to work with the patient’s internal drama, manifested as fantasies or dreams or compulsions, rather than to resolve a real, live relationship—past or present.
In fact, parental love was understood at that time to be so insignificant that it was seen as a stand-in for the “primary drive” for food. Freudian analysts of the day believed that, as in some psychic shell game, physical fulfillment was simply masquerading as love. In other words, we love the hand that feeds us because it feeds us. Hence the cupboard love theory.
Though as a culture we tend to pooh-pooh these outdated notions, and we appreciate the power of relationships to impact our lives, when Azalea was born I was struck by the many voices I heard in the emerging “momosphere” at the time urging mothers like me not to worry too much—the whole “My parents neglected me and I turned out okay!” attitude. Looking back, I appreciate the wisdom in urging parents to take it easy on themselves, something I’ve had to learn how to do. However, just beneath the encouragement to be gentle to oneself is a belief that what we do as parents doesn’t really matter…that much. Which I found unsettling.
When considering the question of parenting and the effect we have on our kids, it’s only natural to ask: What about everything else? What about temperament and other inborn traits? How much responsibility do we take for our children’s problems and, conversely, for their happiness? Mary Ainsworth put this false dichotomy to rest in an interview with Peter L. Rudnytsky in 1997, two years before she died.
PLR: So you are leaving some room for temperament?
MSA: Yes. But a mother can be appropriately responsive to a given baby even if she’s had several babies who may differ quite a lot in their characteristics to start off, and she can be sensitive to each one in terms of his or her own leads.
PLR: So you’re saying that there is something innate that each child brings?
MSA: Yes. Everybody knows that.
What Mary is saying is important. There are things that each child comes into life with, and they really matter. And there are varying degrees of sensitivity with which a caregiver can care for a child, no matter what his or her temperament, and the more sensitive and more attuned that care, the better. It’s so painful to see our children suffer from all manner of human problems, and tempting to say that our love doesn’t help. But it does. Regardless of what we face in adulthood, love in childhood will always make it easier to handle.
During the time of Bowlby’s training, however, his supervisor believed that even though an individual’s emotional pain may have been the result of an insensitive (or worse) caregiver, the importance of their relationship pales in comparison with an individual’s very own interior, private psychic drama—the juicy stuff of on-the-couch, interpretation-of-dreams Freudian analysis. In other words, people were acknowledged as being part of a family archipelago, but ultimately considered distinctly separate and solitary within that string of isles. Individuals. And so it makes sense that when Bowlby, who was beginning to see just how impossible it is to extract someone from their relationships, wanted to work with the boy’s mother, Klein actually forbade it. She believed that it was absurd to try to make an association between the mother’s state of mind—and therefore her ability to be a sensitive caregiver—and the child’s. Nor did she express concern for an already troubled child having to be separated from his mother, because to her, a mother was easily replaced.
I have often tried to imagine young Bowlby, who had devoted his life to boys like this one, scratching his head, maybe searching his soul over this heartbreaking failure, and trying to figure out how he could work within, then change, the system. Bowlby was an outlier in his field because he believed, as he put it, that “real-life events—the way parents treat a child—is of key importance in determining development.” Even when a child’s home life was investigated in a clinical case, which did happen occasionally, all the wrong things were looked at—the external factors of a child’s life, like whether or not the parents kept a tidy