15

What Is It about Love?

Cover of John Bowlby’s book of 1951, in which he studied effects of children being loved, and of them losing their parents.

John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth studied how attachments of infants with primary caregivers are central to development. One-year-olds have three main styles of attachment that carry forward into adulthood. One is Securely Attached; people with this style are comfortable and trustful in their intimate relationships. Among those who are insecure are the Ambivalently Attached, who want to relate, but can be angry and rejecting. Those who are insecure with an Anxiously Attached style want to rely only on themselves. Donald Winnicott proposed that as infants grow, a space comes into being between infant and caregiver, a space-in-between. It is in this space that culture grows. Long-term romantic love can include attachment, but is a uniquely human mode. It’s an important aspiration for many people, and can provide a strong sense of meaning in life.

Attachment and Beyond

Apart from the widespread acceptance that whatever our gender, ethnic group, or religious background, we all have basic human rights, another legacy of World War II was recognition of the sad state of many orphaned children.1 In London, during the war Anna Freud (Sigmund Freud’s daughter) and Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham (granddaughter of Charles Tiffany, the New York jeweler) set up the Hampstead War Nurseries, in response to the destruction of families during the blitz on London.²

With the loss of parents, children would tend first to protest, then perhaps look for them everywhere, then become sad. Often later, they would sink into apathy and despair. The World Health Organization commissioned John Bowlby to make a report on what children had experienced during the War, with air raids, losses, and evacuations. His book of 1951, Child Care and the Growth of Love, the cover of which appears at the opening of this chapter, derives from that report. In this book Bowlby wrote: “What is believed to be essential for mental health is that the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship with [a] mother (or permanent mother substitute …) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment.”³

The early relationship with a mother or other caregiver provides a foundation for later relationships, for what Michael Tomasello calls shared intentionality. Those who have experienced love as a child find it easier to love others when they are adults. Those who have been separated, or neglected, or ill-treated, find it more difficult to form trusting relationships in adulthood, and often they find it difficult to take part in society in ways that others find acceptable. Such unfortunate people can become mentally ill, perhaps act in criminal ways, or both. Bowlby’s idea was that the foundation for being able to relate cooperatively with others—sexual partners, offspring, friends, colleagues, acquaintances—in adulthood is a continuous and affectionate relationship with a mother or mother substitute during the first three years of life.

Bowlby proposed the concept of attachment: a biologically based system, in which an infant keeps close to a caregiver, and in which the caregiver cares for and protects the infant during the period when the child is most vulnerable.4 The opposite was “maternal deprivation,” a term Bowlby used in the title of the second part of his 1951 book. There has been a great deal of research, now, on the subject, starting with, and being strongly influenced by, the work of Michael Rutter.

Think of it like this. Mammals are born live, with infants fitted by evolution to be nourished by mothers’ milk. This is a physiological adaptation. Attachment is a parallel psychological adaptation. It is based on emotions of trustful security when the mother or other caregiver is present. It doesn’t need to be the biological mother; it can be a father, or someone unrelated to the baby. This presence enables the baby to feel safe, and able to explore the world from the secure home base of the relationship. When the caregiver is absent, the infant tends to feel intense anxiety, and loses confidence.

John Bowlby was born in London into an upper-class family.⁵ As a child he saw his mother for only an hour a day, after tea, though he saw her more in the summer. His own primary caregiver was a nanny with whom he was close. Bowlby became a doctor, and while still a medical student he started training in psychoanalysis. He became a psychiatrist with a special interest in children and their separations from parents. During World War II, he was a doctor in the army, but immediately afterward (drawing on work by Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, and others) he focused again on problems of separation of children from their parents.

The concept of attachment came to Bowlby when biologist-friends introduced him to the works of Konrad Lorenz on imprinting, a phenomenon in which, after hatching, a gosling comes to recognize as its mother the first largish sound-making object that moves around. Lorenz sometimes arranged that this object was himself. You may have seen photos of him walking across a field, followed by a gaggle of goslings who think he is their mother-goose.

The idea of attachment as the mammalian equivalent of imprinting came to Bowlby—as Mary Ainsworth later related—in a flash of inspiration.6 This idea of the foundational status of early relationships has been the important link between biology and psychoanalysis. More and more, Bowlby regarded children’s difficulties as based on their real history in infancy, though many psychoanalysts emphasized their patients’ fantasies. One result was that Bowlby was ostracized by many psychoanalysts in London.

In terms of empirical research, it is clear that infancy is indeed the main time for forming attachments, which become templates for later intimate relationships. Bowlby’s idea, however, that there is a window of just the baby’s first three years in which attachment can occur, is too narrow. Although difficulties of forming a first close relationship increase with age, it is now recognized that even with disturbed early experience, people can form decent relationships beyond infancy.

Styles of Attachment

Mary Ainsworth earned her PhD in Toronto, Canada, and during the War she, too, was in the army.⁷ After the War, she moved with her husband to London, where he completed his PhD. She answered an advertisement in the Times, and got a job at the Ta vistock Clinic, working with Bowlby on children’s separations from parents. She became Bowlby’s principal colleague. Later, Mary Ainsworth’s husband got a job in Uganda, so she moved with him, and studied mothers and babies there. She found that, while most characteristics were the same as in North America and England, there were some differences. After Uganda the couple moved to Baltimore, in the United States, and it was there, with Mary Blehar, Everett Waters, and Sally Wall, that Ainsworth devised the Strange Situation Test.

Figure 21. An infant’s mother leaves the room in the Strange Situation Test, devised by Mary Ainsworth and colleagues. Source: © Susan Beattie, with permission.

The Strange Situation was a room in Ainsworth’s laboratory, with a couple of chairs and some toys: it is strange to the child. At first the child is in the room with her or his mother, who sits quietly. Then a stranger enters, and also sits quietly. Then the mother leaves the room. You can see a picture of this in figure 21. Then the stranger tries to interact with the child. The mother then returns and the stranger leaves.

Ainsworth and her colleagues identified three styles of attachment. The first style is Secure. Infants with this style are distressed when their mother leaves the room, but when she returns they seek her out and allow themselves to be comforted by her. Then there are two styles of Insecure Attachment. Some infants are Insecurely Attached with a style called Ambivalent. They want to be near their mother when she returns, but they do not allow themselves to be comforted by her. Instead they show a great deal of anger. Infants who are Insecurely Attached in an Avoidant way seem barely to notice when the mother leaves and they make no attempt to interact with her when she returns. They appear to be unconcerned.

Working Models from Infancy to Adulthood

Since the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth, attachment and its effects in adolescence and adulthood have become the largest topics of research in social development. Attachment is based on an idea of Sigmund Freud, that love in infancy—feeling loved by a parent and being able to love that parent—forms a template for later intimate relationships.8 Bowlby proposed that the child forms an internal working model of relating.⁹ This model is a set of inner beliefs about what to expect in relationships, for instance about whether the other person is to be trusted. These beliefs develop too early to be verbalized, but if put into words, for a Secure person, they would include something like this. “This person is there for me. If I am frightened, I know this person will protect me.” For an Avoidant infant, the beliefs are something like this. “When anything seems threatening, don’t trust anyone. I will be wary, and rely only on myself.” Ideas of these kinds form foundations for subsequent intimate relationships. You may hear someone announce that “We live alone and we die alone.” Although this person may think this is a deep truth, it’s more likely to be an externalization of an internal working model of relating formed in the person’s early years.10

Critical tests of the idea of internal working models as seen in different attachment styles have been made in research on whether styles of attachment carry through into adulthood. Carol George, Nancy Kaplan, and Mary Main developed the Adult Attachment Interview: an hour-long semi-structured interview in which people are asked to talk about past relationships with parents or caregivers. They are asked, for instance, to list five adjectives to describe these relationships with parents, to talk about what they would do when they were upset in childhood, and about whether they ever felt rejected. The interviewer also asks people to talk about their current relationships, so that researchers can understand their participants’ internal working model in their adult forms.

Main and her colleagues concluded that, based on the Adult Attachment Interview, there were three styles. They called one style Secure/Autonomous. People with this style talked about their early relationships with objectivity and balance. They gave a coherent account of their childhood experiences, including both the good and the bad. In a second style, the people were called Preoccupied. The account they gave was incoherent. Some of their experiences from childhood were traumatic and still overwhelming for them. A third style was Dismissing. They gave brief and distanced accounts of their childhood. They didn’t remember many events, and showed no emotion when talking about them.

In a 1991 study, Peter Fonagy and colleagues gave the Adult Attachment Interview to mothers and the Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Test to their one-year-old infants. They found that 75 percent of the women who were securely attached had babies who were also securely attached, and 73 percent of women who were Preoccupied or Dismissing had infants who were Ambivalent or Avoidant.

Everett Waters and his colleagues followed up with people from a Strange Situation Test that they had been given when they were one year old to an Adult Attachment Interview when they were aged twenty-one. In three groups of people, different results were found. One group consisted of sixty white middle-class people. For them, 72 percent maintained their style of Secure or Insecure attachment.11 For those whose style changed, the switch was associated with a negative life event, such as childhood abuse, loss of a parent, or parental divorce. A second group was of thirty people in a research project on alternative lifestyles: twelve of them were from conventional families with parents who were married, while the other eighteen were from unconventional families, with single parents, or unmarried parents, or parents who lived in a commune or in an unattached way.¹² The stability of those from unconventional backgrounds was similar to that of people from conventional backgrounds. Overall in this study 77 percent of people maintained their Secure as compared with Insecure status. In a third study, there were fifty-seven people from a background of poverty and developmental risk.¹³ For these people, continuity of attachment status was not found. People in this group had, however, suffered high rates of severe life events, such as childhood abuse, as well as high rates of depression in their mothers, and family malfunctioning. Any of these might have been responsible for changes of attachment style. In an even longer follow-up, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz have found that men who came from families with warm relationships as children had greater intimacy with spouses when they reached their seventies and eighties.

So, people’s abilities to take part in activities that involve shared intentions are affected. We can even see mental illness as born partly of genetic temperament, but partly, too, from experience in relationships in which intentions were not shared, in which there was disappointment, or fear, or loss.

Attachment is just one aspect of the relationship with parents. It is based on protection from harm.¹⁴ One can see its importance in evolution. Just as important, however, is how sensitive parents are to their children. Attachment and sensitivity both involve joint intentions. In attachment, when it works well, if the child is worried or sad and the caregiver is there, the child is comforted. For sensitivity, when the child wants to engage, the caregiver does so, takes part in whatever the little one wants.

In a study of maternal sensitivity, Vivian Zayas and colleagues found that the greater the sensitivity of mothers when their toddlers were eighteen months old, the less avoidant the people were seen to be with friends and in romantic relationships when they were twenty-two-year-old adults. In contrast, when their mothers had been more controlling, as adults they were more avoidant of friends, as well as showing more avoidance and more anxiety in relation to romantic partners.

Falling in Love

In the West, falling in love was depicted in the medieval poem The Romance of the Rose, by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. It starts with a young man who dreams that he strolls beside the river of life, then enters the garden of courtly love, in which he sees a beautiful lady. The young man’s consciousness is represented as a succession of characters: Hope, Sweet Thought, Reason, and so on. The lady, too, appears as a succession of characters: Bielacoil (her conversational self), Status (her sense of her aristocratic position), and Pity. When the young man makes a false step, these characters disappear, to be replaced by the character Fear, or Shame. As the young man reaches toward the Rose at the center of the garden, the god of Love fires an arrow at him, and makes him Love’s servant.

Elaine Hatfield and Richard Rapson (married as they are) define passionate love like this:

A state of intense longing for union with another. Passionate love is a complex functional whole including appraisals or appreciations, subjective feelings, expressions, patterned physiological processes, action tendencies, and instrumental behaviors. Reciprocated love (union with the other) is associated with fulfillment and ecstasy.15

Falling in love seems to occur worldwide. In 1992, William Jankowiak and Edward Fischer surveyed ethnographic accounts of love mostly by anthropologists from 166 societies and found that in 147 of them at least one of the following could be recognized: (a) personal anguish or longing, (b) love songs and the like, (c) elopements, (d) indigenous accounts of passionate love, (e) the anthropologist’s assertion that love occurred. In another survey made at about the same time, Susan Sprecher and colleagues interviewed 1,667 people in the United States, Russia, and Japan. Among college students, 59 percent of Americans, 67 percent of Russians, and 53 percent of Japanese said they were in love.

Love Is Love

Randolph Nesse has said that the best gift of evolution is our human ability to love. We can love our children, our sexual partners, our friends, sometimes we can even love our parents. But what is this love? Many psychologists have argued that love isn’t love, that really it’s something else.

One argument is that love is attachment.¹⁶ Another argument, almost as popular, is that we humans are unusual among mammalian species in our pair-bonding. The arrangement came about, proposed Owen Lovejoy, when the human line branched off from that which led to chimpanzees, who do not know who their fathers are. In the human line, our male ancestors started to focus on a single female, so that in return for her exclusive and compliant partnership in sex, they would provide food and other input to her and her offspring. Thereby he would help promote the survival of the genes of both of them, and children would come to know both their mothers and their fathers. A third kind of proposal is based on social exchange. Thus, John Gottman has proposed that successful partners make positive statements to each other as reinforcements and that, to maintain a loving relationship, there need to be at least five positive statements for each negative one.

Despite ideas that love isn’t love, but is attachment, or pair-bonding, or mutual reinforcement, the idea of love as love remains a strong one. Perhaps instead of the archives of scientific research we should look to Margery Williams’s 1922 book for children, The Velveteen Rabbit, about a rabbit given as a present to a young boy. Although the Velveteen Rabbit was a favorite, for a long time it lived in the toy cupboard, or on the nursery floor. It was looked down upon by the mechanical toys. The Rabbit was naturally shy, and the only one who was kind to him was the Skin Horse. One day Rabbit asks Skin Horse, “What is REAL?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”17

The Space-in-Between

Donald Winnicott wrote about how, to start with, when a baby wants something, its mother is likely to respond so that what’s in the baby’s mind, the object of the baby’s desire, is met and satisfied by something that then appears in the outer world.¹⁸ A baby who is hungry cries, and a breast full of milk is presented. But after the first few months of life, the wish and the world begin to separate. A space appears—a space in between—and it is from here, says Winnicott, that all language and all culture grow. However elaborate they become, each individual’s language and personal culture never lose this connection with the earliest relationship, with parents or other caregivers. They grow in the space-in-between.

The first material object to appear in this space is often what Winnicott called a transitional object, a soft toy or something similar. It’s cuddled and caressed, and must never be changed. It stands in for the mother and is loved as she is.

As development proceeds, says Winnicott, transitional phenomena “spread out over the whole intermediate territory between ‘inner psychic reality’ and ‘the external world as perceived by two persons in common’ that is to say, over the whole cultural field.”19

From the sensitivity of the mother or other caregiver, there can arise joint intentionality, and later collective intentionality. Winnicott doesn’t mention The Velveteen Rabbit in his discussion of transitional objects, although perhaps he might have done. Later in his work he does, however, take up the Rabbit’s problem of becoming Real, and of how, from being loved, a child may experience becoming real, a sense of having a true self. An alternative is that a child may internalize a set of expectations, typically from a parent, and attempt to enact them in order to be loved.²⁰ Such enactments can lead to the construction of what Winnicott called a false self, so that the person who takes them on may inside forever feel empty and unlovable. It’s a continuation of the idea proposed by Karen Horney, discussed in chapter 1.

It’s when a caregiver can engage jointly with a baby in a sensitive way, not just to impose expectations, that love can grow. And this love, emerging from Winnicott’s space-in-between, can become the basis for relationships with others that are cooperative, with a basis of mutuality, as a person grows up. In turn, such relationships can become bases for shared intentions of whole societies.