Attachment

Attachment

Form a Secure Attachment with Mother and a sizeable chunk of what you will need to feel secure is yours for the rest of your life. If you don’t experience attunenment with Mother, the world is a ruthless, scary, hostile place –a virtual life sentence without parole.

Public Domain Image

Life is unfair

We start out totally dependent on our parents, usually on our mother. We are hungry and need to be fed. We are soiled and need to be cleaned. We are frightened and need to be comforted. We have a dire need to know we are loved.

No Coddling, No Attachment

When I was born in 1938, psychologists and pediatricians pretty much agreed physical demonstration of motherly love was harmful to the child’s emotional development. Even the U.S. government warned of the dire consequences of affectionate, coddling and mothering.

John Watson, M.D. was the spokesperson of this behavioral approach to child-rearing, the same stimulus-response research he conducted with rats. In his popular 1928 book, “Psychological Care of Infant and Child,” and other of his writings, Watson chided mothers about the dangers of too much mother love.

“To the extent to which you devote time to petting and coddling – and I have seen almost all of a child’s hours devoted to it – just to that extent do you rob the child of the time which he should be devoting to the manipulation of his universe, acquiring a technique with fingers, hands, and arms.”

I had lots of time with my fingers, hands, and arms.

Can’t Buy Me Attachment

I’ll buy you a diamond ring my friend,
if it will make you feel all right.

Attempting to show that motherly love was needed in child-rearing was a hard stance for a psychologist starting his career in the 1930s. Harry Harlow took the challenge and spent most of his career in a small basement lab at the University of Wisconsin working with rhesus macaque monkeys.

He presented the results of his experiments on August 31, 1958, at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association. But it was what he left out of that presentation for what he is most remembered.

Dr. Frankenstein

He placed monkeys in steel containers soon after birth and kept them there from thirty days to a year. After thirty days in the container, they were incapable of having sexual relations as adults. When placed with other monkeys for a daily play session, they were badly bullied. Two of them refused to eat and starved themselves to death.

Public Domain Image

Other of Harlow’s experiments involved taking terry-cloth mothers the monkeys bonded with and turning them into evil mothers. The milk-giving “breast” area of the terry-cloth mother was rigged to shoot blunt spikes at the clinging infant monkey. Other terry-cloth moms shook so violently the infant was severely shaken up. Still, other terry cloth-mothers were spring-loaded and violently threw the clinging infant away.

When the spikes stopped shooting, the violent shaking stopped, and when they were no longer thrown, the babies kept coming back to cling to the surrogate mother. They had been comforted by and bonded with this only source of refuge. It was now loving and evil by turns. The monkeys developed the worst case of anxious avoidance attachment.

Monkeys R Us

Harlow and his researchers concluded that the impact of early maternal deprivation could possibly be reversed in monkeys only if it lasted less than 90 days. He estimated that the equivalent for humans was six months. After these critical periods, no amount of exposure to mothers or peers could alter the monkeys’ abnormal behaviors and make up for the emotional damage that had already occurred.

Here is a video of Harlow at work. I had to shut it off because I had a flashback.

Self-help books that help:

Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus

The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body