It is no easy matter to assign the origin of manipulative anger introduced by an adult artist into his representations of women but the insights of John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, Mary Main and Patricia Crittenden offer strong incentives to make the attempt.
Further refinements of attachment research give still greater incentives to apply findings to disturbing cultural manifestations. With more clinical samples observed and assessed, it emerged that even with the addition of the “disorganized” category, there were still combined patterns to be found. One most useful to us is a mixed avoidant/ coercive or resistant (A/C) attachment style described in 1985 by Patricia Crittenden and also by Radke-Yarrow and her colleagues. But before discussing the relevance of A/C attachment to creativity, it should be said that, however problematic measuring transmission of the earliest attachment styles may be, there is another test which reveals their power in shaping adult personality. This is the Adult Attachment Interview, devised by Mary Main and her colleagues to determine security of attachment, or lack of it, from analysis of subjects’ verbal responses to set questions about feelings accompanying recalled interactions with parents, especially mothers.
The AAI sets out to “surprise the unconscious” into disclosures of “states of mind” regarding the subjects’ quality of attachment. It assesses how linguistic samples deliver affective information about the present states of feeling arising from having been parented and, inferentially, about early conditions of attachment. Set questions elicit words or phrases depicting feelings about being upset in childhood, what happened when the subject was hurt or ill, whether parents were ever threatening, why parents behaved as they did, or the results of fearing a parent’s death or actual death. The transcripts are assessed for overall coherence (for instance, lapses and broken or overly copious sentence structure), along with emotive uses of language describing how tensions arose and were dealt with. Does the discourse’s directness, inclusiveness and fluency leave a sense of resolution or, perhaps, does it leave an impression of affectively laden unfinished business? Discourse analysis reveals experiences with the parents in childhood as loving, rejecting, role-reversing/ involving, neglecting or under-pressuring to achieve. The principal resulting classifications of attachment are: secure/ autonomous (subjects are able clearly to state the value of early attachments, whether good or bad, and their dialogue is coherent, fresh and thoughtful), dismissing/ avoidant (attachment concerns are dismissed, the parents idealized but actual memory of events is deficient, while feelings pertaining to attachment are unavailable or dismissed as unimportant) and, finally, preoccupied/ ambivalent (transcripts are long and incoherent as the subject feels confusion, though preoccupied with past relationships). The preoccupied subject is at a loss to put experiences coherently into words. He or she may be passive and vague, fearful, overwhelmed or angry while trying but failing to analyze their situation. These classifications clearly align with Ainsworth’s basic three type early attachment findings and do not depend upon showing the exact transformations though which attachments have gone in the development of personality. The transcripts are artifacts of the unconscious, “surprised” into verbal representations of long-lost parent-child interactions.
The transcripts elicited are organized according to leading questions and, while not connected narratives, they clearly have autobiographical elements. They could be the stuff of creative writing which, in other eras, resulted in such masterpieces of insight as Wordsworth’s poem The Prelude, Aksakoff s autobiography Years of Childhood or D. H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers. But they are much more systematic, objective and capable of replication. They suggest how the creative aspect of self-reporting in autobiography can be viewed. Some transcripts have more “creative” potential than others, and those with strongly repressed feelings in the avoidant, or dismissing, mode seem to have the most potential of all. While the securely attached person is unlikely to feel pressure towards investigating his early experiences to resolve dissonances, the preoccupied person is likely to be too agitated to get very far with an exercise in restoring coherence to distracting and perhaps chaotic events. The dismissing or avoidant person, however, may have the untapped resources to attempt retrieval and reconstruction of distressing attachments which have caused fear, resentment and latent anger towards the mother. He or she may feel constrained to allow, even cultivate, “return of the repressed”, using words to pull together a formerly avoided cache of painful feelings. Controlling mood becomes urgent business. This person may answer best to the A/C classification proposed by Patricia Crittenden, yet no classification should be rigidly adhered to as the following psychobiographical studies will show. The findings of attachment theory are useful only as broad categories suggesting how to view the wide variations of life events discoverable for “creative” persons.
It seems right to locate portrayals of women by Picasso, Belmer, Balthus, and the comparative absence of them in Cornell, generally within the avoidant/ dismissing category of attachment and then add qualifications and refinements.
Refinements of theory will be helpful. The most cogent of these is Crittenden’s A/C, which accounts for the “coercive” element in personality found in each artist in varying degrees, helping to account for the anger against women which is my concern. When Freud commented that happy persons are unlikely to create fantasies, he was looking for a way to characterize the sufferings of writers and artists. The artists studied here who produced rich and damaging fantasies of women can hardly be thought of as happy people. In terms of attachment theory they are demonstrably not “securely attached”, nor are they pathologically “disorganized”, although their bizarre imagery may sometimes suggest it. There are, however, typically elements of resistance/ ambivalence and a strong component of avoidance to be accounted for. In every instance problems of infancy and childhood have been indicated, but not fully examined, by biographers. The purpose of this study is to propose and illustrate the importance of biographical reexamination using the best leads from attachment theory.
In doing so we come upon a strange, and worrying, feature of human development that does not occur in other animals—the defensive strategy of an offspring’s avoidance of an emotionally remote or rejecting mother. We can expect to see in art, evidence for dealing with pent up frustration and anger at not being securely attached during the start of life. Avoidance is a specifically human phenomenon that may have some general explanatory power in thinking about creativity, yet the questions it raises have hardly been noticed.
As Mary Main points out in “Avoidance in the Service of Attachment”, this “behavior is critical to an ethological understanding of human infant social behavior, because it is precisely antithetical to the behavioral expectations that biologically-oriented attachment theory and recent functional interpretations of infant-parent relationships provide”.10 Whereas the expectation of a separated, distressed infant would be the redoubling of attempts to recover attachment to its caregiver, the very opposite typically happens. When the infant feels unable to establish contact with mother, gaze is averted, shifting to inanimate objects—objects substituting for the human face found to be unaccepting, impassive, or outright rejecting. As is well known, infants most readily respond to the mother’s face, or any variant including a crude sketch on a piece of cardboard. It is as if they are pre-programmed to respond to (maternal) faces, or anything resembling one. When this desired response is repeatedly frustrated, a compromise solution to failed attachment is attempted, as suggested by Bowlby’s observation of the sequence protest, despair and, finally, detachment.