Attachment Theory
The recent introduction of attachment theory allows a more exact account of human development than was possible with Freudian psychoanalysis, and hence of what the meaning of artistic creativity may be. Attachment theory centers on how the neonate’s development promotes a pathway to secure adulthood relationships and the capacity to reproduce. Mother-infant/child exchanges of affective information are observed and interpreted in terms of learned, or internalized, feelings of security or insecurity. Based on evolutionary biology, attachment theory offers a universal account of infant-mother behavior, subject of course to varied social and cultural conditions. It suggests that artistic creativity, found in all cultures, has to do with individual and group adaptation to the environment, and especially with managing moods. Moods reflect the quality of human interaction beginning with care-giving at the start of life, and without some degree of empathic care they are not easily regulated. Secondary means become necessary even for infants, as Winnicott described when speaking of the meaning of “play” and of “transitional objects” between infant and mother. The success, or lack of it, in finding and using “transitional objects” has a lot to do with later ability to regulate moods. For adults, improving depressed mood which has arisen from faulty early attachment to mother and inadequate transitional objects is, arguably, the principal traditional function of art and ritual. Art and ritual “take us out of ourselves”, helping to alter and elevate mood. Usually in association with metaphysical beliefs, creative uses of objects put the threatening world in its best and most hopeful light. The transitional object (a cloth toy, or any bauble) can be elaborated through states of increased meaningfulness into art objects with mythic resonance and hence affective power that controls fears and “repairs” the broken sense of trust left by faulty early attachments. As we will see, “objects” (material things) are resorted to when actual “interactive repair”, usually by eye contact between mother and infant, fails to produce feelings of security. The resort to “things”, often distorted by anxious personal projections, is especially evident in the avoidant defense studied here.
Attachment theory is essential to understanding the mood regulating uses of objects. If art and ritual are secondary means of dealing with the inevitable unsettling failures of maternal attachment, what then is the fundamental process? John Bowlby proposed in Attachment and Loss (3 vols., 1969-80) that human attachment is instinctively adaptive between mother and infant/child in the Darwinian sense of enhancing fitness for survival. Good attachment confers safety for the infant to develop, while bad attachment puts its life at risk. Attachment theory studies the variability of attachment between infant and mother, especially the potentially catastrophic effects to the infant of loss of mother. More broadly, attachment behavior is defined as any behavior that increases or maintains proximity between one person and another who is more dependent, while the attachment system is an open bio-social regulatory system promoting homeostasis—that is, the organism’s tendency to maintain itself in a constant state when disturbances occur.
At about six months of age, Bowlby proposed, when the mother’s initial preoccupation with her new infant may be somewhat lessened, attachment behavior appears. The function of smiling, cooing, following with the eyes, clinging etc. is to maintain proximity to the mother as a source not primarily of nourishment but of protection. The ideal attachment is a consistent and conflict-free interaction, with mother invariably available and responsive when needed. But the actuality is often different, and attachment research has established wherein those differences lie, clearly describing them and showing what their long-term consequences are likely to be. The most easily demonstrated is liability to depression in the child and adult when mothering is abruptly terminated, as by death. But a range of other irregularities of attachment have been studied by Bowlby, his colleagues and successors. The underlying assumption is that the maturation of a personal identity depends upon the kind and quality of early mother-infant interaction. Each phase of infant and child development prepares for optimal, or sub-optimal, entry into the next.
The Freudian drive discharge model, upon which psychoanalysis was founded, is replaced by an interactive relational model of human development. Human development is put in a social context that allows for the assessment of styles of mothering and, perhaps, for its improvement. It also adds immeasurably to the resources of psychobiography, when data of the kind collected by attachment researchers is available for the study of a subject. Even when it is not, there are inferential possibilities usable with due caution. Since my hypothesis is that artists who contrive abusive images of women have become “avoidant” in childhood (and later in life “dismissing”) in their attachment styles, it would be convenient to have actual Strange Situation scores for them. While this is impossible, it is well to review what the research means and to look at the probabilities it entails. We know from the research of Mary
Ainsworth that the avoidant attachment style begins with the first attachment experience of infant to mother. Her well known and widely accepted Strange situation test with infants twelve to twenty months of age and their mothers establishes three basic attachment styles, one “secure” and two insecure groups: “resistant” and “avoidant”.7 While secure infants may be distressed by separation from mother, upon reunion they settle quickly. The insecure ambivalent (or, resistant) infants are very distressed by separation yet cannot easily be pacified upon reunion. They make a fuss, alternating between anger and clinging to mother. They are too upset to play or explore quietly. The avoidant infants, on the other hand, seemingly accept separation with distress but avoid mother upon reunion. They remain detached from her, shifting attention to inanimate objects such as toys. Eruptive anger is a frequent concomitant. Subsequently , a fourth group termed “disorganized” was described, made up of infants who are unable consistently to use any reunion strategy, showing diverse behaviors including “freezing” and automaton-like movements. Ainsworth’s initial findings were 66% secure, ambivalent 12% and avoidant 20%, with the remaining 2% later shown to be disorganized. The avoidant attachment style is typically found in European and North American societies, although it is recognized elsewhere.
Mothers of avoidant infants and children are typically unresponsive to their signals for attention; mothers of insecure ambivalent infants are inconsistent in responsiveness, while the secure have consistently responsive mothers. These early attachment styles may differ with mother and father, but they tend to become the child’s ingrained models of interpersonal reality and have been observed in their original form at six and again at ten years of age.8 Subsequent modifications are likely to be difficult, with greater or lesser flexibility a matter of what reinforcements, or freeing up, the individual may experience while moving through childhood into adulthood. The avoidant person tends to be remotely fearful and over-controlled in an attempt to preserve what little sense of security he has with mother, and later with other women. He is angry at feeling cut off from secure attachment but as open anger is risky, it is likely to take insidious forms. As Jeremy Holmes comments, “It may be that the avoidant response is a way of dampening aggression and so appeasing the mother to whom the child needs desperately to feel close, but whom he fears will rebuff him, if he reveals his needs too openly or shows how angry he feels about being abandoned”.9 This observation pertains directly to the artists’ more or less covertly angry portrayals of women we will consider.