Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion

John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist, was one of the first to describe this early social attachment behaviour. 43He had been very influenced by Lorenz’s imprinting in birds and reasoned that attachment was a similar evolutionary mechanism that ensured that mother and infant remained in close proximity. In Bowlby’s view, children are a bit like batsmen in a game of baseball or cricket – they feel secure when they are touching the bases or while behind their creases, but become increasingly anxious and insecure as they step farther and farther away from them. The mother serves as a secure base from which to explore the world.

Bowlby predicted that children not given the opportunity to form a secure attachment as infants would end up as maladjusted adults. Much of this was based on his observations of children separated from their parents during the Second World War and relocated to institutions that did not provide the nurturing environment for attachments to form. He found that children separated early in life failed to develop normally with many exhibiting antisocial behaviour as adolescents. In France a similar picture emerged out of war-torn Europe when children were separated from their families. 44The way children were treated during early development had influenced the way they behaved as adults. Their reflected self, which had emerged in a chaotic, uncontrollable social world, had led them to shun social cohesion and conformity as adults.

In the 1960s, one of Bowlby’s colleagues, Mary Ainsworth, invented an experiment to reveal the nature of young children’s attachment using a temporary enforced separation from the mother in a strange environment. 45It began with the mother and her infant in a waiting room. A strange woman would come in and begin a conversation with the mother. At this point the infant was usually happy playing nearby with the toys in the room. After a couple of minutes, the mother would leave her infant in the company of the stranger as she left the room for three minutes. The stranger would try to interact with the infant until the mother returned. This sequence was then repeated. What Ainsworth discovered was that infants reacted to their mother’s separation in different ways. 46Most would start crying when their mother left but would settle again when she returned. These infants were described as securely attached, demonstrating the appropriate strategy of raising the alarm when the mother was too far away but settling on her return. Other infants were insecurely attached which was described as ‘avoidant’ or they were inconsolable and ‘resistant’ even when she returned to try and settle them.

There are two important limitations of the attachment account of the developing self. First, emotional attachment to the mother is found across the world but it is displayed in different ways, depending on the individual child and the way they are raised. 47Second, as any parent will know, especially those who have raised twins, children come with a whole batch of dispositions and tempers that shape how they interact with others. Some kids are just clingier than others and this temperament reflects how they respond to stress and uncertainty. Their emotional brain centres are trip-wired to overreact to uncertainty and they probably inherit that part of their personality from their parents. My former Harvard colleague, Jerry Kagan, called this natural disposition ‘inhibition’, which reflects the reactivity of the amygdala. In his research, Kagan found that around one in eight children were born inhibited and destined to respond fearfully to new situations. 48At the other extreme, around one in ten infants are born disinhibited, which makes them more fearless and able to cope with uncertainty and new situations. The remaining babies lie somewhere in between. Kagan found that he could identify the temperament of the infant at as early as four months of age, and this would predict their personality seven years later.

The emerging social behaviour of the child must reflect the interaction between the child’s disposition and the environment. Parents instinctively adapt to the temperament of their children, but this can be shaped by cultural norms. For example, some cultures, such as in Germany, seem to encourage independence, whereas Japanese children traditionally spend more time with their mothers and do not cope with Ainsworth’s strange situation so well. This indicates that both the natural disposition of the child and the environment work together to shape the emotional and social behaviour of the child.

Remarkably, studies of infants followed up as adults reveal that the way we respond as infants to social separation stays with us to some extent as adults. Our infant attachment patterns appear to influence our emotional attachment to partners later in life. 49Those infants who develop a normal pattern of wanting their mother, and then settling easily back in when they are reunited, are more likely to go on to form relatively stable relationships as adults. They find it relatively easy to get close to others and are comfortable being dependent on others and having others depend on them. They do not worry about being abandoned and are comfortable in intimate relationships. In contrast, those who had formed an insecure attachment to their mother are either too needy and clingy for fear of being abandoned or, if they were avoidant as infants, they typically do not want to get too close to others or allow others to get close to them. 50Of course, if these adults go on to have children, then it is easy to see how adult attachment can influence the shape of the environment of the next generation.

Who would have thought that our first love would be the deepest, having long-term effects on how our romantic relationships work out as adults? You can just hear Freud tutting in the background, ‘I told you so.’ However, not everything is cast in stone. Relationships come and go and can change over the course of a lifetime, and some may have more impact than others. Circumstances and environments are constantly changing and unpredictable. The early attachment effects, like other individual differences, are more likely to be dispositions that interact with the multitudes of factors that shape our personality over a lifetime. These early attachment effects may reflect temperaments, cultural variations, parenting styles and all of the above but it seems unlikely they will determine how we turn out with any certainty. One thing that is certain is that whatever may be the role of early factors, it is critical that they play out in some form of social environment. We need others in order to develop, not just for nurturing and care, but to become socialized.

Babes in the Woods

In 1798, a naked boy, aged somewhere around ten years, wandered out of the forest in the province of Aveyron in France. 51The villagers had periodically spotted him but no one knew who he was. More likely or not, he was one of the many abandoned children left to die in the woods during these hard times when infanticide was commonplace during the French Revolution. But somehow ‘Victor’, as he was later called, managed to survive. When the local villagers eventually caught him, news of Victor reached Paris where his plight became a cause célèbre . In the spirit of the Revolution, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had argued that man was born inherently good but that society corrupted the noble savage within all of us. Victor was the first test case of this argument and so the Parisian intelligentsia was eager to meet him. As a child uncorrupted by society, Victor could be the living embodiment of Rousseau’s noble savage.

However, Victor was far from noble. He was violent, made animal noises and defecated indiscriminately. At first, it was thought that he might be deaf and mute, so he initially spent time in the National Institute for the Deaf and Dumb, but it soon became apparent that Victor’s problem was more than simply not being able to communicate. A young Parisian doctor, Jean Itard, who had been treating children at the Institute, described Victor in his memoirs as: