the lab, were the ones who actually cried the least at home and were the most easygoing when left in ordinary circumstances, like when their mother had to go to the bathroom or tend to other children (or fetch an ashtray or a drink for an observer).
However, the babies who behaved less predictably in the Strange Situation kept her guessing. Some of these babies were completely undone by separation, and when Mother returned, they continued to cry, fuss, kick, and resist. Finally, this group was deemed insecure/resistant or insecure/ambivalent (C), in the sense that they expressed a desire for contact but were, at the same time, resistant to its effects, or ambivalent. And indeed, these were the babies who at home were the fussiest. Mary writes, “Crying in the home environment, including crying when the mother leaves the room, is most closely related to resistant behavior in the reunion episodes of the strange situation.” The resistant babies cried more in the Strange Situation than the other two groups.
Another group of babies wasn’t crying during separations. Mary thought they might just need a little more stress, so she reluctantly added another separation. Still nothing. And then, when she looked at the home data, she realized that these babies actually cried more than the secure babies, though less than the resistant, and had mothers who were more rejecting at home. The ones who sat still as a stone during the entire Strange Situation were often upset at home, especially when put down. In fact, the home observers had described these babies as the angriest of the bunch. This conundrum led to one of her biggest breakthroughs.
Contemplating this apparent contradiction, Mary thought of the early work of Jimmy Robertson, her colleague at Tavistock Clinic, the same one who inspired her work in Uganda. She remembered a little girl named Laura from his black-and-white film A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital and how, even though her parents visited her daily, Laura was so pissed off about being left, she totally withdrew, and even refused to hold her mother’s hand when her parents took her home. And Mary wondered: Can one-year-olds, preverbal, some still not walking and, as far as Freud was concerned, still egoless, be angry? Is that even possible? Is a one-year-old actually person enough to have such a deeply personal response?
While the world’s answer was no, Mary’s answer, after much close and careful observation, was yes. Even her dear friend Bowlby, who had made it his life’s work to expose the world to a child’s grief from separation, had a hard time buying that these avoidant babies were expressing a defense, per se. But Mary insisted that these babies’ refusal to cry or seek comfort was in fact a very real defense against the pain of knowing that their mothers might reject them.
In a discussion with Bowlby, Mary said:
As for looking-away behavior, I was not geared to note it when we began to observe infants in a strange situation. It first became obvious in its most conspicuous form where a child would start towards the mother, stop, turn and walk away, refusing to come back despite the mother’s entreaties…It was not until a careful examination of the home-visit data that we were able to make hypotheses about what the baby might be defending against.
Eventually Bowlby came around, and in fact felt terrible for doubting Mary, though she “largely took his criticisms as friendly scientific cautions.” She said, “I expected that some children were going to be more insecure than others, that they would cry harder, that they would cry more promptly, that they would cry longer, be harder to comfort, and that they would be angry [C babies]. The thing that blew my mind was the avoidant response [A babies].”
That avoidance response is now well documented. These are the babies who appear to be very together and well behaved in the Strange Situation, though the opposite is true at home. Because we Americans tend to feel pride when our babies don’t appear to need us—we value an independent, “easy” disposition—what is in fact a fear of rejection in the Strange Situation is often misconstrued as admirable nonchalance. However, by tracking the heart rate, skin temperature, and cortisol levels, researchers like Alan Sroufe have found that these babies are far from relaxed;