dead, having fallen from a tall building. There were no external signs of injury. When his wife arrived she was completely and chillingly calm, expressing no emotion, simply saying: 'Oh, but he's not dead, he's asleep, doesn't he look beautiful and peaceful. ' It was only when, several hours later, her mother arrived that she began to sob and wail uncontrollably.
Stage 2: yearning, searching, anger
Bowlby places the search for the lost object at the centre of the mourning response. There may be physical restlessness and wandering as the bereaved person goes from room to room, from place to place, scanning, looking, hoping that their lost loved one may reappear. A similar process goes on psychologically in which the bereaved person goes over in their mind every detail of the events leading up to the loss, in a kind of compulsive 'action replay', hoping that some mistake may have been made and that past events can be made to turn out differently.
Freud (1917) saw the purpose of this mental searching as that of detachment: 'Mourning has a quite precise psychical task to perform: its function is to detach the survivor's memories and hopes from the dead. ' Bowlby, by contrast, sees purpose in evolutionary rather than teleological terms, and views the mental
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searching of the bereaved as an attempt to recover and be reunited with the lost object. Similarly, Bowlby's understanding of the prevalence of visual images of the dead person that so often haunt the bereaved is of an intense 'perceptual set' towards the sight and sound of the lost person that can lead to misinterpretation of auditory and visual clues. Just as the 3-month-old infant quickens at the sound of his mother's footsteps and scans his visual field anxiously until he can meet her greeting smile with his, so the bereaved person is desperately trying to track down his missing attachment figure. Following Darwin (1872), Bowlby sees the facial expressions and crying of the bereaved as a resultant of the tendency to scream in the hope of awakening the attention of a negligent care-giver, and the social inhibition of such screaming.
Anger too is part of the normal response to separation: 'almost every separation has a happy ending, and often a small or large dash of aggression will assist this outcome' (Bowlby 1961c). Bowlby emphasises again and again the importance of the expression of anger if the bereaved person is to recover:
Only if he can tolerate the pining, the more or less conscious searching, the seemingly endless examination of why and how the loss occurred, and anger at everyone who might be responsible, not even sparing the dead person, can he gradually come to realise and accept that loss is in truth permanent and that his life must be shaped anew.
(Bowlby 1982a)
The anger so often seen towards potential comforters whose aim is to help the bereaved person 'come to terms' with the loss, or towards doctors responsible for the care of the dead person, can be understood in this light too. They represent the loss of hope that the loved one might somehow be alive. Their cold comfort can trigger an angry outburst in one who, already weakened by the stress of loss, wants nothing less than to be reminded that the loss is indeed irrecoverable. If only someone can be blamed then this allows the 'secret hope
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that perhaps in some miraculous way to seek out the villain will lead to recovery of loss' (Bowlby 1961c).
The lonely widow
Marion was fifty-five when her husband died suddenly of a heart attack. Childless, they had been married for thirty years and had returned to the United Kingdom after years of living overseas, having lost all their possessions in a fire. Marion had relied on her husband for everything, sheltering behind his competence and social confidence. She 'coped' well at first after his death, but then was admitted to hospital after taking a large overdose. She had only been found in time because the milkman had noticed uncollected bottles and raised the alarm. When she recovered she explained how furious she had felt when her doctor (who had failed in her eyes to save her husband's life) had summoned her for a cervical smear test, without apparently realising that she had had a hysterectomy some years previously.
Therapy with her meant withstanding a torrent of fury about the unfairness of life. She blamed the doctors, the laxity of modern society (the England she had returned to was such a different place from the one she had left), the insurance companies, the Government - everyone. She agreed reluctantly to try not to kill herself, although she continued to insist that life without her husband was futile and meaningless. Contrary to expectation, exploring her childlessness, of which the GP's summons had reminded her, did not lead to feelings of sadness about her lack of children. Instead she revealed how she, unlike her husband, had never wanted children since she feared that this would divert his care and attention from her, as she felt had happened with her mother in her family (she, like Bowlby's mother, was the oldest of six) when her younger siblings were born. A history of excessive dependency and exclusive monotropism is a significant predisposing factor towards prolonged grief reactions (Parkes 1975).
Stages 3 and 4: disorganisation and despair: reorganisation
The diagram of the attachment relationship (Figure 4. 1) shown in the previous chapter depicted a dynamic equilibrium between
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care-seeker and care-giver, constantly monitored, quiescent at times of exploration, activated at times of stress. Bowlby (1980) likens the shock of loss to a see-saw in which one person is suddenly removed, and quotes C. S. Lewis on his widowerhood: 'So many roads once; now so many culs-de-sac. ' The basic dilemma of the bereaved is, as we have said, that the loss removes not only the loved one, but also the secure base to which the bereaved person would expect to turn in their hour of need.
Loss throws the inner world of the sufferer into turmoil. All the assumptions and expectations which depended on the presence of the loved one are now thrown into question. Where can the bereaved person find hope and comfort in the face of his inner turmoil and confusion? The quasi-depressive state which marks the third stage of grief can be understood in a number of ways. Freud (1917) recognised that some internal work was occurring which was necessary before the person could begin to form new attachments. For him the key feature was identification with the lost object; in Klein's (1986) word, the lost person is 'reinstated' in the inner world in the course of healthy grief so that he or she forms part of a composite internal representation of reality.
Melanie Klein (1986) sees the depression and apathy and withdrawal of the bereaved as a regression to infancy, a result of the assault on the security of the inner world which has been so painstakingly built up through childhood. For Klein grief is 'shot through with persecutory anxiety and guilt' (Bowlby 1961a) because the bereaved person is thrown back to the abandonments and failures of early childhood. During the phase of disorganisation the bereaved person is constantly questioning and questing, but 'reality passes its verdict - that the object no longer exists - upon each single one of the memories and hopes' (Klein 1986). Just as the infant, through maternal tolerance and capacity to process conflict and negative affect learns that the lost breast will reappear, that his anger has not destroyed his mother's love, so the bereaved person begins once more to build up his inner world:
every advance in the process of mourning results in a deepening in the individual's relation to his inner objects, in the happiness of regaining them after they were felt to be lost. This is similar
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to the way in which the young child step by step builds up his relation to external objects, for he gains trust not only from pleasant experiences, but also from the ways in which he overcomes frustrations and unpleasant experiences, nevertheless retaining his good objects.
(Klein 1986)
Bowlby is critical of Klein for what he sees as her overemphasis on the persecutory aspect of normal (as opposed to abnormal) grief, and for her neglect of the reality of the danger to which the bereaved person is exposed (widowers die of a broken heart more frequently than comparable non-bereaved men). Nevertheless, her account of the impact of death on the internal world is entirely compatible with the Bowlbian view that the work of grief consists of rebuilding a secure inner base, that the building of secure attachment depends on a secure holding environment which in the past has been reliable enough to withstand and process hostility, and that new attachments can only be formed once old ones are relinquished.
A widower - at twenty-six
Jock was a tough shipbuilder from the Clyde. At twenty-six his wife died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage, leaving him with six children aged eight to 6 months. He tried for a few weeks to carry on as normal but suddenly took all the children to his sister and brother-in-law and set off for London. There he led the life of a tramp, living on the streets and in doss houses, drinking heavily, fighting a lot and moving on. Eventually he was brought to the emergency clinic of the hospital, where he told his story. He spoke of his feelings of rage and fury towards his wife for abandoning him, about which he felt intensely guilty and about his incomprehension that God (he was a devout Catholic) should have allowed such a thing to happen to him; of the despair and chaos which he felt inside; of his wish to smash anyone and everyone who thwarted or tried to control him; and of his need to drink to blot out the pain of losing the wife whom he loved so much. His drinking and way of life continued, but he went on coming to the clinic to talk. Then, suddenly and without warning he disappeared. A few weeks later he wrote saying that he had returned to Glasgow, had stopped drinking and was now happily looking after the children. A further letter about a year later confirmed that things continued to go well.
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Perhaps Jock felt sufficiently 'held' (in the Winnicottian sense) by his weekly contact with the therapist at the hospital to be able to rebuild his inner world so that he could become once more a secure base for his children - leaving his therapist as abruptly as his wife had 'left' him. For Bowlby the opportunity for emotional release is an essential ingredient in healthy mourning, avoiding the defensive manoeuvres which unexpressed emotion requires:
The behaviour of potential comforters plays a large part in determining whether a bereaved person is sad, perhaps dreadfully sad, or becomes despairing and depressed as well . . . if all goes well, since he will not be afraid of intense and unmet desires for love from the person lost, he will let himself be swept by pangs of grief and tearful expressions of yearning, and distress will come naturally.
(Bowlby 1982a)
MOURNING AND ADULT PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
Bowlby's early studies had convinced him of the far-reaching effects of separation and bereavement in childhood. He was convinced that much of adult psychiatric disability could be traced back to such traumata. This view is supported by recent psychophysiological findings that early separation can have long- lasting effects on the sensitivity of brain receptors, leading to permanently raised anxiety levels (Van de Kolk 1987; Gabbard 1992). Post (1992) has similarly argued that depression in adult life may originate with environmental trauma that is encoded in brain changes in protein and RNA, on the analogy of the 'kindling' phenomenon in epilepsy in which the sensitivity of brain cells becomes progressively greater with each seizure, so that what starts as a response to an environmental stimulus becomes eventually an intrinsic feature of the brain.
Bowlby was also convinced that the response of the adult world to a child's distress had a decisive influence on the outcome of loss. He was implacably opposed to the stiff- upper-lip attitude, and disparagement of 'childishness' which epitomised his generation, class and profession. Love, tenderness, encouragement of emotional expression even if hostile, and acceptance of the lifelong imperative for mutual dependency were his watchwords.
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Recent epidemiological research (Tennant 1988) suggests that the influence of childhood bereavement per se on adult psychiatric disorder is probably less significant than Bowlby imagined. Parental disruption and disturbance is a much more potent cause of difficulty and depression than loss in itself. But, as we shall see in Chapters 6 and 9, the current evidence suggests that Bowlby was right to emphasise the real nature of environmental influence and to make quite sharp distinctions between normal and abnormal developmental patterns, a point which he felt the psychoanalysts consistently fudged. His hunch that loss was a key research issue has been proved right, but in a more subtle way than he might have imagined, and one which is compatible with the Kleinian view from which he was so careful to distance himself. The manner in which a child's carers respond to her or his reactions to loss, whether major or minor - to the anger and pining and demandingness - may crucially influence that child's subsequent development. The establishment of a secure internal base, a sense that conflict can be negotiated and resolved, the avoidance of the necessity for primitive defences - all this depends on parental handling of the interplay between attachment and loss that is the leitmotiv of the Bowlbian message.
COMPANIONSHIP AND ATTACHMENT: A POETIC POSTSCRIPT
Being highly intelligent, very well-organised and slightly obsessional, Bowlby was a master of any topic to which he put his mind: for example, he re-read the whole of Freud during his Stanford fellowship in 1957. The corollary of this was that he tended to avoid those few subjects of which he had only passing or partial knowledge, one of which was English literature (U. Bowlby 1991). Having no such scruples - perhaps to my discredit - I conclude this chapter by considering three classic poems of grief from the English canon, which in their non-scientific way lend some support to Bowlby's thesis on mourning.
Milton's Lycidas and Tennyson's In Memoriam are both poems by young men about the loss of loved and valued fraternal comrades. It is debatable whether friendship (and sibship) fulfil the criteria of proximity seeking, secure-base effect and separation protest which are the hallmarks of a full-blown attachment relationship. Weiss (1982) distinguishes the companionship provided by friends from the intimacy of adult attachment typically to be found in a sexual
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partnership. He showed how wives who move because of their husband's job to new towns felt cut off from their friends and bored, but did not experience the specific empty loneliness that widows or separated people feel when loss of a spouse first hits. Similarly, Heard and Lake (1986) write about the need for 'like- minded companions of similar experience and stamina with whom to engage in mutually interesting and enjoyable activities' as part of the 'attachment dynamic'. A cursory glance at any lonely hearts column will attest to the reality of this need. The prime role of friendship seems to facilitate exploratory activity rather than to provide a secure base, although without a secure base no exploration is possible, and many intimate relationships, especially marriage, provide both. It seems likely that friendship or sibship does have a more central role as a source for a secure base in certain circumstances: in adolescence; among comrades in intense and isolated circumstances such as the armed services or mountaineering expeditions; and between siblings when the parental relationship is difficult or defective. The latter was certainly the case for Tennyson, who had an extremely unhappy and tormented childhood which he survived mainly through his writing and intelligence (Hamilton 1986), and, from his teenage years, through his friendship with Arthur Hallam who, although two years younger, became his mentor, sponsor and champion. Hallam's premature death when Tennyson was only twenty-four led to near- breakdown for the poet. In Memoriam was started within weeks of the loss, but was only completed and published some thirteen years later.
Milton's Lycidas 'bewails' the death of a 'learned friend' (Edward King) drowned in the Irish Sea - like Tennyson's Hallam, a childhood companion and one who shared Milton's radical anti-clericalism. Milton's mother had died a few months earlier; numbed, Milton had apparently been unable to write anything to mark her loss. The scene is pastoral and the two friends are depicted as shepherds. The need at times of grief to return to the good object (breast-hill) is evoked:
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For we were nursed upon the self-same hill, Fed the same flock by fountain, shade, and rill.
The centrepiece of the poem is the attack on the 'corrupted clergy then in their height', drawn as self-serving, ignorant shepherds. Like so many prematurely bereaved people, Milton rails against the injustice of fate: why has my loved one died, who did not deserve it, and not those undeserving souls who live on?
'How well could I have spared for thee, young swain, Enow of such as for their bellies' sake
Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold! . . .
Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold A sheep-hook . . .
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread. '
The inner world is contaminated and fouled by the anger and despair of the poet, then projected onto the corrupt priests who are held to blame for the loss.
The action of the poem takes place in a single night in which the poet passes through the stages of sadness, despair, anger, blame and depression until he reaches acceptance, with the help of two images from the natural world. The first are the garlands of flowers with which to 'strew the laureat hearse where Lycid lies', and which serve to link the loss of Lycidas with the natural transience of beauty. In the second he pictures the sun setting over the ocean where Lycidas is drowned, only to rise again the next morning,
and with new spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.
An image of setting and rising, of separation and reunion, has replaced the sense of irretrievable loss. A secure base is reestablished, mirroring perhaps the regular appearance and disappearance of the feeding mother. The poet can begin once more to explore, no longer enshrouded, but enveloped by a cloak that moves and lives:
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.
In In Memoriam we see many of the same themes. In recalling his love for Hallam, Tennyson is taken back to pre-verbal
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paradisial times before the loss, reminiscent of the mother's attunement to her baby's needs, which leads, in Winnicottian terms, to the opening out of a transitional space between them. The poet describes the two friends' sense of intuitive, empathic understanding:
Dear as the mother to the son More than my brothers are to me . . .
Thought leapt out to wed with Thought Ere thought could wed itself with speech.
But then the dreadful boat brings the dead body home. Tennyson contrasts his own empty hands and those reunited with their attachment figures:
Thou bring'st the sailor to his wife
And travelled men from foreign lands And letters unto trembling hands
And, thy dark freight, a vanished life.
Tennyson tackles the tragic implications of monotropism: attachments are not transferable, or only so by a slow and painful process of withdrawal and re-attachment. By contrast, nature becomes an indifferent mother who cares equally and indiscriminately for all her 'children' and has no special affection for any one of them.
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life?
Despair strikes, meaning is destroyed, when the interplay of attachment, with its mutual reinforcement, its linking of inner world and outer reality is disrupted:
'So careful of the type'? But no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, 'A thousand types are gone;
I care for nothing, all shall go. '
Loss throws us back to our childhood, to our primary attachments:
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but what am I?
An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
Tennyson begins to think on a new time-scale and to see the possibility of new attachments, as one generation succeeds another:
Unwatch'd, the garden bough shall sway, The tender blossom flutter down . . .
Till from the garden and the wild
A fresh association blow,
And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger's child.
Finally he returns to the image of mother and child, to the hatching of individuality from their symbiotic mixed-upness (Balint 1964). The mother's 'roundness' takes him round the corner of his developmental pathway towards a less despairing separation in which the inner world is strengthened and clarified:
The baby new to earth and sky
What time his tender palm is prest Against the circle of the breast
Has never thought that 'this is I'
So rounds he to a separate mind
From whence clear memory may begin As through the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined.
So it is with grief where, if all goes well, can come a strengthening of the inner world, of memory and definition. As we shall argue in Chapter 8, the importance of telling a story, of 'clear memory' is central to the poet's (and the psychotherapist's) mission.
John Donne's 'A Valediction: forbidding mourning' also concerns a sea voyage, and also uses the image of a 'round' or circle as an antidote to the abyss of loss and separation. This is a poem about anticipatory grief, given by Donne to his wife before setting sail for France in November 1611 (Gardner 1957).
He starts by advocating a slipping away on parting, which he compares with death, rather than an abrupt and emotional separation:
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As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their soules to goe Whilst some of their sad friends doe say
The breath goes now, and some say no.