A Secure Base

John Bowlby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415355278
• eBook ISBN: 9781135070854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

As Bowlby himself points out in his introduction to this seminal childcare book, to be a successful parent means a lot of very hard work. Giving time and attention to children means sacrificing other interests and activities, but for many people today these are unwelcome truths. Bowlby's work showed that the early interactions between infant and caregiver have a profound impact on an infant's social, emotional, and intellectual growth. Controversial yet powerfully influential to this day, this classic collection of Bowlby's lectures offers important guidelines for child rearing based on the crucial role of early relationships.

1 Caring for Children

DOI: 10.4324/9780203440841-1

During the early months of 1980 I was giving lectures in the United States. Amongst invitations reaching me was one from the psychiatric staff of the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago to address a conference on parenting.

An Indispensable Social Role

At some time of their lives, I believe, most human beings desire to have children and desire also that their children should grow up to be healthy, happy, and self-reliant. For those who succeed the rewards are great; but for those who have children but fail to rear them to be healthy, happy, and self-reliant the penalties in anxiety, frustration, friction, and perhaps shame or guilt, may be severe. Engaging in parenthood therefore is playing for high stakes. Furthermore, because successful parenting is a principal key to the mental health of the next generation, we need to know all we can both about its nature and about the manifold social and psychological conditions that influence its development for better or worse. The theme is a huge one and all I can do in this contribution is to sketch the approach that I myself adopt in thinking about these issues. That approach is an ethological one.

Before I go into detail, however, I want to make a few more general remarks. To be a successful parent means a lot of very hard work. Looking after a baby or toddler is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job seven days a week, and often a very worrying one at that. And even if the load lightens a little as children get older, if they are to flourish they still require a lot of time and attention. For many people today these are unpalatable truths. Giving time and attention to children means sacrificing other interests and other activities. Yet I believe the evidence for what I am saying is unimpeachable. Study after study, including those pioneered in Chicago by Grinker (1962) and continued by Offer (1969), attest that healthy, happy, and self-reliant adolescents and young adults are the products of stable homes in which both parents give a great deal of time and attention to the children.

I want also to emphasize that, despite voices to the contrary, looking after babies and young children is no job for a single person. If the job is to be well done and the child’s principal caregiver is not to be too exhausted, the caregiver herself (or himself) needs a great deal of assistance. From whom that help comes will vary: very often it is the other parent; in many societies, including more often than is realized our own, it comes from a grandmother. Others to be drawn in to help are adolescent girls and young women. In most societies throughout the world these facts have been, and still are, taken for granted and the society organized accordingly. Paradoxically it has taken the world’s richest societies to ignore these basic facts. Man and woman power devoted to the production of material goods counts a plus in all our economic indices. Man and woman power devoted to the production of happy, healthy, and self-reliant children in their own homes does not count at all. We have created a topsy-turvy world.

But I do not want to enter into complex political and economic arguments. My reason for raising these points is to remind you that the society we live in is not only, in evolutionary terms, a product of yesterday but in many ways a very peculiar one. There is in consequence a great danger that we shall adopt mistaken norms. For, just as a society in which there is a chronic insufficiency of food may take a deplorably inadequate level of nutrition as its norm, so may a society in which parents of young children are left on their own with a chronic insufficiency of help take this state of affairs as its norm.

An Ethological Approach

I said earlier that my approach to an understanding of parenting as a human activity is an ethological one. Let me explain.

In re-examining the nature of the child’s tie to his¹ mother, traditionally referred to as dependency, it has been found useful to regard it as the resultant of a distinctive and in part preprogrammed set of behaviour patterns which in the ordinary expectable environment develop during the early months of life and have the effect of keeping the child in more or less close proximity to his mother-figure (Bowlby, 1969). By the end of the first year the behaviour is becoming organized cybernetically, which means, among other things, that the behaviour becomes active whenever certain conditions obtain and ceases when certain other conditions obtain. For example, a child’s attachment behaviour is activated especially by pain, fatigue, and anything frightening, and also by the mother being or appearing to be inaccessible. The conditions that terminate the behaviour vary according to the intensity of its arousal. At low intensity they may be simply sight or sound of the mother, especially effective being a signal from her acknowledging his presence. At higher intensity termination may require his touching or clinging to her. At highest intensity, when he is distressed and anxious, nothing but a prolonged cuddle will do. The biological function of this behaviour is postulated to be protection, especially protection from predators.

¹ Throughout this book the child is referred to as masculine in order to avoid clumsy constructions.

In the example just given the individuals concerned are a child and his mother. It is evident, however, that attachment behaviour is in no way confined to children. Although usually less readily aroused, we see it also in adolescents and adults of both sexes whenever they are anxious or under stress. No one should be surprised therefore when a woman expecting a baby or a mother caring for young children has a strong desire to be cared for and supported herself. The activation of attachment behaviour in these circumstances is probably universal and must be considered the norm.²

² An increased desire for care, either from husband or mother, has been reported in studies of representative groups of women by Wenner (1966) and Ballou (1978).

A feature of attachment behaviour of the greatest importance clinically, and present irrespective of the age of the individual concerned, is the intensity of the emotion that accompanies it, the kind of emotion aroused depending on how the relationship between the individual attached and the attachment figure is faring. If it goes well, there is joy and a sense of security. If it is threatened, there is jealousy, anxiety, and anger. If broken, there is grief and depression. Finally there is strong evidence that how attachment behaviour comes to be organized within an individual turns in high degree on the kinds of experience he has in his family of origin, or, if he is unlucky, out of it.

This type of theory I believe to have many advantages over the theories hitherto current in our field. For not only does it bring theory into close relationship with observed data but it provides a theoretical framework for the field compatible with the framework adopted throughout modern biology and neurophysiology.

Parenting, I believe, can usefully be approached from the same ethologically inspired viewpoint. This entails observing and describing the set of behaviour patterns characteristic of parenting, the conditions that activate and terminate each, how the patterns change as a child grows older, the varying ways that parenting behaviour becomes organized in different individuals, and the myriad of experiences that influence how it develops in any one person.

Implicit in this approach is the assumption that parenting behaviour, like attachment behaviour, is in some degree preprogrammed and therefore ready to develop along certain lines when conditions elicit it. This means that, in the ordinary course of events, the parent of a baby experiences a strong urge to behave in certain typical sorts of way, for example, to cradle the infant, to soothe him when he cries, to keep him warm, protected, and fed. Such a viewpoint, of course, does not imply that the appropriate behaviour patterns manifest themselves complete in every detail from the first. Clearly that is not so, neither in man nor in any other mammalian species. All the detail is learned, some of it during interaction with babies and children, much of it through observation of how other parents behave, starting during the parent-to-be’s own childhood and the way his parents treated him and his siblings.

This modern view of behavioural development contrasts sharply with both of the older paradigms, one of which, invoking instinct, over-emphasized the preprogrammed component and the other of which, reacting against instinct, over-emphasized the learned component. Parenting behaviour in humans is certainly not the product of some unvarying parenting instinct, but nor is it reasonable to regard it as the product simply of learning. Parenting behaviour, as I see it, has strong biological roots, which accounts for the very strong emotions associated with it; but the detailed form that the behaviour takes in each of us turns on our experiences—experiences during childhood especially, experiences during adolescence, experiences before and during marriage, and experiences with each individual child.

Thus I regard it as useful to look upon parenting behaviour as one example of a limited class of biologically rooted types of behaviour of which attachment behaviour is another example, sexual behaviour another, and exploratory behaviour and eating behaviour yet others. Each of these types of behaviour contributes in its own specific way to the survival either of the individual or his offspring. It is indeed because each one serves so vital a function that each of these types of behaviour is in some degree preprogrammed. To leave their development solely to the caprices of individual learning would be the height of biological folly.

You will notice that in sketching this framework I am making a point of keeping each of these types of behaviour conceptually distinct from the others. This contrasts, of course, with traditional libido theory which has treated them as the varying expressions of a single drive. The reasons for keeping them distinct are several. One is that each of the types of behaviour mentioned serves its own distinctive biological function—protection, reproduction, nutrition, knowledge of the environment. Another is that many of the detailed patterns of behaviour within each general type are distinctive also: clinging to a parent is different from soothing and comforting a child; sucking or chewing food is different from engaging in sexual intercourse. Furthermore, factors which influence the development of one of these types of behaviour are not necessarily the same as those that influence the development of another. By keeping them distinct we are able to study not only the ways in which they differ but also the ways in which they overlap and interact with each other—as it has long been evident they do.

Initiation of Mother-Infant Interaction

During the past decade or so there has been a dramatic advance in our understanding of the early phases of mother–infant interaction, thanks to the imaginative research of workers on both sides of the Atlantic. The studies of Klaus and Kennell are now well known. Of special interest here are their observations of how mothers behave towards their newborns when given freedom to do what they like after delivery. Klaus, Trause, and Kennell (1975) describe how a mother, immediately after her infant is born, picks him up and begins to stroke his face with her finger tips. At this the baby quietens. Soon she moves on to touching his head and body with the palm of her hand and, within five or six minutes, she is likely to put him to her breast. The baby responds with prolonged licking of the nipple. ‘Immediately after the delivery’, they noted, ‘the mothers appeared to be in a state of ecstasy’, and, interestingly enough, the observers became elated too. From the moment of birth attention becomes riveted on the baby. Something about him tends to draw not only the mother and father but all those present to the new arrival. Given the chance, a mother is likely during the next few days to spend many hours just looking at her new possession, cuddling him, and getting to know him. Usually there comes a moment when she feels the baby is her very own. For some it comes early; perhaps when she first holds him or when he first looks into her eyes. For a large minority of primaparae who are delivered in hospital, however, it may be delayed for up to a week, often until they are home again (Robson and Kumar, 1980).

Phenomena of the greatest importance to which recent research has drawn attention are the potential of the healthy neonate to enter into an elemental form of social interaction and the potential of the ordinary sensitive mother to participate successfully in it.³

³ See especially the work of Stern (1977), Sander (1977), Brazelton, Koslowski, and Main (1974) and Schaffer (1977). For excellent reviews see Schaffer (1979) and Stern (1985). The state of heightened sensitivity that develops in a woman during and especially towards the end of pregnancy, and that enables her ‘to adapt delicately and sensitively’ to her infant’s needs, is a process to which Winnicott (1957) has called attention.

When a mother and her infant of two or three weeks are facing one another, phases of lively social interaction occur, alternating with phases of disengagement. Each phase of interaction begins with initiation and mutual greeting, builds up to an animated interchange comprising facial expressions and vocalizations, during which the infant orients towards his mother with excited movements of arms and legs; then his activities gradually subside and end with the baby looking away for a spell before the next phase of interaction begins. Throughout these cycles the baby is likely to be as spontaneously active as his mother. Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses. Whereas an infant’s initiation and withdrawal from interaction tend to follow his own autonomous rhythm, a sensitive mother regulates her behaviour so that it meshes with his. In addition she modifies the form her behaviour takes to suit him: her voice is gentle but higher pitched than usual, her movements slowed, and each next action adjusted in form and timing according to how her baby is performing. Thus she lets him call the tune and, by a skilful interweaving of her own responses with his, creates a dialogue.

The speed and efficiency with which these dialogues develop and the mutual enjoyment they give point clearly to each participant being preadapted to engage in them. On the one hand is the mother’s intuitive readiness to allow her interventions to be paced by her infant. On the other is the readiness with which the infant’s rhythms shift gradually to take account of the timing of his mother’s interventions. In a happily developing partnership each is adapting to the other.

Very similar alternating sequences have been recorded in other quite different exchanges between mother and child. For example, Kaye (1977), observing the behaviour of mother and infant during feeding, has found that mothers tend to interact with their infants in precise synchrony with the infant’s pattern of sucking and pausing. During bursts of sucking a mother is generally quiet and inactive; during pauses she strokes and talks to her baby. Another example of a mother taking her cue from her infant, in this case an infant within the age range 5 to 12 months, is reported by Collis and Schaffer (1975). A mother...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition
• 1 Caring for Children
• 2 The Origins of Attachment Theory
• 3 Psychoanalysis as Art and Science
• 4 Psychoanalysis as a Natural Science
• 5 Violence in the Family
• 6 On Knowing What you are Not Supposed to Know and Feeling What you are Not Supposed to Feel
• 7 The Role of Attachment in Personality Development
• 8 Attachment, Communication, and the Therapeutic Process
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index