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PART 1
EXPLORING
INTEGRATION,
UNINTEGRATION
AND ATTACHMENT
A Jigsaw Puzzle in the Making
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CHAPTER 1
THE DEVELOPMENT OF
THE SELF THROUGH A
SECURE ATTACHMENT
Alistair Cooper
Introduction
Today’s society is increasingly complex, and one where social media offers access to larger communities of people but where there is less reliance on wider family networks. Immediate family networks tend to have fewer members in them, as parents increasingly raise children with little or no support from extended family. In this context, perhaps more than ever, having an ability to negotiate and flourish in our social world relies on mastering the skills of self-care, including having control over our own emotional world and the skills of understanding ourselves and others. Mentalising is the term given to this emotional understanding and attunement to the mental states of the self and others – the ability to empathise and to see things from the perspective of others, which is critical in enabling social relationships. Our ability to do this is first shaped by how we were cared for in our early primary relationships, particularly how harmonious and regulating these relationships were.
The familial context can be characterised as repeated in-situ social and emotional training exercises, wherein infants and children learn about relationships and practice and improve the different skills needed to relate to others both within and outside the family. In developmentally supportive environments, children have the advantage of relationships with trusted parents who directly help to strengthen the capacities that enable relatedness and connection. Research (Rutter 2006; Felitti and Anda 2009; Leadsom et al. 2013) repeatedly evidences the impact of the familial environment on developmental outcomes for children. The findings highlight the significance of early social environments and, specifically, the adults within them in creating conditions that optimise a child’s development. Parents who foster curiosity and exploration of the inner worlds of both self and others build resilience in a child’s inner world, which then enables the child to thrive in the outer world. So, relating to the world outside the self requires a parental focus on the inner world of the child.
When an infant lives with a family that promotes a felt sense of safety and emotional support, they immediately learn about their sense of self: what is them and what is not them. This begins a journey of understanding their psychological self, the emergence of which relies on much more than an infant’s innate ability to organise their own experience (Fonagy et al. 2005). We are social creatures, who find ourselves in relationships with others; this makes the origin of the self by its very nature social. To form a self, it is necessary to have interactions with interested and connected caregivers, who provide certain types of experiences that will evoke the emergence of the self. For a child to develop a coherent sense of their inner world they need parents with whom they can truly connect emotionally, reflecting back their inner states so that their inner world becomes integrated and understood. I will refer to the primary caregiver as the mother on occasion within this chapter, though this should not be interpreted as an indication that primary care cannot be provided by others, for example fathers, extended family members, foster carers or nannies. I will explore the social origin of the self and how we create coherence about self and others in the social environment of the family. The outcomes can be very different depending on the nature of these interactions and how attuned a parent is to the needs of their child. I draw on my work with adolescents with whom I have had the good fortune to meet and support and who, for the purposes of this chapter, are anonymised.
The patterns of rhythm and harmony in secure relationships
What must it be like to be a newborn baby, a little person who knows nothing about the world, who cannot yet experience themselves as a separate entity and must know little about their emotional world? Rather than being a helpless passive individual ready to be shaped by the environment, the infant brings skills, abilities and motivations to achieve the most important task, namely that of making relationships with their parents and caregivers.
Research studies on mother–infant interactions suggest that newborn babies demonstrate an inherent motivation to interact with adults (Nagy et al. 2013). They make gestures, lip movements, facial expressions and sounds that express what is going on inside their bodies and that relate to their interest in events in the world (Trevarthen, Delafield-Butt and Schögler 2011). An infant is interested in and takes part as a capable, active participant within enjoyable harmonious interactions with other people who take an interest, make an effort and feel pleasure joining in this dialogue and responding to their gestures (Trevarthen et al. 2011). Such harmonious interactions are called attuned interactions.
Researchers demonstrate that, during attuned interactions, parents and infants are not just matched emotionally and behaviourally, but also physiologically (Tronick 2007). These interactions are characterised by emotional communication where an infant leads and the mother follows; both match and synchronise inner states, and simultaneously both mother and infant adjust their attention, stimulation and arousal to each other’s responses.
Frankie, a 14-month-old infant, is interacting with his mother, and both are co-ordinating their responses. For example, they are following each other’s gaze, smiling in response to each other and becoming animated in response to each other’s animation. As Frankie becomes more excited, his mother smiles excitedly, responding in turn. She becomes psychobiologically attuned not so much to Frankie’s overt behaviour but to the reflections of the rhythms of his internal state.
In exchanges of affective synchrony, a parent and infant each recreates an inner state similar to each other. They share what the other is feeling emotionally and physically on some level. The ‘musicality’ within attuned interactions, matched by both rhythm and style, happens subtly and provides an infant with an experience of being seen and heard, a felt experience that the parent is truly connecting with the child.
An attuned parent will match activity to the infant, and allow them to recover quietly in periods of disengagement, so, for example, once excited feelings calm down and arousal is down-regulated and the infant becomes calmer, the parent is able to interpret this change in behaviour as non-threatening, a normal developmental need and not a sign of rejection. An attuned parent will also be more attentive to the infant’s cue to re-engage and be willing to reconnect with interest and joy when the infant is ready.
Harmony and brain development
An infant’s ability to actively join with the parent and take part in such meetings of emotionally matched experiences within social play suggests an innate capacity to orientate towards these events, but to what purpose? What happens within these interactions – why might they be important? Our ever-increasing understanding of neurological processes points to the experience-dependent maturation (reaching maturity) of the brain systems involved in attachment, which suggest that a baby’s developing brain is designed to be moulded by the social and emotional environment it encounters. Everything about us, our brains, our minds and our bodies, is geared towards collaborating with each other. These interactions help neural connections and give substance and meaning to our entire lives. What happens within our primary attachment relationships are the crucial drivers in this neural development (Watt 2000).
The importance of this can be seen clearly when we consider that the early maturing right part of the brain, responsible for processing emotions, prevails in human infants (Schore 1994) and is shaped by the mother. She is actively engaged in emotionally laden interactions, which puts great responsibility on a mother’s care at reflexive, implicit, non-verbal levels and the support she gives to the self-regulatory systems of her child. An attuned mother will intuitively and automatically react more frequently to her baby’s displays of emotional expressions compared with more random movements, meaning there is a frequent matching of a mother’s response to her baby’s emotional experiences. A mother’s intimate care provides vital regulatory functions for her child, who possesses immature, incomplete psychological organisation, and she will promote the development of brain functions that support the capacity to calm distress (Schore 1994). This is particularly important during the first three years of the child’s life, or 1001 days, which are widely seen as the critical period for brain development and when there is greatest vulnerability in terms of the stress response. This relates to one of the earliest developmental tasks facing infants: to begin to manage their own stress. The effects of early stress have a particularly disabling effect on the developing child.
Babies are born with little capacity to soothe themselves and are completely dependent on adults to respond to, manage and regulate their emotions and stress. Healthy adults respond to distressed babies by trying to comfort them, and they use techniques such as holding, stroking, rocking, singing or walking up and down to calm them. Associating intense arousal with comfort and security from a consistent, contingent and reliable caregiver is fundamental to emotional regulation. The regular, sensitive provision of such comfort, combined with a timely response to physical needs, teaches babies how to learn to deal effectively with physiological arousal without being totally dependent on adults.
Learning to sing and learning about my own song
Within the context of attachment relationships, infants start immediately to learn about their sense of self. Winnicott (1973) described how mothers attentively hold their babies during everything they do and how this special contact starts the discovery of a physical self, to be able to physically feel the body as the place wherein one lives. Gergely and Watson (1996) proposed that the process for affect regulation and of emotional self-awareness and control in infancy starts with newborn babies’ innate interest in aspects of the environment that forms the basis of a primary representation of the bodily self. In other words, the infant has an ability to pay attention to and recognise aspects of their world that react in response to their actions in a way that perfectly reflects their action or activity. From the outside, for instance, you might see a baby showing fascination for a mobile that moves in response to their leg movement. Again, synchronicity is important, as the infant is sensitive to change in the frequency or intensity of the movement of the mobile, and if there is a delay in movement of the mobile their interest diminishes. The infant might show shock and surprise if a mobile moves more or less than the amount of effort they have put in to moving it.
These experiences are a perfect reflection of self, of an infant’s own physical movements, and are particularly important as they are the ...
