chapter 1
When the Tiger Comes: Origin of the Attachment System
Every time I attended Harry Reis's class on attachment theory, I was late. That was because the start of Harry's class at the University of Rochester conflicted with the end of a writing class I was teaching at a nearby college, and even if I made all the lights and quickly found a parking space, the soonest I could get there was ten minutes after class began. So I'd enter the amphitheater-style lecture hall quietly through a side door and take a seat in the back.
That turned out to be an advantage, though, because from the back of the room I could see all one hundred or so students, including who was paying attention and who wasn't. That first day, I noticed, in the seats nearby, a young man reading e-mail, a young woman on Facebook, and a young man checking stock quotes.
"This is a damn good theory," Harry was saying as I took my seat that first day. He stood six foot three, had a deep, resonant voice, and spoke with a slow, deliberate cadence. "We think it explains an unbelievable amount of human behavior: about our childhoods, about intimate adult relationships, about nearly all relationships throughout our lives."
When I'd first realized Harry was one of the country's leading relationship researchers and that he lived and taught about attachment theory in my hometown of Rochester, New York, I invited him for coffee. Halfway through our meeting, a middle-aged woman sitting at the next table suddenly turned around to us and nearly shouted, "Wow! I'd pay to be at your table! What you're sayin' is so true. Wished I'd known all that when I was younger-it would've saved me a heap of grief!"
Oddly, Harry hadn't seemed surprised by the interruption.
"People hear about this attachment stuff," he told me, "and say, 'Yeah, that's what I want to study. That's what I want to understand.'"
I wanted to understand my own attachment style and how it may have been affecting my relationships and behavior. I'd been through a divorce and then a long-term romance. If knowing more about attachment could help me find a satisfying, stable relationship, that's what I was after. Later, my interests would broaden to include understanding how attachment influences people throughout their lives and throughout society: their relationships with family and friends, how they raise their kids, get along at work, cope with loss, and much more. Could attachment theory be a key to unlocking a deeper understanding of our behavior and everyday lives?
Onto a large screen, Harry projected photos of parents-human and nonhuman-holding and protecting their babies: a mother carried her child on her back; a father held his son on his knee; a cat nursed two kittens; a polar bear sheltered her baby under her body.
"Let's look at this first slide," Harry said. "Notice that in all these different species, there is a physically close, protective bond between an adult caregiver and an infant."
The room was quiet except for the clicking of a hundred students typing on laptops. Taking notes in longhand, I was a visitor from another generation.
Harry's next slide showed a black-and-white photo of a middle-aged British man looking distinguished in a tweed sport coat over a wool sweater.
"In Britain during World War II," Harry began, "fathers were off at war, and during the bombing of London many mothers were killed, so there were a rather large number of children brought to orphanages. And working in the orphanages was a young British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst named John Bowlby."
The red dot of Harry's laser pointed at the image of the distinguished-looking Brit.
"Bowlby was struck by the behavior of these infants," he continued. "What he observed was that even though the orphans were housed in a clean, germ-free environment, were fed well and given good medical care, they didn't thrive. They were underweight. They became depressed. Some died."
The young woman in front of me who had been on Facebook looked up from her laptop.
"And Bowlby observed another thing," said Harry. "He was struck by the way these infants called for, cried for, and watched the door for their mothers, what he called 'searching behaviors.' And he took that to be the human equivalent of what animals do-you know, if you've ever seen a young kitten or a puppy and some scary person walks in the room, what do they do? They run immediately back to their mother for safety."
Monkeys
Harry didn't mention it that day, but at about the same time Bowlby was noting the effects of maternal deprivation on orphaned children, Harry Harlow, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, was observing a related phenomenon in monkeys. His work would later influence Bowlby.
In his most famous experiment, Harlow separated baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers at birth. He then provided them a choice of two surrogate "mothers": one made of wire and holding a bottle of milk, the other also of wire but covered with a soft cloth and without any milk. The result? Most of the time, the infant monkeys clung to the soft-cloth mother-and ran to her whenever they were frightened; they used the wire mothers only for milk.
"These findings are legendary in psychology," Lee Kirkpatrick has written, "as well they should be. They demonstrated convincingly that, at least in rhesus monkeys, infants' interest in their mothers was not reducible to the need or desire for food or breast; [instead,] they spontaneously sought physical contact and comfort."
Babies and Their Caregivers
There is no such thing as a baby-meaning that if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone. A baby cannot exist alone but is essentially part of a relationship.
-pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott
Harry Reis took a couple of steps away from the lecturer's table and faced the class.
"You know," he said, "horses can run within a day or two of birth. That's one of their ways of surviving. But we can't do that. Human babies have the longest period of vulnerability of any species on earth. For seven or eight years of your life, if there isn't someone taking care of you, forget it-you're dead. If a tiger comes, you have no chance of survival."
Harry paused, scanning the class.
"Okay, so you're an infant," he continued, "and there's a tiger coming. What's your way of surviving? If you can find a caregiver and keep that caregiver close-someone who'll provide you food and shelter, and when the tiger comes, take you away from danger-this would be your way of surviving.
"So how do you locate and then keep close to that caregiver?"
As he moved toward an answer, I felt the class's tension rise.
"How do you find and hold close to that caregiver?" he repeated.
"You cry!" he shouted. "You cry, meaning, 'Something's going on that's scaring me! I want somebody to protect me!'"
Babies use other "seeking behaviors" too, Harry explained, such as turning their heads, following with their eyes, and reaching with their hands. "Bowlby argued that these behaviors-crying, staying near the caregiver, etc.-were designed to maintain physical closeness because infants who did that were more likely to survive."
These behaviors of babies, in other words, are not random. They are biologically designed to help a human infant survive by locating and attaching to a competent, reliable caregiver.
Harry again pointed the laser at the photo of the man in the tweed jacket.
"And the profound idea Bowlby came up with," he continued, "and in retrospect this seems like such a simple idea, is that there is an evolutionary system called the attachment system.
"The attachment system was designed," he explained, "to do one very simple thing: to create and keep physical closeness between infant and caregiver. Infants who displayed these behaviors and caregivers who responded were the ones whose genes were more likely to survive to the next generation. Infants who didn't do it, who said, in effect, 'pretty tiger' and wanted to go talk to the tiger, or caregivers who were more concerned about themselves and didn't go to pick up the infant, their genes did not get passed on.
"So it's a very, very simple, straightforward evolutionary adaptation," he said. "And you all have it. You don't have to go to the store to buy the program called Attachment System. It's hardwired into you. You come with it already installed."
As Harry said this, a young man next to me, playing Tetris, looked up.
Attachment Figure: A Secure Base and Safe Haven, in Close Proximity
"When we say a child has an 'attachment figure,'" Professor Reis explained, "we mean a person-and it's usually the mother-who fulfills three essential functions of the attachment system. The first is called 'proximity maintenance,' which means the caregiver is someone the child keeps close for safety and comfort. The next two are 'secure base' and 'safe haven': children need a secure base from which to explore and a safe haven to come back to when life gets scary."
And true attachment figures, whether for a child or adult, meet two additional criteria: that the threat of separation from the attachment figure causes anxiety, often accompanied by protest (in the case of a child that would be crying), and that the loss of the attachment figure causes grief.
"Okay," Harry continued, "so infants have this attachment system, which acts like a sort of radar. When something threatening happens-tiger, hunger-the radar activates and the infant thinks, 'Is my attachment figure near? Is she attentive, able to interpret my signals of distress, and available to provide the help I need?'"
Typically, children have multiple attachment figures. These may include both parents, maybe a grandparent or two, an older sibling, and regular care providers. From the child's perspective, however, these people are not interchangeable. A hierarchy of attachment figures exists, with one special primary figure (usually the mother) at the top. "If the child were suddenly frightened," notes Lee Kirkpatrick, "and all of his or her attachment figures were lined up in a row, the primary attachment figure is the one to whom the child would run first."
Mental Models
In the first years of life . . . a child extracts patterns from his relationships . . . [and] stores an impression of what love feels like.
-psychiatrist Thomas Lewis and colleagues
"Bowlby believed that as you grow up," Harry continued to the class, "you form beliefs about what you can expect from significant others-that is, you learn, 'This is how powerful, caregiving people are going to relate to me.' These beliefs stem from our earliest experiences with attachment figures, mostly in the first two years. And these beliefs, once formed, form a 'mental model' in the child-actually create patterns in the brain-that will influence what that individual expects of relationships and how he behaves in relationships, not just in childhood but over the whole of a lifetime, or as Bowlby put it, 'from the cradle to the grave.'"
And it's these mental models, Harry noted, that cause the experiences of the infant to later affect that individual's behavior as an adult. "This points up one place where Bowlby differed with Freud," Harry added. "Freud believed that an awful lot of stuff that went on was in the infant's mind-you know, the infant imagined this libidinal attachment to his or her mother. Bowlby didn't buy that. Instead, Bowlby felt that the actual interactions that occur between a mother and child are what's important, and that the mental models formed from those interactions are what transform the infant's early experience into personality traits that last a lifetime.
"These early beliefs are about the self in relation to others," Harry continued. "Am I lovable? Am I someone other people are going to value and care for? How comfortable am I being close, depending on another person, making myself vulnerable to another person? When I need others, will they be there for me?
"If the answer is yes," he went on, "the infant experiences a sense of security." Harry took a loudly exaggerated deep breath, imitating a relieved infant whose mother had perhaps just picked them up and run into a cave to protect them from a tiger. "'Okay, no big deal. I'm fine,' which produces a sense of confidence that nothing dangerous is going to happen. The radar gets shut down and everything's okay."
This person, explained Harry, will come out of childhood trusting that others are generally available and responsive, and will think, "I can trust people. I can allow myself to be close to people. I'm not afraid of intimacy."
This is a secure attachment.
"But what if the radar system says no?" asked Harry. "What if the child does not feel protected by a competent and reliable attachment figure?"
In that case, there are two defensive responses.
"First," Harry said, "is when the infant cries and cries, and the caregiver just doesn't give a damn, doesn't respond, leaves the infant alone. No proximity, no safe haven, no secure base. This child may think"-and here he channeled the voice of a frightened infant-"'There is no caregiver available who can take care of me and who will deal with this threat for me. I'm an infant; I can't even crawl. I'll stick around this caregiver because what other choice do I have? But I'm not going to get too close and I'm not going to protest too much because I've already discovered these things don't work.'
"This individual," Harry continued, "whose caregiver is pretty much always unresponsive, learns to shut down and avoid intimacy."
This is an "insecure avoidant attachment."
"The other defensive response," he said, "occurs in infants when the caregiver is inconsistent-sometimes responding, sometimes not. The caregiver is sometimes there, sometimes not; sometimes provides a safe haven and secure base, but sometimes does not. This infant says, 'I can't figure out how I get my caregiver to come over and take care of me. I don't know what to do. I'm feeling abandoned, so I better just put all my energy into trying to get that person over here right now.'
"Instead of shutting down," Harry explained, "this infant protests and cries even more. He clings and does everything possible to signal that he is really, really distressed and, 'By God, you're my caregiver and you just gotta take care of me!'"
This is an "insecure anxious attachment."
Drawing from a large number of studies, among the US population about 55 percent of people tend to be relatively secure, 25 percent relatively avoidant, and 20 percent relatively anxious.
"These are pretty constant results," Harry said.
They are also pretty consistent universally. Studies show similar breakdowns among attachment styles across the globe, with only slight variations among Western and non-Western nations, developed and developing societies.
Copyright © 2018 by Peter Lovenheim. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
