Love at Goon Park (10 page)

Spitz took his film from medical society meeting to medical society meeting in New York. In his eloquent book on the importance of
early relationships,
Becoming Attached,
psychologist Robert Karen writes that one prominent analyst marched up to Spitz with tears in his eyes, saying, “How could you do this to us?” The film did indeed cause the debate over mother-child relationships to steam. Could Spitz be right? Could some fifty years of psychiatry be so wrong? Even eight years after
Grief
was produced, the quarrel still simmered. Critics shredded the film all over again as emotionally overwrought and nonscientific. Even in the late 1960s, researchers were arguing over whether he was right. But it was almost impossible, as Spitz had known, to argue those weeping children away.

Another film was circulating by this time, James Robertson's documentary of children in medical care. It was a cheap little film, too. Robertson estimated that it cost $80 to produce. His was a different story from Spitz's—and the same. Robertson wanted to tackle children in hospital wards and what it cost them to feel abandoned by their parents. This was still, of course, during the time of brief weekly visits. He called his film
A Two-Year-Old Goes to the Hospital.

For a child at that time, hospitalization was, essentially, isolation from home and family and friends and everything that might have given a sick child security and support. Robertson's film followed a poised little toddler named Laura. He said once that she was so naturally composed that he worried that her very temperament would render his case meaningless. And Laura did indeed go easily into her hospital bed. But by the next week, she was begging her parents to take her home; and the next, pleading with them to stay; and by the next, hardly responding to them at all, just her lips trembling as they left her behind. At the end of the film, she was like a frozen child, silent and unresponsive. Months later, Laura, back home and secure again, saw Robertson's film, turned to her mother, and said angrily, “Why did you leave me like that?”

Robertson showed his film to an audience of three hundred medical workers in England. The initial reaction was concentrated fury. The hospital staffers felt personally attacked. Many demanded that the film be banned. “I was immediately assailed for lack of integrity,”
Robertson recalled. “I had produced an untrue record. I had slandered the professions.” In 1953, Robertson became a World Health Organization consultant and brought his film to the United States for a six-week tour. Here, again, he ran into a solid wall of defensiveness, as if the ghosts of John Watson and Luther Holt were rising up in revolt. Robertson was assured that the problems he had documented were British ones: “American children were less cosseted and better able to withstand separations.” And his simple solution—let parents stay with their children—was rejected as wrong-headed.

Robertson, though, had an unusual ally who liked the film and the message behind it. Edward John Mostyn Bowlby, born in 1907, was the son of a baronet. His father had been surgeon to the royal family. The son had been raised in time-honored upper-class style—a nanny until he was eight and then off to boarding school. It hadn't been a happy experience. John Bowlby later told his wife that he wouldn't send a dog to boarding school. Bowlby's father had wanted his son to follow him as a physician. He obediently entered medical school at Cambridge, but finally rebelled against doing as he was bid. Bowlby dropped out of the university and spent two years working in schools for troubled children. That time, and the almost heroic struggles of children seeking some kind of balance, decided Bowlby on a career in psychiatry. In 1929, he entered medical school at University College Hospital to train as an analyst. In time, he would indeed become a smart and thoughtful psychoanalyst. He figures in this story, though, because he would also become more—a brilliant theoretician, a world-class crusader.

Psychoanalysis belonged to one man at the time, and that was Sigmund Freud. When Bowlby began training as a psychiatrist, Freud was seventy-three years old, living in an affluent section of Vienna. Within the next decade, the Nazis would confiscate Freud's home, his money, his publishing house, and his library, and kill all his sisters in the gas chambers. He, his wife, and his children escaped to England in 1938, but Freud never recovered. He died of cancer within a year of arrival on safe soil. Yet even in the last ragged years of his life,
Freud cast a long and powerful shadow. He still does, of course, more than sixty years after his death. In Bowlby's time, it was a living shadow, as if some smoky image of Freud were still standing by, frowning at one's mistakes and one's doubts about his theories. His daughter, Anna Freud, helped keep his influence alive. She became one of the dominant psychoanalysts in post–World War II Britain. But Freud's ideas stood on their own power. They were potent enough, provocative enough to continue challenging the field indefinitely. The years since Freud died have stayed full of his ideas—of the subconscious mind, of sexual repression, of the power of a fantasy life. The smoky figure has faded, but not away, ever, entirely.

The aspect of Freud's theories that Bowlby found so difficult had to do with reality. Freud had declared that the unconscious in the adult is “in large measure made up of the child slumbering within, the child who dreams and fantasizes of a better life, so intensely that sometimes the adult cannot distinguish the two.” And neither, Freud suggests, could the child. In other words, a child might be most heavily affected by his fantasy life and not by real events. This would mean that what a parent might do to a child was not nearly as important as the child's internal perceptions and desires and fantasies about that parent. A mother's touch might be meant as affection, for instance, but be turned into sexual dreaming by the child. If a child reported sexual abuse, then, it might only be the manifestation of desire. Perhaps the memory of a seduction was actually the memory of a wish. A sexual dream woven out of equal parts imagination and longing. Young children, Freud said, have a potent erotic drive that causes them to
want sex
with their opposite-sex parents. Reality doesn't have to enter into it at all.

Freud didn't say that early connections were meaningless. Shortly before his death, he wrote that the tie with the mother was “unique, without parallel, laid down unalterably for a whole lifetime” as the prototype for all other relationships. On the other hand, he still said, that unparalleled relationship didn't have to be entirely
real.
The child might be influenced by his perceptions of something his
mother had done, or his dreams of her, or even those lingering erotic fantasies. Spitz could argue that baby needed mother; Goldfarb could argue that children must learn affection when young; Bakwin might insist that babies are emotional creatures. But if doctors were looking for professional support in keeping mother and child physically together, they were not yet going to find it in the community of Freudian psychoanalysis. Anna Freud once explained it like this: “We do not deal with happenings in the real world but with their repercussions in the mind.”

So when John Bowlby trained in psychiatry, he was startled to find that “it was regarded as almost outside the proper interest of an analyst to give systematic attention to a person's real experiences.” It didn't take Bowlby long to realize that he couldn't work that way. His time with the maladjusted school children had convinced him of the power of real life. He knew that how parents treated children—if they had parents—mattered intensely. In 1948, working for the World Health Organization, Bowlby took his stand, beginning with a report titled
Maternal Care and Mental Health.
In it, he gathered together his allies. The report rings with the work of Bakwin, Goldfarb, Spitz, Bender, and other observations, including Bowlby's own.

Scientists who knew Bowlby remember him as almost a stereotype of the British gentleman, sometimes arrogant, dry in humor and tone, unsentimental, outwardly cool. But in the WHO report, he is passionate. Anger hums in the pages like electricity through a wire: “The mothering of a child is not something which can be arranged by roster; it is a live human relationship which alters the characters of both partners. The provision of a proper diet calls for more than calories and vitamins; we need to enjoy our food if it is to do us good. In the same way, the provision of mothering cannot be considered in terms of hours per day but only in terms of the enjoyment of each other's company which mother and child obtain.”

Another concept, beloved by the Freudians, was that the baby's first relationship was not with the mother as a whole, but with her breast. Infants, so the thinking went, lacked the mental capacity to
form a relationship with a whole person, or even to keep the concept of a person. When Freud wrote of mother love, he also explained that the breast that feeds is an infant's first erotic object, and that “love has its origin in attachment to the satisfied need for nourishment.” Bowlby had studied under another dedicated Freudian psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, who agreed that the most important “being” in an infant's life was the breast. The mammary relationship, so to speak, would define the child's connection to its mother. This was Freud's “oral stage” of development, the mixing of nourishment with a faint tinge of erotica. After World War II, when she had worked with displaced children, Anna Freud was more willing to discuss the notion that a child might love a mother. But she didn't believe that bond began in affection: “He forms an attachment to food—milk—and developing further from this point, to the person who feeds him and the love of the food becomes the basis of love for the mother.”

This dovetailed beautifully with psychology's faith in the conditioned response—the baby is hungry, his hunger drive is satisfied, he becomes conditioned to associate his mother with food. Mother and breast are equal; good mother means good feeding. It was another perfect meeting of the minds in defining human behavior. There was Freud and his followers and their faith in fantasy and food. There was the conviction of mainstream psychology that affectionate mothering was irrelevant and that children could and should be trained. There was the medical profession's reluctance to believe that health and emotions were in any way connected. “It's hard to believe now,” says psychologist Bill Mason of the University of California-Davis, now an expert in social relations, “but when I first started working in Harry Harlow's lab, the prevailing view in psychology was that a baby's relationship to the mother was based entirely on being fed by her.”

By the late 1950s, despite the films and arguments and reports, the baby and the mother remained loveless in psychology. John Bowlby was running out of patience. He published another paper, or
you could say another salvo, titled “The Nature of Child's Tie to His Mother” that was flatly grounded in the everyday reality of touch and affection. It was also his first attempt at putting forth his own theory of mother-child relationships, today known far and wide as attachment theory. And what attachment theory essentially says is that being loved matters—and, more than that, it matters who loves us and whom we love in return. It's not just a matter of the warm body holding the bottle; it's not object love at all; we love specific people and we need them to love us back. And in the case of the child's tie to the mother, it matters that the mother loves that baby and that the baby knows it. When you are a very small child, love needs to be as tangible as warm arms around you and as audible as the lull of a gentle voice at night.

Yes, Bowlby said, sure, food's important. But we don't build our relationships based on food. We don't love a person merely because she comes in carrying a bottle of milk or formula. We don't seek her out, clinging to her, sob when she leaves, just because she can feed us. That's lower in the hierarchy of needs—in the terminology of psychology—a secondary drive. Love is primary; attachment is primary. In Bowlby's view, a whole and healthy baby will want his parent nearby and will work for it—“many of the infant's and young child's instinctual responses are to ensure proximity to the adult.” Babies aren't stupid; they know who will watch over them best. In attachment theory, a plethora of the infant's behaviors target mom or dad: sucking, clinging, following, crying, and smiling—perhaps cooing and babbling as well—are all part of the instinctive way a child tries to bind his parent tight.

There's a Darwinian side to this, Bowlby said, because a nearby parent undoubtedly increases the survival chances of the offspring. Without these behaviors, if parents lost interest, “the child would die, especially the child that was born on the primitive savannas where people first evolved.” And, yes, obviously, food is necessary to survival, but it's a byproduct of the relationship. A baby knows that if the mother is there, she will provide food. Equally important,
Bowlby said, if the mother isn't there, not only is there no food but no protection against predators, and cold, and all the dangers of the night. So you might logically expect that we would evolve to be afraid and even despairing if our parents suddenly disappear. If you see a baby who appears to be suffering in his loneliness, Bowlby said, then you are seeing reality.

Push a child away, abandon it, and you do not see a well-disciplined miniature adult. You see the sobbing child in Spitz's film; James Robertson's Laura, clinging to her parents' hands; Bakwin's grave and shrunken babies in their screened-off beds. Bowlby's studies showed that, as children grew older, became toddlers, this need didn't lessen at all. The older children were just more aware. They knew their mothers better. They grieved when their mothers left them. They mourned a loss. They wanted their mothers back. In Bowlby's theory, this was a natural childhood reaction, like fear of the dark, of loud noises, strange people, and shadowy forests. If a baby's call wasn't answered, the child was left to fend for herself, make her own defenses. This could be part of what Goldfarb saw in the emotionally cold children from orphanages. Their emotional distance might be self-protective, Bowlby agreed, because it buffered away grief and loss. But it could also be destructive because “it sealed off the personality not only from despair but from love and other emotions.”