sits down and the baby plays. Or not. A stranger comes in and the mother leaves. The baby is left with the stranger, and then alone. What happens next has been found to reveal something so profound about the relationship between the two that it will impact that baby forever. And, as I would later learn, the mother, too.
I was instantly drawn to the promise of this very strange situation to tell me what kind of mother I had been. I hoped that what I learned would let me off the hook for the damage I was afraid I was inflicting upon my daughter. But even more, I wanted to learn everything I could about the Strange Situation, because I thought it could point me to something important about love. And I was immediately drawn to the “lady professor” named Mary Ainsworth who’d created it.
Ainsworth was born in 1913 and died in 1999, when she was eighty-five years old, a celebrated expert in her field and by all accounts a brilliant researcher and theoretician. Her New York Times obituary described her as a “developmental psychologist whose work revolutionized the understanding of the bond between mothers and infants.” Inspired both by her own questions about the nature of a child’s relationship to its mother and by a passion for the scientific method, she spent her career observing, then developing an understanding of, the parent-child dynamic—first for a few months in Uganda in 1954, then in Baltimore from 1964 to 1967—with a depth and a rigor considered “unparalleled.” Her work in Africa was what she called “an experiment of opportunity,” inspired by a Ganda ritual regarding weaning that intrigued her, but turned out to be a rumor. The truly fortuitous opportunity lay in the fact that she was in Africa only because her younger husband had insisted on going for a project of his own and she, being a dutiful 1950s wife, went with him. Never one to squander a moment, she decided to do a study of her own—a research project about the early love that forms between parent and child.
Visiting and chatting with twenty-six Ganda mothers and their babies every couple of weeks, watching the babies crawl, scramble, and toddle back and forth across the floor to their mothers’ laps, Ainsworth began to wonder what made some of the relationships feel so easy and pleasant, while others felt disconnected and fraught, and she started to form a hypothesis. Though her Uganda study was a little scrappy and off-the-cuff, it was the first of its kind, and it set the stage for what is now the long, complicated history of attachment research.
And for the insights that have changed my life.
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IN THE OPENING of the third edition of the Handbook of Attachment (2016), Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver write of Mary Ainsworth and her colleague John Bowlby that “it seems unlikely that [either of them] dreamed for a moment that their theoretical efforts would spawn one of the broadest, most profound, and most creative lines of research in 20th- and 21st-century psychology.”
While there is no way Ainsworth could have imagined that an online search—which of course did not exist in her lifetime—for “attachment” would turn up millions of entries, she did know she was onto something big. On January 2, 1968, she wrote in a letter to her graduate student and research partner Sylvia Bell, “This is really a tremendously difficult, subtle, and yet highly significant area of research we have gotten into…We can’t really miss!”
And she was right. As the boom in attachment research now reports, pretty much everything we do—how we love, work, marry, create, lead, pray, scroll, drink, eat, study, sleep, have sex—can be seen in light of our earliest attachment relationships. And the field itself has evolved to become ever more subtle and fine-tuned, influencing other areas of study such as psychopathology, physical health, neurobiology, and genetics. While mothers were the original parental figures studied, it is now widely accepted that babies form the same attachments with fathers and nonbiological caregivers as well. Today, researchers believe that our pattern of attachment, entrenched enough by one year of age to be observed and classified, is more important to a person’s development than temperament, IQ, social class, and parenting style. According to Marinus van IJzendoorn,