No More Learning

Several hundred infants have now been studied by means of the strange situation procedure de- vised by Ainsworth (Ainsworth et al. , 1978) which gives an opportunity to observe how the infant responds, first in his parent's presence, next when he is left alone, and later when his parent returns. As a result of these observations infants
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? ? ? can be classified as presenting a pattern either of secure attachment to mother or of one of two main forms of insecure attachment to her. Since these patterns have been shown to have consider- able stability during the earliest years of life and to predict how a nursery-school child in the age range 41/2 to 6 years will approach a new person and tackle a new task (Arend, Gove, and Sroufe, 1979), the value of the procedure as a method of assessing an infant's social and emotional devel- opment needs no emphasis.
Hitherto almost all the studies using this pro- cedure have observed infants with their mothers. Main and Weston (1981), however, extended the work by observing some 60 infants, first with one parent and, six months later, with the other. One finding was that, when looked at as a group, the patterns of attachment that were shown to fath- ers resembled closely the patterns that were shown to mothers, with roughly the same per- centage distribution of patterns. But a second finding was even more interesting. When the pat- terns shown by each child individually were ex- amined, no correlation was found between the pattern shown with one parent and the pattern shown with the other. Thus one child may have a
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? ? ? secure relationship with the mother but not with the father, a second may have it with the father but not with the mother, a third may have it with both parents, and a fourth may have it with neither. In their approach to new people and new tasks the children represented a graded series. Children with a secure relationship to both par- ents were most confident and most competent; children who had a secure relationship to neither were least so; and those with a secure relation- ship to one parent but not to the other came in between.
Since there is evidence that the pattern of at- tachment a child undamaged at birth develops with his mother is the product of how his mother has treated him (Ainsworth et al. , 1978), it is more than likely that, in a similar way, the pat- tern he develops with his father is the product of how his father has treated him.
This study, together with others, suggests that, by providing an attachment figure for his child, a father may be filling a role closely resembling that filled by a mother; though in most, perhaps all, cultures fathers fill that role much less fre- quently than do mothers, at least when the chil- dren are still young. In most families with young
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? ? ? children the father's role is a different one. He is more likely to engage in physically active and novel play than the mother and, especially for boys, to become his child's preferred play com- panion. 4
PROVISION OF A SECURE BASE
This brings me to a central feature of my concept of parenting--the provision by both parents of a secure base from which a child or an adolescent can make sorties into the outside world and to which he can return knowing for sure that he will be welcomed when he gets there, nourished phys- ically and emotionally, comforted if distressed, reassured if frightened. In essence this role is one of being available, ready to respond when called upon to encourage and perhaps assist, but to in- tervene actively only when clearly necessary. In these respects it is a role similar to that of the of- ficer commanding a military base from which an expeditionary force sets out and to which it can retreat, should it meet with a setback. Much of the time the role of the base is a waiting one but it is none the less vital for that. For it is only when the officer commanding the expeditionary force is
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? ? ? confident his base is secure that he dare press forward and take risks.
In the case of children and adolescents we see them, as they get older, venturing steadily further from base and for increasing spans of time. The more confident they are that their base is secure and, moreover, ready if called upon to respond, the more they take it for granted. Yet should one or other parent become ill or die, the immense significance of the base to the emotional equilib- rium of the child or adolescent or young adult is at once apparent. In the lectures to follow evid- ence is presented from studies of adolescents and young adults, as well as of school children of dif- ferent ages from nursery school up, that those who are most stable emotionally and making the most of their opportunities are those who have parents who, whilst always encouraging their children's autonomy, are none the less available and responsive when called upon. Unfortunately, of course, the reverse is also true.
No parent is going to provide a secure base for his growing child unless he has an intuitive un- derstanding of and respect for his child's attach- ment behaviour and treats it as the intrinsic and valuable part of human nature I believe it to be.
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? ? ? This is where the traditional term 'dependence' has had so baleful an influence. Dependency al- ways carries with it an adverse valuation and tends to be regarded as a characteristic only of the early years and one which ought soon to be grown out of. As a result in clinical circles it has often happened that, whenever attachment beha- viour is manifested during later years, it has not only been regarded as regrettable but has even been dubbed regressive. I believe that to be an appalling misjudgement.
In discussing parenting I have focused on the parents' role of providing a child with a secure base because, although well recognized intuit- ively, it has hitherto, I believe, been inadequately conceptualized. But there are, of course, many other roles a parent has to play. One concerns the part a parent plays in influencing his child's be- haviour in one direction or another and the range of techniques he uses to do so. Although some of these techniques are necessarily restrictive, and certain others have a disciplinary intent, many of them are of an encouraging sort, for example, calling a child's attention to a toy or some other feature of the environment, or giving him tips on how to solve a problem he cannot quite manage
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? ? ? on his own. Plainly the repertoire of techniques used varies enormously from parent to par- ent--from largely helpful and encouraging to largely restrictive and punitive. An interesting start in exploring the range of techniques used by the parents of toddlers in Scotland has been made by Schaffer and Crook (1979).
PERI- AND POST-NATAL CONDITIONS THAT HELP OR HINDER
So far in this lecture my aim has been to describe some of the ways in which the parents of children who thrive socially and emotionally are observed to behave towards them. Fortunately, much of this behaviour comes naturally to many mothers and fathers who find the resulting interchanges with their children enjoyable and rewarding. Yet it is evident that, even when social and economic conditions are favourable, these mutually satisfy- ing relationships do not develop in every family. Let us consider therefore what we know of the psychological conditions that foster their doing so and those that impede them.
At several points I have referred to the ordin- ary sensitive mother who is attuned to her child's actions and signals, who responds to them more
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? ? ? or less appropriately, and who is then able to monitor the effects her behaviour has on her child and to modify it accordingly. The same de- scription, no doubt, would apply to the ordinary sensitive father. Now it is clear that, in order for a parent to behave in these ways, adequate time and a relaxed atmosphere are necessary. This is where a parent, especially the mother who usu- ally bears the brunt of parenting during the early months or years, needs all the help she can get--not in looking after her baby, which is her job, but in all the household chores.
A friend of mine, a social anthropologist, ob- served that in the South Sea island in which she was working it was the custom for a mother, both during and after the baby was born, to be atten- ded by a couple of female relatives who cared for her throughout the first month, leaving her free to care for her baby. So impressed was my friend by these humane arrangements that, when her own baby was born on the island, she accepted suggestions that she be cared for in the VIP way, and she had no cause to regret it. In addition to practical help, a congenial female companion is likely to provide the new mother with emotional support or, in my terminology, to provide for her
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? ? ? the kind of secure base we all need in conditions of stress and without which it is difficult to relax. In almost all societies an arrangement of this sort is the rule. Indeed in all but one of 150 cultures studied by anthropologists a family member or friend, usually a woman, remains with a mother throughout labour and delivery (Raphael, 1966, quoted by Sosa et al. , 1980).
Turning to our own society, preliminary find- ings that, if confirmed, are of the greatest interest and practical importance have recently been re- ported by the Klaus and Kennell team from a study conducted in a hospital maternity unit in Guatemala (Sosa et al. , 1980). One group of wo- men went through labour and delivery according to the routine practice of the unit which meant in effect that the woman was left alone for most of the time. The other group received constant friendly support from an untrained lay woman from the time of admission until delivery, one woman during the day and another at night. In the supported group labour was less than half as long as in the other, 8. 7 hours against 19. 3. 5 Moreover, the mother was awake for a greater part of the first hour of the infant's life during
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? ? ? which she was much more likely to be seen strok- ing her baby, smiling, and talking to him.
Effects of a similar kind on the way a mother treats her baby as a result of her having addition- al contact with him soon after his birth are now well known. Amongst differences observed by Klaus and Kennell, when the babies were one month old, was that a mother given extra contact was more likely to comfort her baby during stressful clinic visits and, during feeding, was more likely to fondle the baby and engage him in eye-to-eye contact. Differences of a comparable kind were observed when the babies were 12 months old and again at 2 years. In these studies the increased contact amounted to no more than an extra hour within the first three hours after birth, with a further five of contact each after- noon during the next three days (Kennell et al. , 1974; Ringler et al. , 1975). 6
Findings of another study of the part these kinds of peri- and post-natal experiences play in either assisting a mother to develop a loving and sensitive relationship to her baby or impeding it are reported by Peterson and Mehl (1978). In a longitudinal study of 46 women and their hus- bands, interviewed and observed during
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? ? ? pregnancy, labour, and on four occasions during the infants' first six months, the most significant variable predicting differences in maternal bond- ing was the length of time a mother had been sep- arated from her baby during the hours and days after his birth. Other variables that played a sig- nificant but lesser part were the birth experience and the attitudes and expectations expressed by the mother during her pregnancy.
INFLUENCE OF PARENTS' CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES
There is, of course, much clinical evidence that a mother's feeling for and behaviour towards her baby are deeply influenced also by her previous personal experiences, especially those she has had and may still be having with her own par- ents; and, though the evidence of this in regard to a father's attitudes is less plentiful, what there is points clearly to the same conclusion. On this matter evidence from systematic studies of young children is impressive: it shows that the influence that parents have on the pattern of caring that their children develop starts very early. For example, Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, and King (1979) have found not only that aiding and
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? ? ? comforting others in distress is a pattern of beha- viour that commonly develops as early as a child's second year of life, but that the form it takes is much influenced by how a mother treats her child. Children whose mothers respond sens- itively to their signals and provide comforting bodily contact are those who respond most read- ily and appropriately to the distress of others. 7 Not infrequently, moreover, what a child does in such circumstances is a clear replica of what he has seen and/or experienced his mother do. The follow-up of a group of children showing these early differences would be of the greatest interest.
Another line of evidence regarding the influ- ence of childhood experience on how a woman mothers her child comes from studies under- taken in London. For example, a study by From- mer and O'Shea (1973) shows that women who, during their pregnancy, give a history of having been separated from one or both parents before the age of 11 years are particularly likely to have marital and psychological difficulties after their baby's birth and also to have trouble with their infant's feeding and sleeping. Another study, also in London, by Wolkind, Hall, and Pawlby (1977) is extending this finding by showing that women
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? ? ? with this type of childhood history interact signi- ficantly less with their 5-month-old first-born in- fants than do women who have had more settled childhoods. These observations, which were car- ried out by an ethologist, extended over a period long enough to record 50 minutes of the baby's waking life, exclusive of any time taken to feed him; this usually necessitated the observer stay- ing for the whole morning. Not only did the mothers from a disrupted family of origin spend on average twice as long as the other mothers out of sight of their babies, but, even when one of them was with her baby, she was likely to spend less time holding him, less time looking at him and less time talking to him. Moreover, when asked the question, 'It takes a bit of time to begin to see a baby as a person--do you feel this yet? ', mothers from a disrupted family were much less likely to say they did (Hall, Pawlby, and Wolkind, 1979). The point I wish to emphasize is that the study provides firm evidence that women whose childhood has been disturbed tend to engage in less interaction with their infants than do moth- ers with happier childhoods--at a period in their baby's life when the amount of interaction that
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? ? ? ensues is determined almost entirely by the mother.
Some of the clearest evidence regarding the enormous part played by childhood experience in determining in later years how a parent treats a child comes from studies of parents known to have abused their children physically (Parke and Collmer, 1979). A common picture includes a childhood in which parental care was at best er- ratic and at worst absent altogether, in which cri- ticism and blame were frequent and bitter, and in which parents or step-parents had behaved viol- ently towards each other and sometimes though not always towards the children. A feature that emerges from a study by DeLozier of mothers known to have abused a child physically (a study described in detail in Lecture 5) is the high pro- portion who have lived in constant dread of being deserted by one or both parents and therefore of being sent away to a foster home or institution, and who have also been threatened frequently with violent beatings or worse. Not surprisingly these girls have grown up to be perpetually anxious lest husband or boyfriend desert, to re- gard physical violence as part of the natural
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? ? ? order, and to expect little or nothing in the way of love or support from any quarter.
Not every woman with childhood experiences of these sorts batters her child, however; nor in- deed does a woman who physically abuses one of her children necessarily abuse the others. What accounts for these differences? Evidence suggests that individuals who, thanks to earlier experi- ences, are markedly prone to develop unfavour- able parental attitudes are more than usually sensitive to what happens to them in the time during and after the birth of their babies. It seems that for these women adverse experiences during this time can prove the last straw.
In a study done at Oxford, for example, Lynch (1975) compared the histories of 25 children who had been physically abused with those of their siblings who had escaped. Children who had been abused were significantly more likely than their siblings to have been the product of an abnormal pregnancy, labour, or delivery, to have been sep- arated from their mother for 48 hours or more soon after birth, and to have experienced separa- tions of other kinds during their first six months of life. During the first year of these children's lives, moreover, the abused children were much
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? ? ? more likely to have been ill than were the non-ab- used siblings; and the mothers also were more likely to have been ill during the abused child's first year than during the siblings' first year. Since in this study the personalities and child- hood histories of the parents were the same for the abused siblings as for the non-abused, the fate of each seems to have turned in large part on the mother's experiences with the child during the peri- and early post-natal periods. The find- ings of a study by Cater and Easton (1980) point to the same conclusion. 8
Of the many other disturbed patterns of par- enting that can be traced, in part at least, to childhood experience, there is one that happens also to be well documented in studies of abusing mothers (e. g. Morris and Gould, 1963; Steele and Pollock, 1968; Green, Gaines, and Sandgrun, 1974; DeLozier, 1982). This is their tendency to expect and demand care and attention from their own children, in other words to invert the rela- tionship. During interview they regularly describe how, as children, they too had been made to feel responsible for looking after their parents instead of the parents caring for them.
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? ? ? Most, perhaps all, parents who expect their children to care for them have experienced very inadequate parenting themselves. Unfortunately, all too often, they then create major psychological problems for their children. Elsewhere (Bowlby, 1973, 1980) I have argued that an inverted parent-child relationship of this kind lies behind a significant proportion of cases of school refusal (school phobia) and agoraphobia, and also prob- ably of depression.
HOW WE CAN BEST HELP
In this contribution I have given principal atten- tion to what we know about successful parenting and to some of the variables that make it easier or more difficult for young men and women to be- come sensitive, caring parents. In consequence I have been able to say only a little about the many and varied patterns of deficient and distorted parenting that we meet with clinically. Another large theme omitted is how we can best help young men and women become the successful parents I believe the great majority wish to be. In conclusion, therefore, let me state what I believe to be the first principles for such work--which are that we seek always to teach by example, not
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? ? ? precept, by discussion, not instruction. The more that we can give young people opportunities to meet with and observe at first hand how sensit- ive, caring parents treat their offspring, the more likely are they to follow suit. To learn directly from such parents about the difficulties they meet with and the rewards they obtain, and to discuss with them both their mistakes and their suc- cesses, are worth, I believe, hundreds of instruc- tional talks. For a programme of this kind, which in some places might be an extension of the mothers' self-help groups now beginning to flour- ish, we would need to enlist the active co-opera- tion of sensitive, caring parents. Fortunately there are still plenty of them in our society and I believe many would be willing and proud to help.
1 Throughout this book the child is referred to as mas- culine in order to avoid clumsy constructions.
2 An increased desire for care, either from husband or mother, has been reported in studies of representative groups of women by Wenner (1966) and Ballou (1978). 3 See especially the work of Stern (1977), Sander (1977), Brazelton, Koslowski, and Main (1974) and Schaffer (1977). For excellent reviews see Schaffer
(1979) and Stern (1985). The state of heightened sens- itivity that develops in a woman during and especially
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? ? ? towards the end of pregnancy, and that enables her 'to adapt delicately and sensitively' to her infant's needs, is a process to which Winnicott (1957) has called attention.
4 Studies of relevance are those of Lamb (1977), Parke (1979), Clarke-Stewart (1978), and Mackey (1979).
5 In a further and larger study, also carried out in Guatemala and by the same research group, all find- ings were replicated. Samples numbered 279 in the routine group and 186 in the supported group. Not only was the duration of labour halved but the incid- ence of perinatal complications halved also (Klaus et al. , 1986).
6 Since more recent studies, e. g. Svejda, Campos, and Emde (1980), have failed to replicate initial findings of the effects of early mother-infant contact, the issue re- mains in doubt. It may be that in this sensitive area de- tails of how this early contact is arranged and by whom would explain discrepancies.
7 The role of close physical contact with mother during human infancy has been studied especially by Ainsworth who finds that children who develop a se- cure attachment to mother are those who, during early infancy, are held longest in a tender and loving way (Ainsworth et al. , 1978).
8 In interpreting the findings of these two studies cau- tion is necessary because in neither study is it certain that in every case the child's mother was always the ab- using parent.
2
THE ORIGINS OF ATTACHMENT THEORY
In the spring of 1981 the American Orthopsychi- atric Association invited me to New York to re- ceive the Fourth Blanche Ittleson Award and to address members of the Association on the his- tory of my work in the field of attachment and loss. After thanking members for the honour they were doing me, I also took the opportunity to express my deep gratitude to the three Amer- ican foundations, the Josiah Macy Junior, the Ford, and the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, which had supported our work at the Tavistock Clinic during the critical decade starting in 1953.
After the meeting the editor of the Associ- ation's journal asked me to expand my remarks by giving an account of what we knew at that time in the field I have been exploring, how we arrived at that knowledge, and the directions which further research should take. In reply I
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? ? ? explained that I was in no position to be an ob- jective historian in a field that had for long been controversial and that all I could attempt was to describe the story as I recalled it and to point to a few of the empirical studies and theoretical ideas that had been influential in shaping it. My personal biases, I explained, would inevitably be everywhere evident.
During the 1930s and 40s a number of clinicians on both sides of the Atlantic, mostly working in- dependently of each other, were making observa- tions of the ill effects on personality development of prolonged institutional care and/or frequent changes of mother-figure during the early years of life. Influential publications followed. Listing authors in alphabetical order of surname, these include the following: Lauretta Bender (Bender and Yarnell, 1941; Bender, 1947), John Bowlby (1940, 1944), Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud (1942, 1944), William Goldfarb (1943 a, b, and c and six other papers, summarized 1955), David Levy (1937), and Rene? Spitz (1945, 1946). Since each of the authors was a qualified analyst (except for Goldfarb who trained later), it is no surprise that the findings created little stir out- side analytical circles.
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? ? ?
At that point, late 1949, an imaginative young British psychiatrist, analytically oriented and re- cently appointed to be Chief of the Mental Health Section of the World Health Organisation, stepped in. Requested to contribute to a United Nations study of the needs of homeless children, Ronald Hargreaves1 decided to appoint a short- term consultant to report on the mental health aspects of the problem and, knowing of my in- terest in the field, invited me to undertake the task. For me this was a golden opportunity. After five years as an army psychiatrist, I had returned to child psychiatry determined to explore further the problems I had begun working on before the war; and I had already appointed as my first re- search assistant James Robertson, a newly quali- fied psychiatric social worker who had worked with Anna Freud in the Hampstead Nurseries during the war.
The six months I spent with the World Health Organisation in 1950 gave me the chance not only to read the literature and to discuss it with the authors, but also to meet many others in Europe and the United States with experience of the field. Soon after the end of my contract I submitted my report, which was published early in 1951 as a
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? ? ? WHO monograph entitled Maternal Care and Mental Health. In it I reviewed the far from neg- ligible evidence then available regarding the ad- verse influences on personality development of inadequate maternal care during early childhood, called attention to the acute distress of young children who find themselves separated from those they know and love, and made recommend- ations of how best to avoid, or at least mitigate, the short- and long-term ill effects. During the next few years this report was translated into a dozen other languages and appeared also in a cheap abridged edition in English.
Influential though the written word may often be, it has nothing like the emotional impact of a movie. Throughout the 1950s Rene? Spitz's early film Grief: A Peril in Infancy (1947), and James Robertson's A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital (1952) together had an enormous influence. Not only did they draw the attention of professional workers to the immediate distress and anxiety of young children in an institutional setting but they proved powerful instruments for promoting changes in practice. In this field Robertson was to play a leading part (e. g. Robertson, 1958, 1970).
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? ? ? Although by the end of the 1950s a great many of those working in child psychiatry and psycho- logy and in social work, and some also of those in paediatrics and sick children's nursing, had ac- cepted the research findings and were imple- menting change, the sharp controversy aroused by the early publications and films continued. Psychiatrists trained in traditional psychiatry and psychologists who adopted a learning-theory ap- proach never ceased to point to the deficiencies of the evidence and to the lack of an adequate ex- planation of how the types of experience implic- ated could have the effects on personality devel- opment claimed. Many psychoanalysts, in addi- tion, especially those whose theory focused on the role of fantasy in psychopathology to the relative exclusion of the influence of real life events, re- mained unconvinced and sometimes very critical. Meanwhile, research continued. For example, at Yale Sally Provence and Rose Lipton, were mak- ing a systematic study of institutionalized infants in which they compared their development with that of infants living in a family (Provence and Lipton, 1962). At the Tavistock members of my small research group were active collecting fur- ther data on the short-term effects on a young
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? ? ? child of being in the care of strange people in a strange place for weeks and sometimes months at a time (see especially the studies by Christoph Heinicke, 1956 and, with Ilse Westheimer, 1966), whilst I addressed myself to the theoretical prob- lems posed by our data.
Meanwhile the field was changing. One import- ant influence was the publication in 1963 by the World Health Organisation of a collection of art- icles in which the manifold effects of the various types of experience covered by the term 'depriva- tion of maternal care' were reassessed. Of the six articles, by far the most comprehensive was by my colleague Mary Ainsworth (1962). In it she not only reviewed the extensive and diverse evid- ence and considered the many issues that had given rise to controversy but also identified a large number of problems requiring further research.
A second important influence was the publica- tion, beginning during the late fifties, of Harry Harlow's studies of the effects of maternal deprivation on rhesus monkeys; and once again film played a big part. Harlow's work in the Un- ited States had been stimulated by Spitz's reports. In the United Kingdom complementary studies
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? ? ? by Robert Hinde had been stimulated by our work at the Tavistock. For the next decade a stream of experimental results from those two scientists (see summaries in Harlow and Harlow, 1965 and Hinde and Spencer-Booth, 1971), com- ing on top of the Ainsworth review, undermined the opposition. Thereafter nothing more was heard of the inherent implausibility of our hypo- theses; and criticism became more constructive.
Much, of course, remained uncertain. Even if the reality of short-term distress and behavioural disturbance is granted, what evidence is there, it was asked, that the ill effects can persist? What features of the experience, or combination of fea- tures, are responsible for the distress? And, should it prove true that in some cases ill effects do persist, how is that to be accounted for? How does it happen that some children seem to come through very unfavourable experiences relatively unharmed? How important is it that a child should be cared for most of the time by one prin- cipal caregiver? In less developed societies it was claimed (wrongly as it turns out) that multiple mothering is not uncommon. In addition to all these legitimate questions, moreover, there were misunderstandings. Some supposed that
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? ? ? advocates of the view that a child should be cared for most of the time by a principal mother-figure held that that had to be the child's natural moth- er--the so-called blood-tie theory. Others sup- posed that, in advocating that a child should 'ex- perience a warm intimate and continuous rela- tionship with his mother (or permanent mother- substitute)', proponents were prescribing a re- gime in which a mother had to care for her child 24 hours a day, day in and day out, with no res- pite. In a field in which strong feelings are aroused and almost everyone has some sort of vested interest, clear unbiased thinking is not al- ways easy.
A NEW LOOK AT THEORY
The monograph Maternal Care and Mental Health is in two parts. The first reviews the evid- ence regarding the adverse effects of maternal deprivation, the second discusses means for pre- venting it. What was missing, as several reviewers pointed out, was any explanation of how experi- ences subsumed under the broad heading of ma- ternal deprivation could have the effects on per- sonality development of the kinds claimed. The reason for this omission was simple: the data
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? ? ? were not accommodated by any theory then cur- rent and in the brief time of my employment by the World Health Organisation there was no pos- sibility of developing a new one.
The child's tie to his mother
At that time it was widely held that the reason a child develops a close tie to his mother is that she feeds him. Two kinds of drive are postulated, primary and secondary. Food is thought of as primary; the personal relationship, referred to as 'dependency', as secondary. This theory did not seem to me to fit the facts. For example, were it true, an infant of a year or two should take read- ily to whomever feeds him and this clearly was not the case. An alternative theory, stemming from the Hungarian school of psychoanalysis, postulated a primitive object relation from the beginning. In its best-known version, however, the one advocated by Melanie Klein, mother's breast is postulated as the first object, and the greatest emphasis is placed on food and orality and on the infantile nature of 'dependency'. None of these features matched my experience of children.
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? ? ? But if the current dependency theories were in- adequate, what was the alternative?
During the summer of 1951 a friend mentioned to me the work of Lorenz on the following re- sponses of ducklings and goslings. Reading about this and related work on instinctive behaviour re- vealed a new world, one in which scientists of high calibre were investigating in non-human species many of the problems with which we were grappling in the human, in particular the relat- ively enduring relationships that develop in many species, first between young and parents and later between mated pairs, and some of the ways in which these developments can go awry. Could this work, I asked myself, cast light on a problem central to psychoanalysis, that of 'instinct' in humans?
Next followed a long phase during which I set about trying to master basic principles and to ap- ply them to our problems, starting with the nature of the child's tie to his mother. Here Lorenz's work on the following response of duck- lings and goslings (Lorenz, 1935) was of special interest. It showed that in some animal species a strong bond to an individual motherfigure could develop without the intermediary of food: for
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? ? ? these young birds are not fed by parents but feed themselves by catching insects. Here then was an alternative model to the traditional one, and one that had a number of features that seemed pos- sibly to fit the human case. Thereafter, as my grasp of ethological principles increased and I ap- plied them to one clinical problem after another, I became increasingly confident that this was a promising approach. Thus, having adopted this novel point of view, I decided to 'follow it up through the material as long as the application of it seems to yield results' (to borrow a phrase of Freud's).
From 1957, when The Nature of the Child's Tie to his Mother was first presented, through 1969 when Attachment appeared, until 1980 with the publication of Loss I concentrated on this task. The resulting conceptual framework2 is designed to accommodate all those phenomena to which Freud called attention--for example love rela- tions, separation anxiety, mourning, defence, an- ger, guilt, depression, trauma, emotional detach- ment, sensitive periods in early life--and so to of- fer an alternative to the traditional metapsycho- logy of psychoanalysis and to add yet another to the many variants of the clinical theory now
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? ? ? extant. How successful these ideals will prove only time will tell.
As Kuhn has emphasized, any novel conceptual framework is difficult to grasp, especially so for those long familiar with a previous one. Of the many difficulties met with in understanding the framework advocated, I describe only a few. One is that, instead of starting with a clinical syn- drome of later years and trying to trace its origins retrospectively, I have started with a class of childhood traumata and tried to trace the se- quelae prospectively. A second is that, instead of starting with the private thoughts and feelings of a patient, as expressed in free associations or play, and trying to build a theory of personality development from those data, I have started with observations of the behaviour of children in cer- tain sorts of defined situation, including records of the feelings and thoughts they express, and have tried to build a theory of personality devel- opment from there. Other difficulties arise from my use of concepts such as control system (in- stead of psychic energy) and developmental path- way (instead of libidinal phase), which, although now firmly established as key concepts in all the biological sciences, are still foreign to the
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? ? ? thinking of a great many psychologists and clinicians.
Having discarded the secondary-drive, depend- ency theory of the child's tie to his mother, and also the Kleinian alternative, a first task was to formulate a replacement. This led to the concept of attachment behaviour with its own dynamics distinct from the behaviour and dynamics of either feeding or sex, the two sources of human motivation for long widely regarded as the most fundamental. Strong support for this step soon came from Harlow's finding that, in another primate species--rhesus macaques--infants show a marked preference for a soft dummy 'mother', despite its providing no food, to a hard one that does provide it (Harlow and Zimmermann, 1959).
Attachment behaviour is any form of behaviour that results in a person attaining or maintaining proximity to some other clearly identified indi- vidual who is conceived as better able to cope with the world. It is most obvious whenever the person is frightened, fatigued, or sick, and is as- suaged by comforting and caregiving. At other times the behaviour is less in evidence. Neverthe- less for a person to know that an attachment fig- ure is available and responsive gives him a strong
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? ? ? and pervasive feeling of security, and so encour- ages him to value and continue the relationship. Whilst attachment behaviour is at its most obvi- ous in early childhood, it can be observed throughout the life cycle, especially in emergen- cies. Since it is seen in virtually all human beings (though in varying patterns), it is regarded as an integral part of human nature and one we share (to a varying extent) with members of other spe- cies. The biological function attributed to it is that of protection. To remain within easy access of a familiar individual known to be ready and willing to come to our aid in an emergency is clearly a good insurance policy--whatever our age.
By conceptualizing attachment in this way, as a fundamental form of behaviour with its own in- ternal motivation distinct from feeding and sex, and of no less importance for survival, the beha- viour and motivation are accorded a theoretical status never before given them--though parents and clinicians alike have long been intuitively aware of their importance. As already emphas- ized, the terms 'dependency' and 'dependency need' that have hitherto been used to refer to them have serious disadvantages. In the first
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? ? ? place 'dependency' has a perjorative flavour; in the second it does not imply an emotionally charged relationship to one or a very few clearly preferred individuals; and in the third no valu- able biological function has ever been attributed to it.
It is now 30 years since the notion of attach- ment was first advanced as a useful way of con- ceptualizing a form of behaviour of central im- portance not only to clinicians and to develop- mental psychologists but to every parent as well. During that time attachment theory has been greatly clarified and amplified. The most notable contributors have been Robert Hinde who, in ad- dition to his own publications (e. g. 1974), has constantly guided my own thinking, and Mary Ainsworth who, starting in the late 50s, has pion- eered empirical studies of attachment behaviour both in Africa (1963, 1967) and in the USA (Ainsworth and Wittig, 1969; Ainsworth et al. , 1978), and has also helped greatly to develop the- ory (e. g. 1969, 1982). Her work, together with that of her students and others influenced by her (which has expanded dramatically since this lec- ture was given and is described in some detail in Lecture 7), has led attachment theory to be
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? ? ? widely regarded as probably the best supported theory of socio-emotional development yet avail- able (Rajecki, Lamb, and Obmascher, 1978; Rut- ter, 1980; Parkes and Stevenson-Hinde, 1982; Sroufe, 1986).
Because my starting point in developing theory was observations of behaviour, some clinicians have assumed that the theory amounts to no more than a version of behaviourism. This mis- take is due in large part to the unfamiliarity of the conceptual framework proposed and in part to my own failure in early formulations to make clear the distinction to be drawn between an at- tachment and attachment behaviour. To say of a child (or older person) that he is attached to, or has an attachment to, someone means that he is strongly disposed to seek proximity to and con- tact with that individual and to do so especially in certain specified conditions. The disposition to behave in this way is an attribute of the attached person, a persisting attribute which changes only slowly over time and which is unaffected by the situation of the moment. Attachment behaviour, by contrast, refers to any of the various forms of behaviour that the person engages in from time
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? ? ? to time to obtain and/or maintain a desired proximity.
There is abundant evidence that almost every child habitually prefers one person, usually his mother-figure, to whom to go when distressed but that, in her absence, he will make do with someone else, preferably someone whom he knows well. On these occasions most children show a clear hierarchy of preference so that, in extremity and with no one else available, even a kindly stranger may be approached. Thus, whilst attachment behaviour may in differing circum- stances be shown to a variety of individuals, an enduring attachment, or attachment bond, is confined to very few. Should a child fail to show such clear discrimination, it is likely he is severely disturbed.
The theory of attachment is an attempt to ex- plain both attachment behaviour, with its episod- ic appearance and disappearance, and also the enduring attachments that children and other in- dividuals make to particular others. In this theory the key concept is that of behavioural system. This is conceived on the analogy of a physiologic- al system organized homeostatically to ensure that a certain physiological measure, such as
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? ? ? body temperature or blood pressure, is held between appropriate limits. In proposing the concept of a behavioural system to account for the way a child or older person maintains his re- lation to his attachment figure between certain limits of distance or accessibility, no more is done than to use these well-understood principles to account for a different form of homeostasis, namely one in which the set limits concern the organism's relation to clearly identified persons in, or other features of, the environment and in which the limits are maintained by behavioural instead of physiological means.
In thus postulating the existence of an internal psychological organization with a number of highly specific features, which include represent- ational models of the self and of attachment fig- ure(s), the theory proposed can be seen as having all the same basic properties as those that charac- terize other forms of structural theory, of which the variants of psychoanalysis are some of the best known, and that differentiate them so sharply from behaviourism in its many forms. Historically attachment theory was developed as a variant of object-relations theory.
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? ? ? The reason why in this account I have given so much space to the concept and theory of attach- ment is that, once those principles are grasped, there is little difficulty in understanding how the many other phenomena of central concern to clinicians are explained within the framework proposed.
Separation anxiety
For example, a new light is thrown on the prob- lem of separation anxiety, namely anxiety about losing, or becoming separated from, someone loved. Why 'mere separation' should cause anxi- ety has been a mystery. Freud wrestled with the problem and advanced a number of hypotheses (Freud, 1926; Strachey, 1959). Every other lead- ing analyst has done the same. With no means of evaluating them, many divergent schools of thought have proliferated.
The problem lies, I believe, in an unexamined assumption, made not only by psychoanalysts but by more traditional psychiatrists as well, that fear is aroused in a mentally healthy person only in situations that everyone would perceive as in- trinsically painful or dangerous, or that are per- ceived so by a person only because of his having
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? ? ? become conditioned to them. Since fear of separ- ation and loss does not fit this formula, analysts have concluded that what is feared is really some other situation; and a great variety of hypotheses have been advanced.
The difficulties disappear, however, when an ethological approach is adopted. For it then be- comes evident that man, like other animals, re- sponds with fear to certain situations, not be- cause they carry a high risk of pain or danger, but because they signal an increase of risk. Thus, just as animals of many species, including man, are disposed to respond with fear to sudden move- ment or a marked change in level of sound or light because to do so has survival value, so are many species, including man, disposed to re- spond to separation from a potentially caregiving figure and for the same reasons.
When separation anxiety is seen in this light, as a basic human disposition, it is only a small step to understand why it is that threats to abandon a child, often used as a means of control, are so very terrifying. Such threats, and also threats of suicide by a parent, are, we now know, common causes of intensified separation anxiety. Their ex- traordinary neglect in traditional clinical theory
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? ? ? is due, I suspect, not only to an inadequate theory of separation anxiety but to a failure to give prop- er weight to the powerful effects, at all ages, of real-life events.
Not only do threats of abandonment create in- tense anxiety but they also arouse anger, often also of intense degree, especially in older children and adolescents. This anger, the function of which is to dissuade the attachment figure from carrying out the threat, can easily become dys- functional. It is in this light, I believe, that we can understand such absurdly paradoxical behaviour as the adolescent, reported by Burnham (1965), who, having murdered his mother, exclaimed, 'I couldn't stand to have her leave me. '
Other pathogenic family situations are readily understood in terms of attachment theory. One fairly common example is when a child has such a close relationship with his mother that he has difficulty in developing a social life outside the family, a relationship sometimes described as symbiotic. In a majority of such cases the cause of the trouble can be traced to the mother who, hav- ing grown up anxiously attached as a result of a difficult childhood, is now seeking to make her own child her attachment figure. So far from the
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? ? ? child being over-indulged, as is sometimes asser- ted, he is being burdened with having to care for his own mother. Thus, in these cases, the normal relationship of attached child to caregiving par- ent is found to be inverted.
Mourning
Whilst separation anxiety is the usual response to a threat or some other risk of loss, mourning is the usual response to a loss after it has occurred. During the early years of psychoanalysis a num- ber of analysts identified losses, occurring during childhood or in later life, as playing a causal role in emotional disturbance, especially in depressive disorders; and by 1950 a number of theories about the nature of mourning, and other re- sponses to loss, had been advanced. Moreover, much sharp controversy had already been en- gendered. This controversy, which began during the 30s, arose from the divergent theories about infant development that had been elaborated in Vienna and London. Representative examples of the different points of view about mourning are those expressed in Helene Deutsch's Absence of Grief (1937) and Melanie Klein's Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States (1940).
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? ? ? Whereas Deutsch held that, due to inadequate psychic development, children are unable to mourn, Klein held that they not only can mourn but do. In keeping with her strong emphasis on feeding, however, she held that the object mourned was the lost breast; and, in addition, she attributed a complex fantasy-life to the in- fant. Opposite though these theoretical positions are, both were constructed using the same meth- odology, namely by inferences about earlier phases of psychological development based on observations made during the analysis of older, and emotionally disturbed, subjects. Neither the- ory had been checked by direct observation of how ordinary children of different ages respond to a loss.
Approaching the problem prospectively, as I did, led me to different conclusions.