LOVE, EXILE, EXCOMMUNICATION, AND DISGRACE: SHAME AND THE OTHER
My daughter asked me to look at something she was reading for her science class in high school. On the theory that all the sciences are easily interchangeable, the school had assigned to its best physics teacher the task of putting together a course in psychology. Cheerily, uncritically, this amiable young man had assembled a mélange of classical texts to be digested and regurgitated back to him in relatively pristine condition. “Daddy!” she said, “They don’t know anything about affect! And my whole class knows more about shame than the teacher.” My earliest work on the importance of shame in interpersonal relationships had been greatly informed by Julie’s reports from school. She and her grade school cronies were among the first to use these new theories “in the field.”
Looking over the list of books from which she was to choose one for a report, I had suggested she read Erich Fromm’s 1956 work The Art of Loving. Nearly two generations of adolescents, consumed as they are with concerns about love and sex, have been exposed to this immensely popular work. I use sections of it in my teaching and in psychotherapy, even though I sort of close my eyes to the parts that no longer make sense. His work is, of course, based on the Freudian logic that dominated psychiatry until recently, even though Fromm himself offered many important revisions of classical psychoanalytic theory. I had always liked his explanation of the different ways we love our parents, our children, our peers, and our partners in erotic play.
Julie drew my attention to Fromm’s initial premise—that we are created as beings fused with mother and are terrified of separateness: “The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. Being separate means being cut off, without any capacity to use my human powers. Hence to be separate means to be helpless, unable to grasp the world—things and people—actively; it means that the world can invade me without my ability to react. Thus, separateness is the source of intense anxiety. Beyond that, it arouses shame and the feeling of guilt. . . . The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love—is the source of shame” (8-9). (Italics in original.)
Fromm is not the only scholar to link shame to separation. One of the most influential early investigators of shame, Helen Block Lewis, felt that the human is intrinsically social, that the infant is born social. She believed that shame and guilt are mechanisms built into the firmware of the body, well differentiated and highly specific emotional systems that monitor our involvement with each other. In her system, shame monitors our tendency to be narcissistic, to adopt an opinion about ourselves that does not conform to what is seen by those important to us.
For Lewis, the blush is a flag that tells the other before whom we have been shamed that we are ready to admit our transgression and by which we ask that we be returned to the fold. Guilt is a mechanism that tells us we have violated some rule of the group and punishes us for transgression. Both emotions are viewed only in terms of the way they affect our membership in social networks, and for this reason her work must now be considered inadequate to explain all the phenomenology of shame. Like Fromm, she is too quick to explain emotion on the basis of the way it appears to a therapist who works with adults.
Fromm continues along this vein, maintaining that the search for “orgiastic pleasure” in drugs or hedonistic activity is an attempt to return to the feeling of fusion with mother—”to escape from separateness” (12). Conformity, too, is evaluated as a means of fooling ourselves into the belief that we are not alone. Even creative activity is described as a mere hedge against separateness: “In any kind of creative work the creating person unites himself with his material, which represents the work outside himself. . . . (I)n all types of creative work the worker and his object become one, man unites himself with the world in the process of creation” (17).
All three solutions—orgiastic fusion, conformity, and productive work—are only transitory, producing what he calls “pseudo-unity.”
Hence, they are only partial answers to the problem of existence. The full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of fusion with another person, in love.
This desire for interpersonal fusion is the most powerful striving in man. It is the most fundamental passion, it is the force which keeps the human race together, the clan, the family, society. The failure to achieve it means insanity or destruction—self-destruction or destruction of others. Without love, humanity could not exist for a day (18).
I think these explanations of love must now be considered incorrect, or at least inadequate to explain what we have learned more recently about the early development of children. In this chapter, and the one that follows, I will discuss some of the major theories about human connectedness and suggest a new way of looking at the relation between love and shame. But it would be unfair to judge The Art of Loving as if it had been published today. When a new book (or play or film) is reviewed, both author and reviewer must be citizens of the same culture, creatures of the identical era. Erich Fromm wrote for two audiences. At the superficial level, he aimed this book at his contemporary reader. But at a deeper level, he was fighting with the ghost of Sigmund Freud.
Throughout this book I have mentioned the Freudian concept known as libido theory. As you know, it was Freud’s view that the psychological life of the human is powered by a basically sexual life force that animates us much as a marionette, or a puppet, or a velveteen rabbit may be “brought to life” in fiction. In classical psychoanalytic theory, this libido force presents itself first as the newborn’s insatiable drive to consume the world through its mouth, an oral drive that links the infant to the breast of mother with great passion. Fromm repeats this in his lovely, poetic style when he says that to the newborn, mother is food, mother is warmth, mother is safety. What the psychoanalyst calls “oral needs” link infant and mother. But since Freud viewed the infant as quite unable to differentiate between self and other at this time, he taught that even the “need-satisfying” breast of mother was seen by the child as an extension of its own being and not really separate from it. In the Freudian system, the infant is locked in the state he called narcissism, and infantile love is no more than narcissistic self-love.
Within this system of thought, the libido force is believed to move to the anal region as the growing child begins to oppose and disagree with the mother he or she had previously seen only as the source of sustenance. As I mentioned earlier, however much child and mother seem to be in contention, Freudian theory argues that (at least to the child) what we outsiders would see as interpersonal conflict is really a form of inner conflict because it is being viewed by the child as part of a narcissistic system. Their relationship is still not truly interpersonal because mother and infant are thought to be locked in narcissistic fusion, for theory states that the child still does not know that mother is another being.
Only much later, when the libido force is thought to become really sexual, does the small child begin to see the opposite-gender parent as the object of this sexual drive, and thus to define another person as a sexual object. Eventually the child renounces his or her sexual interest in this parent, but the passionate interest that had drawn the child to this object of the sexual drive remains as a nonsexual attraction that is the forerunner of adult love. To Freud, who would not tolerate within his circle any scholar who wished to diminish the primacy of his libido-based theory, love was an inherently sexual force.
Where Freud saw love as the irrational validation of a relationship made powerful by sexual attraction, Fromm saw the need to overcome our terror of separateness. The Art of Loving is a wonderful book because it makes us think about the varieties of love, about the need to blend sexuality and human intimacy into a dynamic relationship. Fromm’s moving and passionate treatise on love would have been quite different had he been granted the opportunity to study the affect system of Tomkins and to integrate with it the work of Stern, Tabin, and other modern observers of infancy. His book can be understood best in terms of the world it sought to change. Considering the fact that it remains a classic nearly 40 years after its publication, and that an enormous number of adults have grown to maturity with Fromm’s book by their side, it would seem that he accomplished his aim. But too much has been learned in those intervening years, and it is time to reevaluate some of the classical assumptions about love and especially about the relation between shame and separateness.
Connections abound. In the moment of shame we feel isolated, terribly alone, shorn from the herd. Equally well can shame make us feel that the eyes of the other—normally the window of friendly human interchange—have become a source or a symbol of oppressive attention. It is then that we wish for the earth to open up and swallow us; shame makes us long for invisibility. When embarrassed, we feel that we are no longer known to the world by our best attributes, but by our worst. Léon Wurmser,* surely the most gifted psychoanalytic writer ever to plumb the depths of the shame experience, has often remarked that at the core of shame is the feeling that we are both unloved and unlovable.
Intuitively, then, we know that shame affect, when triggered, causes an immediate effect on our place in the social system. Fromm’s conclusion is too superficial. He starts out with the theory that physical birth is the most important trauma ever experienced by the individual because it is the moment when the infant is torn from fusion with mother. This wrenching separation becomes, for him, the model of all human woe. As Fromm sees it, we spend the rest of our lives searching for ways to return to this blissful state of union with mother. And, since shame is one of the most painful forms of separation, he links it to his basic theoretical system by defining it as what happens when we become aware of our separated state.
His concept of shame, then, derives from the theories popular in the late 19th century (both Darwin and James-Lange), which taught that all emotion depends on an initial cognitive appraisal. It is a system that denies the connection between infantile affect display and adult emotion, one that restricts our understanding of shame to a small part of its spectrum. Fromm’s theories were central to his being: So much did he himself long for reunion with the mothering figure that he persuaded his psychoanalyst to marry him and wrote a long series of books about the meaning of separateness.
Fromm’s work differs from that of Margaret Mahler and her followers, which also takes for granted that the embryo’s presence within the womb means that fetus and mother are a fused being. But even after emergence from intrauterine existence, say these scholars, the baby remains emotionally fused with mother for quite some time. Their theory teaches that fusion is breached only by sequences of attempts at separation and individuation alternating with frequent efforts of rapprochement (return to mother on an emotional tether). The infant is seen as unable to separate from mother until it can master the skills that allow it to manipulate the large muscles of locomotion—emotional separation depends on physical distance.
Thus, the ability to link with another person is taken for granted as a biological attribute. Separation, in this system, really implies the ability to walk away from mother. Like the Freudian system from which it evolved, the “separation/individuation” school of child development teaches that we do not become fully individual until completion of the family romance, the oedipal phase of development.
The separation/individuation theory is one of the most popular systems of our current era. It is used to explain nearly all emotional disorders characterized by failures of socialization or problems of intimacy. One who is overly dependent is said to have failed at separation, one who cannot get close to others is seen as having failed at rapprochement, and those who are emotionally unstable are shown to have grown up with mothers who would not let them separate properly from fusion. Love, within this system, requires both the healthy return to this fusion and the presence of mature self-awareness.
Stern and his colleagues in the field of infant observation have presented droves of evidence to unseat this remarkably attractive and tenacious theory, which is based so heavily on our understanding of the adult. Feelings of fusion, of being immersed in the being of our beloved, are so powerful a part of adult life that many people have assumed that fusion itself is a “natural” phenomenon. As we will discuss in the next chapter, there is a great deal of reason to believe that fusion is really a developmental milestone, a developmental acquisition of importance equal to any of the others we have discussed so far.
We have come to understand that infant and caregiver, beginning in the earliest moments of their relationship, communicate through the external display modality of the affect system. It all starts with the infant’s unintentional manifestations of innate affect, to which the caregiver responds with empathy. Soon the child learns to use both the intentional broadcast of affect-related movements and sounds, to which the caregiver also responds, and a growing assortment of communications with roots in the affect system but not actually meant to convey information about the broadcaster’s affective state. Watching this process of data transfer between infant and mother, Beatrice Beebe† has described the “packages of information” through which they communicate.
This is not a system of communication in which the infant is either passive or helplessly dependent. And most certainly it is not a system in which the baby is unable to declare either its status as a separate person or its complete independence! Stern notes, “During the three- to five-month period, mothers give the infant control—or rather the infant takes control—over the initiations and terminations of direct visual engagement in social activities. . . . It must be remembered that during this period of life the infant cannot walk and has poor control over limb movements and eye–hand coordination. The visual–motor system, however, is virtually mature, so that in gazing behavior the infant is a remarkably interactive partner. When watching the gazing patterns of mother and infant during this life period, one is watching two people with almost equal facility and control over the same social behavior” (1985, 21).
Only by ignoring the facial display of affect and the interplay of facial communication can one defend a theory that says infants are fused with mother until they can walk away from her. Walking away from mother is nothing more than walking away from mother; rapprochement is not return to fusion but rather a request for a moment of maternal selfobject function, of reassurance through affect mutualization. Children are, of course, attached to their mother; they are obliged by nature to be dependent on her. Part of the job of growing up is to become less dependent on mother. Each of us must find our own way to achieve the fullest development of the self. But we are both separate from mother and quite individual right from the day sperm and egg meet to initiate the process of intrauterine development.
The whole system of separation/individuation theory, attractive as it has been for so many years, is another dinosaur ready for extinction in the new environment of modern infant observation. Perhaps equally deserving of study is the need of adult humans to prove that they are not really created alone, that they are brought into existence with a link to a loving and helping other.
It is easy to understand how primitive science might develop the naturalistic theory that intrauterine existence defines us as a part of mother rather than a boarder living within one of her enclosures. The discipline of infant observation shows us that this old theory is untenable. There remain only two further possibilities, two rationales to explain both separateness and togetherness in terms of human biology.
On the one hand, we might view our species as a vast horde of individuals floating through a void and featureless interpersonal space, each of us bound tightly within our own private enclosure. The universe of stars and galaxies would then provide an analogue for a cosmos of solitary selves who achieve connection by building tenuous bridges from one to another through whatever means of communication might be devised by the mind of man. Our failure to form links to our fellow humans would be only a reflection of whatever might limit our ability to send or receive messages.
Yet this facility with which we communicate, the ease with which most of us seem to form close, meaningful, loving, and intimate relationships, this process itself seems so natural that one is led easily to wonder whether there is something built into the very structure of the human that lends itself to such relatedness. Man is the life form most involved with individual others of its species. Might not the very form and type of this involvement be the result of an evolutionary process leading man from the solitary status more typical of presocial organisms toward the intense interpersonal preoccupation that characterizes the human of our time? Might the individuals of our species be predisposed by nature to be linked to others?
There is a great deal of evidence for both theoretical positions, which, although presented as mutually exclusive, are capable of coalescence into a solid working hypothesis. The evidence for our solitary status is intuitively perceptible. It is to the evolving theme of an evolving predisposition to intimacy that I would next like to turn our attention. Like most realms of scientific thought, it, too, has a history.
In the computer analogy I developed earlier, the human may be viewed as an assemblage of hardware, firmware, and software. In the domain of human development, software is an analogue of all the ways a baby or an adult is instructed about the world in which it lives.
There are, of course, myriad intricate bodily activities that work quite well without any sort of overriding control program. No complex scheme need be imputed to understand what happens when the skin is cut by a knife—the integrity of our integument is disturbed and its component structures leak blood. Yet any physician can tell you that what happens next depends on an immensely complicated group of working parts called the clotting factors. Chemical substances carried in the blood or kept in storage within the skin itself all begin to interact in ways that produce new and highly complex molecules that staunch the flow of blood. Yet there does not seem to be any realm or region of the body where the program for this series of chemical actions is stored. All parts of the body seem equally capable of bleeding and clotting, whether or not they are connected to the brain.
The next level of complexity might be described as simple sequences of reaction to stimuli—like the jerky motion of the lower leg that occurs when the tendon below the knee is tapped suddenly. Programs like this are stored in the spinal column and called “reflexes” because they involve mechanisms as simple as the reflection of light from mirrored surfaces. One can be trained neither to have a reflex nor to avoid having a reflex, although by autosimulation one can imitate the gross aspects of its action pretty well.
There are many types of behavior that seem to be run by scripts stored at levels of the central nervous system that have evolved more recently. Rather than merely mount his pillow, curl up on it, and prepare for sleep, one of our dogs—a Gordon Setter—must place his feet squarely in its center and with great care twirl around three times before lying down. Comments Rapoport, whose studies of the obsessive-compulsive disorder I mentioned earlier, “My collie dog, for example, turns in circles to prepare his bed before lying down. Historically it may have been necessary for some of his ancestors to trample tall grasses or to chase off snakes or insects. But my collie circles the same way whether he is preparing to sleep outside my camping tent in the Shenandoah or on my living room carpet” (189).
What impresses me is that these acts seem to be executed so much the same way each time, as if performed from a script written in the genetic material of certain dogs and stored somewhere in the brain. The script for this particular behavior is a good example of what I am calling firmware. It is the very existence of firmware that has charmed and puzzled the life sciences for generations—systems of action that are neither learned nor merely the results of simple reactions.
As life forms travel through evolution there seems to develop a fascinating balance between prewritten and learned scripts. Prewritten scripts abound in nature, and there is an abundance of firmware to study. More “primitive” organisms, like the bee, can manage enormously complicated routines as soon as they emerge from the egg. Bees fly and they communicate with each other, despite the fact that they have been trained to do neither. The Austrian biologist Karl von Frisch studied the firmware of bees during the first half of this century, explaining the inborn mechanisms that allow such highly social behaviors as the transfer of information about the location of specific sources of nectar, and those that organize proper etiquette within the hive.‡
In the second quarter of this century, the biologist Niko Tinbergen noted that each spring the male stickleback fish goes through a highly ordered sequence of behavior relating to the mating process. First it begins to prepare a nest in the sand at the bottom of its tank. As this work nears completion, the fish suddenly changes color from its usual dull gray to a vibrant red. Now the brightly dressed male begins to court any female who happens through his neighborhood, initiating a highly stereotyped mating dance that garners both her interest and her apparent agreement to back into his nest until only her head can be seen peeping out from it. Speedily the male begins to nudge and massage her egg-swollen abdomen. All at once she releases a clutch of eggs and swims away, after which the male drifts a mist of sperm over these eggs. When he has made sure the eggs are safe, he is once again available to make contact with another female stickleback. This sequence of actions is repeated until he has filled his nest with fertilized eggs.
Now the courting male turns into an attendant, expectant father, guarding the eggs with great intensity, “ventilating” them with fresh water every once in a while. When the hatchlings start to swim away, he retrieves each of them by carrying it back to the nest in his mouth. Only when they have reached a degree of maturity adequate to allow them to survive unaided does the watchful father allow them to venture unaccompanied into the wild. And only then does the male stickleback return to his normal patterns of swimming, feeding, and fighting.
The stickleback fish measures two inches or so in length; its brain can be no larger than a grain of corn. Yet contained within this tiny organ of organization is all the firmware needed to produce these marvelously interwoven performances. Tinbergen found ways to interfere with each segment of this system, with what might in computer terms be called the subroutines from which is assembled the whole script for mating. He ascertained that some subroutines are triggered by seasonal alterations in hormone levels and others by specific visual stimuli. Sometimes Tinbergen was able to block an entire segment of the mating script, thus forcing the animal to ignore that phase of its program. The experimenters could destroy the nest each time it was built—and the hapless little fish then began the next part of the mating sequence without its nest. No portion of this wonderful sequence of activities proved to be either “conscious” or “intentional.” All of it is under the control of specific biological scripts written into the genetic code of the stickleback.
Do you have a favorite play or opera? Buy a ticket to see it. Watch the actors, singers, musicians, stagehands, ushers, and the rest of the crew put on the program as directed by their scripts. Yes, they are competent adult humans capable of other tasks. But for the duration of this entertainment they agree to act under the control of prewritten scripts, and we agree to be charmed by their work. Coleridge said that the mental set necessary for our enjoyment of the drama is “the willing suspension of disbelief.” As long as we accept the conventions of the theater we are able to experience what happens on stage as if it were “real” and unfolding “naturally” before our very eyes and ears. The theater of live actors is even more a miracle of programmed behavior than the motion picture, for when we watch a film we can allow ourselves the illusion that a hidden camera has recorded a slice of life, something that “just happened that way.” In the legitimate theater, the actors must live out their scripts each and every day that their play draws enough interest to make it commercially viable.
But in each case a group of highly skilled performers has entertained us by its artful presentation of something scripted. For the adult human, such activity is all the more pleasurable because we are free to behave without scripts, to run our lives without direction. That someone would take the trouble to learn a script and perform it for us is all the more exciting because of the range of choices involved. And often we spectators learn new responses because we have seen them onstage and decided to add them to our personal collection of software. Learned behavior is quite different from firmware, the inborn scripts that direct action within a tiny realm of choice.
Might there be internally scripted courting dances in humankind? Does not the male of any species, including our own, dress in his finest garb when undertaking the selection of a mate? Does evolution favor the development of more prewritten scripts, or do life forms grow only more free from internal control as they evolve?
Quite recently, Dr. Wagner Bridger assumed the leadership of the Society for Biological Psychiatry. He caused quite a stir when, in his presidential address, he expressed the belief that perhaps two-thirds of human behavior was directed by firmware little different from that of the stickleback, and that the search for such mechanisms was the legitimate concern of psychiatry. He argued, somewhat pugnaciously, that too much attention had been paid to the psychoanalytic exploration of early experience, to the software dealing with sexual firmware. He stands unfairly accused of psychophobia, the morbid fear of the inner life that has always stood in opposition to the self-examination intrinsic to dynamic psychotherapy. Yet I believe Bridger represents an equally valid approach to the understanding of human interaction, one that must be accorded its rightful place in this pleomorphic realm of study.
The type of firmware studied by von Frisch and Tinbergen is generally known as the instincts, patterns of behavior that seem motivated by species-specific needs having mostly to do with food gathering and reproduction. There are many other systems in the central neurologic apparatus, systems that we take for granted in the healthy, functioning adult, but which do not work unless they are “brought on line” in the proper order. One of the most fascinating of these was discovered by the German eye surgeon von Senden,§ who developed the first truly safe operation for congenital cataracts. Sometime around 1935, he began to treat a group of children and young adults whose lifetime blindness had been caused only by the presence of an opaque substance that prevented light from getting to an otherwise healthy and well-formed optical apparatus.
Believing that he could now offer the gift of sight to these young people, von Senden removed the offending cataracts and fitted his patients with the same sort of spectacles used by people whose cataracts have developed in later life. Yet not one of these patients was ever able to “see” in the conventional sense. What afflicted and disturbed them was a blur of painfully intense lights and colors, none of which could be understood as the perceptions we normal adults take for granted. Many of these patients expressed the wish that they could return to the state of blindness, which they found far less bothersome. It seems that what we own at birth is a visual apparatus ready to receive stimuli, but still unable to organize them. Only as we grow and develop during the first few months of extrauterine life is the visual apparatus tuned properly so that it can become the sort of interface with the world that we normally take for granted. Some scientists believe that the final development of those parts of the brain that handle and process visual information is not completed until these structures have been used for a while.
Here is a situation in which the vagaries of life, the coincidences of illness, have produced an experiment no scientist would dare perform on a human infant. Hundreds of similar studies have been done using laboratory animals more acceptable to our sensibilities, but all with the same result: There are a number of mechanisms that work only if they are triggered just at the correct moment in early development.
Near the middle of this century, Konrad Lorenz studied such patterns of development in the graylag goose and introduced the concept of imprinting.¶ He divided a single clutch of eggs into two groups, one hatched by the mother goose, the other in an incubator. The goslings hatched by the goose immediately followed their mother wherever she waddled. Yet those hatched in the laboratory showed no interest in her. The first living being they encountered was Dr. Lorenz, and they followed him everywhere. Now he placed both groups of goslings under a large box; when released, they returned immediately to the creature they had previously followed.
It is all very reminiscent of the scene in Shakespeare’s play Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Oberon tells Puck to place in Titania’s eyes special drops that will make her fall in love with the first creature she sees when she awakes. Konrad Lorenz is not Bottom with the head of an ass, and hatchling geese are not adult fairy queens; yet there is this lingering feeling in all of us that we love mother because it is she whom we first encounter when we awaken into extrauterine life. Shakespeare suggests that it is the eyes that govern the definition of whom we love, while Lorenz would move from that organ of perception to some point deeper within the structure of the brain.
A great many scientists rushed to duplicate and extend this research. What they learned is that there is, in birds, a group of social conventions that seem to be under the control of firmware scripts, each of which must be triggered at a moment optimal for its imprinting into the permanent behavior of the organism. Hess and Ramsay, for instance, showed that ducklings will form similar attachments to wooden models as long as the imprinting stimulus is presented to them between 13 and 16 hours after hatching. Before the age of 13 hours, imprinting is weak and ineffective; after 16 hours imprinting is considerably impaired. Only during the proper window of opportunity is it easy and “natural” for the hatchling duck to imprint onto its “consciousness” the identity of the “parent” who will lead it until full maturity.
There is a special “wisdom” to this brevity of opportunity. At the 16-hour mark a new behavior pattern takes over. By the beginning of the second full day after hatching, 80 percent of ducklings show a fear or avoidance reaction to moving objects; by 32 hours all ducklings have developed this “emotional” response. Only for a few brief hours is it possible to instruct the fledgling bird that mother is safe to follow.
The biologist of today understands that imprinting is not always so precisely determined a process as it might seem from the experiments described above and that it may be neither reasonable nor useful to extrapolate from the study of birds to the nature of man. Yet it is important for us to recognize the existence of biological systems that, for all intents and purposes, do not really “exist” until and unless their “switch” is “turned on” at the proper moment in development.
Sometimes we really do forget that science itself has a history. Looking back at the work of Harry Harlow, who studied the attachment behavior of monkeys, we tend to forget that his research was conducted at a time when early Freudian theory was dominant. Freud and his circle saw the infant’s passionate attachment to its mother as a derivative of the child’s need for food, amplified by the forces of libido. The breast, as the organ of sustenance, became an engrossing symbol for infant–mother attachment.
Harlow built one sculpture that contained a fairly standard nursing bottle held firmly in a bare wire frame in the vague shape of a mother monkey, and another that mimicked her form similarly and was clad in soft cloth, but contained no source of nourishment. Although infant monkeys learned to feed at the nipple of the glass bottle, they clung to and vastly preferred the cloth surrogate, much as they might a mother of flesh and fur. Such experiments served to reveal as myth the idea that infant humans have any primary attachment to the maternal breast and that the act of feeding deserved consideration as a primary source of love.
Harlow’s work emerged so early in my education that I took it for granted—what came to be called the “cupboard theory of love” was never a part of my world. Even today, as I review the now-classic papers on “Love in Infant Monkeys” by Harlow and his group, I am surprised at the vehemence and evident triumph with which he dismissed this aspect of Freudian theory. To Harlow, mother was what you clung to, not what fed you. Monkeys reared by a cloth mother grew up pretty near normal, he said. And he demonstrated that prolonged periods of maternal deprivation reduced the ability of monkeys to form an affectional tie in later life.
Seymour Levine and other behavioral psychologists showed that laboratory rats handled by friendly experimenters were more likely to form normal affectionate attachments with their peers than those reared in isolation. These investigators presented evidence that there may be critical periods for the development of this response to stimulation. In other words, it appears that the genetic makeup of many life forms may include scripts for the development of attachment, and that those attachment behaviors are “released” only when triggered in the proper sequence.
Perhaps the most important school of psychology owing its origin to this line of experimentation is that founded by John Bowlby, one of the leading psychiatrists at London’s Tavistock Clinic. Bowlby’s well-known book Attachment was first published in 1969. In a 1987 taped interview, Dr. Bowlby remarked that he was led to study attachment behavior by the work on fish and birds of Tinbergen and Lorenz, and that he used the theories they derived from their study of fish and birds as a point of departure for his own work on human love. “In this formulation, it will be noticed,” wrote Bowlby, “there is no reference to ‘needs’ or ‘drives’. Instead, attachment behaviour is regarded as what occurs when certain behavioural systems are activated. The behavioural systems themselves are believed to develop within the infant as a result of his interaction with his environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and especially of his interaction with the principal figure in that environment, namely his mother” (1982, 179–80). It is a system that can be assessed or graded from without, a theory that lends itself to evaluation on purely “objective” grounds.
You will note that Bowlby does not mention the feelings that are involved in attachment, only the behavior. It is fascinating to read his rationale for this position: He explains emotion in the language of James and Lange—conscious, cognitive labeling of a visceral response to an initial cognitive appraisal. Whatever role affect might be given in the search for the primary sources of motivation, this role would have to be completely dependent on the organism’s ability to make cognitive appraisals.
Might affect be responsible for early infantile behavior, he asks? Not likely, he answers, because affect could only follow a process of assessment not possible for the infant. Certainly affect is capable of altering the behavior of an adult, but not an infant. “We must conclude therefore that the process of interpreting and appraising sensory input must unquestionably be assigned a causal role in producing what behaviour emerges” (from affect) (117). This distinction is critical to his thesis, and to all of attachment theory, for Bowlby intends to demonstrate that attachment itself occurs long before the child can “understand” it and therefore have feelings about it.
Although the word “love” does not appear in the index of Attachment, he does refer to the “affectional systems” of Harlow, recording that psychologist’s description of five forms of inter-individual attachment. Bowlby remarks: “In the terminology used in this book each affectional system is an integrate of behavioural systems mediating socially directed instinctive behaviour of a particular kind” (232n.). The human is viewed here as if we were recently derived from the stickleback fish or the graylag goose. If we love at all, it is because we have learned to appraise the prewritten attachment behaviors that were set in motion long before we were able to interpret them.
The work of Tomkins was already available to Bowlby, and quite well-known at the Tavistock Clinic, which had already reprinted and distributed in England the first volume of Affect/Imagery/Consciousness. To Tomkins, as must by now be quite clear, the affects are a series of prewritten scripts exactly like those studied by Tinbergen and Lorenz. Affect theory states simply that the affects are triggered by meaning-free alterations in biological systems, that they cause changes to occur at sites of action all over the body, and that we learn to appraise these changes with growing sophistication as we grow older. But affects cause external display at the same time they are producing their characteristic alterations of internal function; it is these external displays that allow those outside us to intuit what we are feeling. It is the affects, then, that first link infant and caregiver; attachment behaviors are all derivatives of affective expression. Love is an affective experience because it is based on the experience of affect, not because we become affectively involved in a meaning-free display of attachment!
Astonishingly, immediately after defining affect in terms of cognitive appraisal, Bowlby nods politely at Tomkins in a footnote and dismisses affect theory by misrepresenting it: “The causal role of appraisal processes has led Tomkins in his two-volume work on Affect/Imagery/Consciousness (1962–63) to postulate that ‘affects constitute the primary motivational system’, defining a motive as ‘the feedback report of a response’ ” (117n.). Bowlby then notes, quite correctly, that infants appear to be attached to their mothers long before they are capable of the level of cognition necessary for the intelligent appraisal of the situations in which they find themselves. And, of course, he proceeds to develop a theoretical system that explains attachment without regard for affect.
I hope that I have been able to make clear to the casual reader, to one not steeped in the literature and tradition of my field, just how maddening it is to try and understand how it is that great scientists can stare at the same landscape and see it so differently. Here, on the one hand, is Tomkins, studying the facial display of affect and linking it to the very interactions that so intrigue Bowlby. And on the other hand, here is Bowlby, immersed in the new science that has derived from the study of fish and birds, two life forms that have no facial affect display, seeing everything but the face.
Most theories work not because of the data observed and evaluated, but because what is ignored makes the new theory work better. Had Bowlby only looked at the face he might have come to understand the relation between the external display of affect and the internal experience of feeling, and his theory would not have been so dry and devoid of emotional resonance. Affect theory and attachment theory have traveled along unnecessarily separate paths for too long.
What, then, do students of attachment theory see when looking at a child? Basic to their investigation is a standardized behavioral assessment designed by Mary Salter Ainsworth# and performed when a child is 12 months old. Infant and mother are led into a room they have never seen, thus creating what is called a “strange situation.” They are observed for a predetermined amount of time, following which the mother is instructed to leave the child alone with the examiner, who is a stranger. The child’s behavior with the examiner is noted, again for a specific amount of time, after which the mother returns to the examination room. The final phase of the study involves an assessment of the child’s response to mother’s return.
Three patterns of interaction are noted. In Pattern A, called “Anxious/ Avoidant Attachment,” the child is readily available to separate from the mother, shows little affective sharing with her, seems affiliative with the examiner, shows little preference for mother over the examiner, and is well able to explore independent of her. When mother returns, these babies actively ignore her, even to the point of turning away.
Pattern B is called “Secure Attachment.” Infant-mother pairs who demonstrate this type of relationship are quite different in many respects. Here the infant uses the caregiver as a secure basis for exploration, readily separates from her to check out new toys in the room, freely and easily shares with mother on an affective level, and is readily comforted by her when distressed, returning easily to play. Indeed, when distressed, as by her programmed departure, these children actively seek out mother for solace on her return. And when her departure does not produce distress, for many of these securely attached babies are quite comfortable to be without their mother for a while, they greet her happily and initiate interaction with gusto.
Pattern C, “Anxious/Resistant/Attachment,’ is characterized by quite another form of infantile response. These babies have great difficulty separating from mother even to explore the novel room in her presence. They are wary of new people and new situations. When she returns, they seem even more upset, mixing contact with resistance—kicking, squirming, rejecting toys—and occasionally showing a striking degree of passivity.
Ignore, for a moment, the obvious parallel between these “attachment behaviors” and the innate affects clearly being described. Ignore, as well, the implications of these excellent and succinct descriptions of three styles of maternal mutualization and regulation of infantile affect. The attachment theorists have developed a simple, elegant, standardized technique for the assessment of affect expression and modulation within the parent-child relationship—even though they disavow the relation of these behaviors to the internal experience of both child and mother.
Even more important, the patterns of attachment described here hold true for each child over many years of follow-up. Anxious/avoidant children show more negative orientation toward peers. Anxious/resistant children are far less competent in developing peer relationships than securely attached children. Bullying, submissiveness, avidity for problem-solving, behavior with teachers, and a host of other, easily observed behaviors have been linked to these three patterns of attachment.
It should be clear from my necessarily overbrief summary of this immensely active area of modern psychology that I have no quarrel with the validity of its observations. Patterns of attachment appear soon after birth, and they remain remarkably stable over the course of life. Yet the attachment theorists and the affect theorists are eons apart in their understanding of the meaning of these data. Some attempt at healing this rift has been made by Carol Malatesta** and by David Cook, whose sophisticated studies of the relation between shame and attachment are just beginning to appear in print.
Bowlby sees attachment as the result of specific, inborn systems built for no other reason than to produce attachment. In this respect he follows the work of Tinbergen and Lorenz with great precision. He chooses to ignore the emotional aspects of attachment, to relegate the affective accompaniment of attachment to a period in life far later than infancy. For Bowlby, attachment occurs merely because it is programmed to occur; our feelings about that attachment are a late acquisition dependent on cognitive appraisal.
The attachment theorist, therefore, sees the human as predisposed by nature to be linked. Where primitive science saw this link only in terms of our origin as a piece of mother’s flesh, Bowlby sees all life forms as truly separate except insofar as they are connected through the attachment system. That man is the most social of organisms can be explained by our ownership of the greatest number of built-in attachment mechanisms. Evolution has conferred on us the ability to become more involved with each other than those life forms from which we evolved; the path of evolution is toward increasing society.
Were there no evidence that attachment behaviors have much to do with the broadcast, resonance, and modulation of affect within an interpersonal system, I might be able to accept the existence of an attachment system. I think that the entire fabric of attachment theory is but another example of 19th-century rationalism, a philosophical position that avoids emotion as an interference with proper cognition or as a derivative of proper cognition. The observations of these excellent psychologists are trenchant, and the predictive ability conferred by their attachment test is extremely important. But just as we must reject Freud’s idea that love is nothing more than a derivative of sexual longing, and Fromm’s idea that love derives from the need to return to the mother from whom we have been shorn by birth, and Mahler’s belief that love represents a rapprochement with the mother from whom we have recently learned to separate, we must go beyond Bowlby’s narrow and emotionless view of attachment behaviors.
We are back to the matter I raised earlier in this chapter: I see the human as a solitary being, created in the isolated micro-universe of the womb; then delivered as a baby into the outside world as if it still lived within a bubble; and as an adult still floating through life with no connection to those other bubbles that make up its human environment save what bridges it learns to build. In this system of thought we are capable of emotional attachment to others only because the commonality of affective experience allows us to know the world of others as if from their core. Love would be viewed as the name we give the most powerful positive form of this connection. In terms of interpersonal relationships, shame would then be regarded as an affect that returns the individual to its state of primary isolation, but also as a complex emotion retaining whatever other meanings it has accumulated during our individual development.
In the next chapter I will present a theory of love based on the affect system. It takes for granted the relation between affect and attachment described in the preceding sections of this book. It demonstrates the crucial links between shame and love and establishes a logical explanation for Wurmser’s observation that at the core of shame is the feeling that we are unlovable. All attachment is, indeed, due to firmware mechanisms, to inborn scripts that govern certain human actions. Love is not, however, simply the type of instinct that causes fish to mate and birds to follow their mothers, not the desexualized remnant of libidinal attachment, not the result of any inborn system of connection.
I propose to show that love develops as a complex set of linkages established for each of us from the experiences of innate affect and of interaffectivity. We have indeed evolved into the ability to love. But it is the innate affects, these highly developed patterns of affective expression, that have made it possible for us to understand each other at the deepest level. Love and hate, those most powerful of the emotions of interpersonal involvement, involve affects. It is affect that makes the heart beat strongly in the presence of our beloved and our gorge rise in the presence of those we hate. And it is specific patterns of interpersonal expression and experience that have made shame so deeply painful and so antithetical to love. The explanation of its relation to interpersonal life is necessary to any understanding of love.
*Read, especially, pp. 87–97 of The Mask of Shame for his poignant and evocative description of this painful experience.
†Beebe and Gerstman (1984), Beebe and Lachmann (1988).
‡See Krogh (1948).
§Described by René Spitz (1965), 40, 54–64.
¶Ekhard H. Hess (1958) presents an excellent summary of this important work.
#See also Sroufe (1979) for another excellent discussion of these theories and their application to the study of children and families.
**Malatesta & Wilson (1988), Malatesta (1990).