Bonding
Bonding characterizes the nature of the emotional connection established between the child and the “other” he or she has attached him or herself to, usually whoever is established as the primary caregiver—often the mother. Feeding is the first collaborative effort in which both mother and child engage, thus it has a significant impact on the quality of the earliest bond formed. But an adequate exchange of nutrients alone does not a healthy emotional connection make.
While Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs originally suggested food was our first and foremost priority on the road to self-actualization, Harry Harlow (who worked with Maslow) later determined contact-comfort and attachment to be primary when it comes to cognitive and emotional development, after conducting controversial social isolation experiments on infant monkeys. Furthermore, Renee Spitz studied infants in orphanages who were adequately fed and held but failed to bond with their caretakers, which resulted in “a failure to thrive.” Spitz thus determined bonding to be an important aspect of attachment, and a benchmark of development that allows for growth on all spectrums.
WHAT MAKES FOR A HEALTHY BOND?
If the feeding experience is a pleasurable one—consisting of snuggles, smiles, caresses, and cooing—the infant is able to establish a sense of security and begin to formulate a mental picture of a loving mother, described by object relations theorists as a “libidinal object” (Winnicott, 1970). As previously discussed, this will help the child develop and later sustain a sense of self in his mother’s absence; he has achieved what Margaret Mahler would describe as object constancy, which is similar to developmentalist Jean Piaget’s concept of object permanence. The child comes to understand that the mother is a separate individual with her own identity, and continues to exist whether or not he can perceive her physical presence. The child has found a “compass point” from which to properly orient himself psychologically and emotionally (Neufeld and Mate, 2004).
Achieving an optimal, healthy bond is reliant upon a variety of factors, both internal and external. Edith Jacobson felt that biology and experience mutually influenced each other and continue to interact throughout development. She also emphasized affective perception: because experience is subjective, there is no such thing as an objectively good mother, only mothering that feels good to a particular baby (Tyson and Tyson, 1990). This raises the issue of temperament and resulting styles of attachment.
Temperament
When the temperament of the babe and the disposition of the mother are in sync, they are considered “attuned.” Temperament is a term used to describe a child’s innate disposition, as evidenced by observable behaviors. Thomas, Chess and Birch began the classic New York longitudinal study in the early 1950s regarding infant temperament, by rating infants on nine temperamental characteristics. Ultimately, they found the infants fell into one of three major categories: the easy child, the difficult child, and the slow-to-warm-up child (1968). They found these attributes to exist across cultures, and determined about 65 percent of children fell into one of these three categories (the rest had temperaments that were not so distinctly determined).
Mary K. Rothbart (Rothbart and Hwang, 2005) defines temper-ament as individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation that manifest in the domains of emotion, activity, and attention. She identified three underlying dimensions of temperament, using factor analysis on data from 3- to 12-month-old children: surgency/extraversion (the degree to which a child is generally happy, active, and enjoys vocalizing and seeking stimulation), negative affect (the degree to which a child is shy and not easily calmed), and effortful control (the degree to which a child can focus attention, is not easily distracted, and employs planning).
Jerome Kagan and his colleagues (2007) studied the temperamental category of “reactivity” in infants ages 14–21 months. Children with high reactivity experienced intense fear to novel events, and children with low reactivity were minimally fearful. Intervening family experiences were shown to mediate the infants’ “expected profiles” by age five. Those that remained highly reactive at age five, however, were at higher risk for developing anxiety and conduct disorders. Parents and family members who were able to compensate for the child’s initial high or low reactivity allowed for the infant’s innate disposition to change and improve.
Furthermore, Solomon Diamond described temperaments based upon characteristics found in the animal world: fearfulness, aggressiveness, affiliativeness, and impulsiveness. H. Hill Goldsmith and Joseph Campos used emotional characteristics to define temperament, originally analyzing five emotional qualities: motor activity, anger, fearfulness, pleasure/joy, and interest/persistence, but later expanding to include other emotions (Zentner and Bates, 2008).
The ongoing list of theorists and supporting research for temperament speaks to the importance of its acknowledgement and its impact on the bond between mother and child. When mother and child are mismatched in temperament, it can lead to difficulties in attachment and misperceptions of characterological “disturbances” in the child—a mistake, if unchecked, that could lead to actual disturbances, through projected introjects.
For example, if an introverted child is born into an extroverted family, he may be perceived as depressed and withdrawn. Similarly, if an excitable and physically active child is born into a calm and more sedentary family, he or she may be perceived as hyperactive and distractible. If the parents and family members deliver and reinforce (project) either of these depreciative messages (introjects) frequently enough, the child may come to identify with (internalize) these misinterpretations as his own truth. This creates a psychic dissonance between what self psychologists would describe as the “true self” and “false self,” leading to feelings of low self-esteem, anxiety and rigidity, meaninglessness and alienation, what is sometimes called a “narcissistic wound.” Heinz Kohut’s treatment for these early childhood injuries is vicarious introspection, which suggests the only way to truly understand a person is from within his or her subjective experience, via empathy. However, if left untreated, such disturbances can lead to significant obstacles when confronted with the task of grieving later in life, particularly in the realm of relationships (Mitchell and Black, 1995). How can one go about the task of reshaping of one’s perception of reality, in order to integrate one’s self into it, if one does not have an essential sense of self to begin with?
The evolving bond
Styles of attachment
Our style of attaching from an early age impacts our relationships later in life. For example, Allan and Barbara Pease (2009) attribute the adult’s romantic inclinations to his childhood “love map.” A “love map” is a blueprint that contains the things we think are attractive determined by the brain’s hardwiring and a set of criteria formed in childhood. Similarly, Freud believed a child’s amorous interest in his parents fixes his attraction to later lovers. His repressed memories and emotions remain in pristine condition, to be exhumed at a later date, unchanged. Freud wrote, “The unconscious, at all events, knows no time limit” (as quoted in Lewis, Amini, and Lannon, 2000). Indeed, many scientists believe love maps begin forming around age six, and are firmly in place by age 14 (Lewis et al., 2000). For the purposes of this chapter, I will expand the definition of one’s love map to include all attachment relationships, romantic and otherwise.
Mary Ainsworth is best known for devising “the strange situation” to study attachment and separation/reunion behavior between mothers and their infants. Mary Main (Main, Kaplan and Cassidy, 1985) expanded on this work, examining the connections between parenting styles and the resulting attachment styles of their children, in a longitudinal study (Wallin, 2007). The results of Main’s study were categorized into four pairings:
1.Autonomous parenting typically leads to a secure attachment style, in the child. When parents display an autonomous parenting style, they are flexible enough