Transcript > The Book of Life – Psychotherapy: John Bowlby

Our deepest longing is to have stable, satisfying relationships, but the painful
fact is that very large numbers of relationships have one painful episode after
another, or seemingly intractable, miserable conflicts running through them.
It’s one of the biggest questions there is: why is it so hard to be happy and
love? The huge and not yet fully digested insight of psychoanalysis is that the
challenges of relationships always start when we were children. It was the
contribution of a great English psychoanalyst called John Bowlby to trace the
tensions and conflicts we have with our partners, back to our earliest
experiences of maternal care. His ideas are sound in part because he drew so
deeply and honestly on his own experiences in order to formulate them.
Born in 1907, Bowlby had a quintessentially upper-class British childhood.
Young Bowlby hardly saw his parents and was looked after by a nanny, who
was let gone when he was just four, leaving young Bowlby bereft. At seven he
was sent off in line with the conventions of his class to Boarding School, he
hated it and later declared: “I wouldn’t send a dog away to Boarding School!” at
the age of seven. Bowlby became a brilliant medical student, and an
imaginative researcher.
When he was a consultant to the World Health Organization in the early 1950s,
Bowlby wrote a report: Maternal Care and Mental Health. He attacked prevalent
assumptions, and argued that kindness doesn’t smother and spoil children. It’s
as if maternal care were as necessary for the proper development of personality
as Vitamin D for the proper development of bones, he wrote. This insight
initiated a wave of reform: the visitation rooms* of many health institutions were
reformed to allow parents to stay with their children, were they once been
allowed only to visit and never touch. It sounds like a dray burocratic move, but
it ended countless afternoons of quiet sorrow, and evenings of solitary anguish.
In a book published in 1959 called Separation Anxiety, Bowlby looks at what
happens when there isn’t enough of this kind of parental care. He described the
behavior of children he’d observed, who’d been separated from their parents. If
the child is separated for too long, they still crave the attention, love and interest
of the parents, but feel that anything good may disappear at any moment; they
look for a lot of reassurance, and get upset if it’s not forthcoming; they become
volatile, they take heart and then they despair, and then they are filled with hope
again. This is the pattern of what Bowlby called Anxious Attachment.
But the degree of separation from the parents, may lead to another sort of
problem: the child could feel so helpless, he becomes what Bowlby called
“detached”, they enter their own world to protect themselves and become
remote and cold, they experience what Bowlby calls Avoidant Attachment. That
is, they see tenderness, closeness, emotional investment as always dangerous
and to be shunned, they may in truth be desperate for a cuddle or reassurance,
but such things are far too treacherous. The focus of Bowlby’s thinking, was
about what happens to a child if there are too many difficulties in forming secure
attachment. But the consequences don’t magically get restricted to the age of
eight, twelve or seventeen, they are lifelong. Our attachment style is fed by our
earliest experiences. It’s a preexistent script that gets written into our adult
relationships, usually without us even realizing that this has happened.
In line with Bowlby’s views about how children relate to their parents, there are
three basic kinds of attachment we could have to other adults:
Firstly, Secure Attachment. This is the rare ideal. When you’re securely
attached, if there’s a problem, you’ll work it out. You’re not repulled (*) by the
weakness of your partner, if your partner is a bit down, confused or being a bit
annoying, you don’t react too wildly, because if they can’t be nice to you, you
can take care of yourself and have hopefully a little time left over to meet some
of the needs of your partner. You give the other the benefit of a doubt when
interpreting behavior, you realize that maybe they had a tricky time at work,
that’s why they’re not so interested in your day. The explanations are
accommodating, generous and usually more accurate.
But there’s another kind of attachment. Anxious Attachment. And his is
marked by cleanliness (*), texting and calling all the time, just to check where
the other is and keep tabs at what they’re up to. You need to make sure the
other person hasn’t left you, or the country. Anxiously attached people are
cohesive and demanding, and focus on their own needs, not their partner’s.
Anxious attachment involves a lot of anger, because the stakes feel so high, a
minus slight, a hasty word, a tiny oversized, can look to the anxiously attached
person like huge threats, they seem to announce the imminent breakup of the
whole relationship. One feels “the reason you don’t tell me that the (*) soup I
made is delicious is that you don’t love me and are planning to leave me”, when
the true explanation may simply be that one’s partner is mulling over a very
tricky bit of news about a contract at work.
Avoidant Attachment means that you would rather withdraw or/and go away
than compromise or get angry, or even get close to another person. If there’s a
problem, you don’t talk, your instinct is to say you don’t need the other person,
especially if you’re lonely.
Avoidant spouses, often team up with anxious ones. It’s a risky combination: the
avoidant one doesn’t give the anxious much support, and the anxious one is
always invading the delicate privacy of the avoidant one.
Bowlby helps us to feel more generous and more constructive about what this
partners are doing when they upset or disappoint us. Almost no one in truth is
purely anxious, or purely avoidant, we’re just a bit like that some of the time. So,
alerted by Bowlby, we can see that our partner’s apparent coldness and
indifference is not caused by their (*) of us, but by the fact that a long time ago
they were probably rather badly hurt by intimacy. And it opens possibilities of
self-knowledge which can help one reform, if only a little, one’s own rather
eccentric behaviour.
The latest research shows that in the UK population:
56 per cent are securely attached.
24 per cent are avoidantly attached.
20 per cent are anxiously attached.