Attachment, Relationships and Food

From Cradle to Kitchen

Linda Cundy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000428599
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Using attachment theory as a lens for understanding the role of food in our everyday lives, this book explores relationships with other people, with ourselves and between client and therapist, through our connection with food.

The aim of this book is twofold: to examine the nature of attachment through narratives of feeding, and to enrich psychotherapy practice by encouraging exploration of clients' food-related memories and associations. Bringing together contributions from an experienced group of psychotherapists, the chapters examine how our connections with food shape our patterns of attachment and defence, how this influences appetite, self-feeding (or self-starving) and how we may then feed others. They consider a spectrum from a "secure attachment" to food through to avoidant, preoccupied and disorganised, including discussion of eating disorders.

Enriched throughout with diverse clinical case studies, this edited collection illuminates how relationships to food can be a rich source of insight and understanding for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and other counselling therapists working today.

Chapter 1
The last supper

Attachment, loss … and food

Linda Cundy

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

(Forster, 2005, p. 57)

To this, Bowlby would have added separation. The big themes of attachment theory are the nature and purpose of the attachment bond and the impact of separation from and loss of our attachment figures. Throughout life we make important relationships, face temporary and permanent losses, and hopefully recover from these. But what of food?

Attachment and separation

The last supper

I met Leanne when I worked for Hackney Bereavement Service. In her late twenties, she was struggling to cope following the death of her father a few months earlier. She described herself as a “daddy’s girl” and was clearly a bright young woman, but depression masked any spark of curiosity, creativity or motivation. An only child, she was the first in her extended family to pursue further education, but at the time she took up her place at a university several hundred miles from home, her mother had breast cancer and died shortly after. Leanne returned, ostensibly to care for her father. But the reality was rather different.

Leanne told me that she had always been timid and dependent. She applied for a university place to make her parents proud but experienced the separation as unbearable, cutting her off not only from the family home but also the working-class community she grew up in. She lacked the internal resources to adapt to this new world, and she was worried and distressed about her mother’s illness. Her parents had kept the true extent of the disease hidden from their highly-strung daughter, but parental secrecy created further anxiety in the child – anxiety, separation and then loss. So her return home was rather to be cared for by her father. Perhaps this also fulfilled a need in him, to continue nursing and supporting a vulnerable loved one, a way of coping with his own grief at losing his life partner. It seems he was by nature more a nurturing maternal figure than a father, and an important manifestation of his love was his cooking. So while Leanne found work with the local council, father Eddie ran the home, shopped and prepared her evening meals.

When Eddie was himself diagnosed with an advanced cancer, he faced his illness courageously troubled only by the knowledge that his daughter would soon be left alone. He tried teaching her to prepare basic dinners, but Leanne would have none of it – she would not countenance the need to cook for herself. So in order to continue caring for her from beyond the grave, Eddie filled the freezer with her favourite homemade meals.

Leanne was devastated when her father died. Her doctor signed her off work with depression and she became reclusive. When just one of her father’s home-cooked dinners remained to be defrosted she finally asked for help.

We humans are a profoundly social species, and our young are utterly dependent on their parents for survival. Babies come into the world ready equipped with behaviours designed to elicit care, and the caregiver’s most fundamental function is to keep the infant alive. Feeding is a critical component of this (how many times have I heard, from people severely neglected or abused as children, “at least there was food on the table”?). But in time, the child must develop skills to go out into the world, keep himself safe, find his own food and eventually to feed others. It is part of the attachment figure’s role to pass on the skills to fend for and feed oneself.

One approach to understanding Leanne’s difficulties is to reflect on the family’s three-person dynamics. Did “daddy’s girl” Leanne long to shut out her mother, to have her nurturing father to herself? May she have felt excluded from the parental couple’s relationship, especially during the months of her mother’s illness and treatment when Eddie was so involved in supporting his wife? Was Eddie’s subsequent death felt to be a punishment for her Oedipal triumph? So many questions. And, when viewed from an attachment perspective, further questions arise concerning the family narrative.

Leanne’s is a moving tale of a father’s love and care – the parental urge to keep his child alive and nourished. But perhaps the Tupperware containers filled with his beef stews and fish pies were also manifestation of an enmeshed family dynamic? The attachment-seeking and caregiving functions of their relationship worked well, but the encouragement to explore the world, develop expertise and grow into a secure autonomous adult was missing. (I am aware of a certain bias here, the assumption that separation and independence are normal, healthy, inevitable. I accept that human development allows for wide variation, but I view the capacity for autonomy to be culturally appropriate in the Western world.)

I did not learn the family history, the ingredients that spiced life with anxiety and seemed to tinge the outside world with danger, making all food other than father’s unpalatable for Leanne. Perhaps there was a clue in the age of her parents (both had been in their forties when their daughter was born), the absence of siblings, some reason why her arrival in the world, or her survival, was especially precious and precarious. Possibly Eddie’s attachment history could have helped us understand his need to protect and feed his daughter long beyond usual dependency. Or, as her mother’s cancer was diagnosed when Leanne was a teenager, perhaps a developmental opportunity was missed; adolescents typically experiment with separation and individuation, loosen bonds with family and begin to invest in new relationships. Teenage protest and rebellion, against a mother whose breast was cancerous, would likely have been curtailed. And now, twice-bereaved, Leanne lacked skills or resources to sustain herself.

The imperative for Eddie to continue caring for – and feeding – his daughter even beyond death was far from unique. In past years archaeologists have unearthed mysterious objects dating from the Bronze and Iron Ages in numerous sites in Europe. These ceramic containers have spouts, and recent finds in Germany contain traces of animal milk (Dunne et al., 2019). It appears that these were feeding bottles for small children – evidence of weaning practice some three thousand years ago. What is notable is that these were grave goods, buried alongside young bodies. It seems the parental urge to nourish their young continued beyond the child’s death. Part nourishment, part transitional object, these feeders indicate a belief in an afterlife, with the bond between parent and offspring continuing despite separation by death.

In this chapter, I explore the close connection between feeding and attachment and the impact of separation and bereavement on appetite, eating habits and the sense of self. Eating together is central to parent–child relationships, is part of couple bonding and of family life. So when an attachment figure dies, our relationship to the world – including what and how we feed ourselves – is shaken up. People enjoy talking about food, and I have listened to and interviewed, many people – family, friends, clients, even strangers on trains – about their own experiences. Some of their stories provide vignettes.

In general, I will refer to the infant or child as “he,” and the mother (the person who provides “mothering,” whether birth mother or not, and regardless of gender) as “she.”

Early feeding

From the start of life, feeding is a relational activity. Whether breast or bottle, feeding time provides an opportunity for intimate connection. Skin-to-skin contact stimulates oxytocin, the bonding hormone, in both partners. Through touch, gaze, facial expression and vocalisation, the nursing dyad come into synchrony; they find each other.

One vital task of early caregiving is regulating not only the infant’s hunger but also his affect states. How the baby is held and fed depends on the caregiver’s capacity for sensitive attunement, and that, in turn, is related to her own attachment history, as well as current support and stresses (Sette et al., 2015). A mother’s capacity to be fully present and enjoy the infant, or her unease with intimacy and baby’s dependency needs, her own barely contained anxiety, or her struggle to be reliable and attuned, have origins in her own past and often her own infancy. The pattern of attachment that develops between baby and a parent – secure, avoidant, ambivalent or disorganised – is shaped long before conception (Benoit & Parker, 1994; Fonagy, 1991; Steele et al., 2016); mother’s early relationships thus contribute to the infant’s sense of self and self-worth, how he comes to perceive his place in the world. The intergenerational relationship is ingested with each feed and forms the basis of the baby’s developing personality.

Mother may have the capacity to meet the baby’s needs for nutrition and attunement more or less on demand at first (Winnicott’s “good enough mother,” 1971), putting time aside for a relaxed, unhurried meal. The baby experiences his bodily needs and emotional hunger for connection as important. Or this family may opt for the structured approach to feeding advocated by Frederic Truby King, whose childcare methods were particularly influential following the Second World War, or, more recently, by Gina Ford. Here, the infant is trained from the start to fit into a routine, allowing mother to attend to other commitments and to her own needs. The little one discovers the place he can occupy in the life of this family – and the mind of this parent. He adapts, learning to contain his own anxiety and, perhaps, make do with less intimate contact. His awareness of his hunger for food and for attention and how he later feeds himself develop within this particular relational ecosystem: his appetites perhaps feel shameful.

A chronically anxious mother conveys her agitation through how she holds and nourishes her baby. If her anxieties concern his survival, she may become intrusive and potentially misattuned in her management of feeds; she is likely to resort to controlling behaviours in her attempts to feed her child, and conflict may develop between them (Messina et al., 2000). Her cortisol is taken in with the milk, and his digestive system is often troubled. Feeding becomes stressful for him, torn between the pain and fear of hunger and a tense encounter with his stressed mother, and his own base levels of stress hormones are likely to be set high.

Here is an extract from a letter written in 1850 by Jenny Marx, wife of Karl: at that time the family was in London, almost destitute, after being effectively banished from France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland etc.

Let me describe for you, as it really was, just one day in our lives and you will realise that few refugees are likely to have gone through a similar experience. Since wet-nurses here are exorbitantly expensive, I was determined to feed my child myself, however frightful the pain in my breast and my back. But the poor little angel absorbed with my milk so many anxieties and unspoken sorrows that he was always ailing and in severe pain by day and by night.

(in Wheen, 2000, p. 158)

The baby being nursed, little Henry, did not survive.

Alternatively, a depressed parent may provide functional feeding, but without the pleasurable relational connection that babies so crave and need to thrive. Food is then equated not with love, pleasure, safety and comfort but with fuel.

Of course, mother’s state of mind is also affected by other factors, including her support system, the influence of her partner (if she has one), other demands on her energies, her own health, recent or past trauma, or loss. It is possible that the pregnancy and birth give rise to fantasies about this particular baby that influence how mother relates to him, as explored by Piontelli in her observational study, From Fetus to Child (1992). Even when she has created secure attachment with a previous child or children, if this pregnancy has been an ordeal for her or has become associated with tragedy or pain, it is possible that her reserves are over-stretched. It is then difficult to distinguish between the newborn who has ordinary needs from one who is “insatiable” and has “been trouble from the start.” She may resent paying him attention, and that influences the feeding contact.

A baby who cannot or will not breast feed, due to birth defects, colic or other difficulties, is often experienced as rejecting. Mothers who are unable to breast feed commonly feel inadequate, and their shame may take the form of withdrawing from intimacy or perhaps overcompensating with the bottle.

If a woman has been victim to attack, persecution or sexual assault, we can imagine that pregnancy and early motherhood may feel traumatic – how she might confuse the piercing, persistent cries of a hungry infant with the taunts or jeers of an abuser, or the little one’s vulnerability with her own at the time of assault. Mothers with a history of unresolved trauma manifest their own disturbance in how they attend to their babies’ needs, including their hunger, often leading to infants’ failure to thrive (Ward et al., 2000). Research using the “still face” procedure with mothers diagnosed with borderline personality disorder – or complex post-traumatic stress disorder, as Herman (1992) renamed it – and their 8-week-old infants found these mothers to be more intrusive and insensitive to their baby’s cues than the control group (Crandell et al., 2003). Fraiberg and her colleagues, assigned to support young mothers with a background of trauma and abuse where the baby was at risk of harm, found that these women, when in self-absorbed states of mind, did not hear their infants’ cries of hunger or distress. (Fraiberg et al., 1975) Parents with a traumatic past struggle to manage their own fear, hopelessness and rage and may dissociate when agitated. They have few internal resources to help them care for a dependent infant and, under the strain of sleepless nights and frequent demands, may not only fail to provide reliable, safe, enjoyable feeding experiences for the little one; rage, terrifying shouting and physical attack may be triggered by a hungry baby’s desperate communications. A chilling description of such a scenario is outlined by Daniel A. Hughes (2018).

I worked with Samira at a mental health centre in the 1980s. She had recently been discharged from psychiatric hospital, where she had been sectioned following a psychotic episode. Samira showed signs of true hysteria, or conversion disorder – psychological distress converted into mysterious bodily symptoms. In particular she suffered from partial paralysis not caused by neurological damage. She also had an eating disorder, surviving on a restrictive diet of sweets and cigarettes.

Samira had been subjected to physical and sexual abuse by her ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the editor and contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 The last supper: attachment, loss … and food
• 2 “He’s got a good appetite”: how do men experience attachment and food?
• 3 Food and feelings
• 4 “Let food be thy medicine”: the impact of nutrition on mental well-being
• 5 Overcoats, burning buildings and planks of wood: an integrated attachment-based approach to working with eating disorders
• 6 Dysfunctional eating in recovering addicts: a therapist’s shift to an attachment-focused approach
• 7 Kitchen Therapy: cooking for connection and belonging
• 8 Food in the consulting room
• 9 Guess who’s coming to dinner: culture, community, identity … and food
• Index