Human Condition - Universalmuseum Joanneum

55 Harry Bakwin, “Loneliness
in Infants,” American Journal of
Diseases of Children 63, 1941,
p. 31.
56 Karen, Becoming Attached,
p. 20.
57 Ibid., pp. 20–21.
58 Ibid., p. 21.
59 Ibid., p. 24.
a box equipped with inlet and outlet valves and sleeve arrangements for the
attendants. The infant is placed in this box and can be taken care of almost
untouched by human hands.55
Bakwin ordered new signs be put up across the pediatric unit that read: “Do not
enter this nursery without picking up a baby.”56 Infec tion rates declined, and infants
began to thrive.
At the same time, other researchers were finding a correlation between intelligence
and language skills and emotional deprivation. Children raised in orphanages
often tested with low and even retarded IQs, while those in foster care tested
normally.57 Those studies flew in the face of the orthodox thinking of the time that
IQ was inherited.
In a landmark study conducted by Harold Skeels of the lowa Child Research Welfare
Station, thirteen children from orphanages, all below two-and-a-half years of age, were
each placed in the care of a feeble minded older girl in a public institution. During a
nineteen-month period, the average IQ of the infants under the care of the older girls
shot up from 64 to 92, demonstrating that emotional bonds play a far more crucial
role in the development of human intelligence than previ ously suspected.58 The longheld
conventional wisdom that individual human intelligence is preordained by one’s
biology no longer seemed convincing. Was it possible that a child’s mental intelligence
flowed from the innate emotional need for affection and companionship?
The mounting number of studies on infant care and lack thereof in the 1930s and
1940s began to slowly shift opinions within the psychiat ric profession regarding
the nature of human nature. But it was the vis ceral, emotional impact of a single film
that shook the very foundations of the field and changed forever the ideas about
proper professional care of children, and parenting as weIl.
In 1947, a short amateur film was shown to a small group of physi cians and psychoanalysts
at the New York Academy of Medicine. The film, made by René Spitz,
a psychoanalyst, was entitled Grief: A Peril in Infancy. It was a silent film, shot in black
and white, showing a number of infants who had been previously attended by mothers,
but forced by various circumstances to be placed in a foundling home, where there
was only a single nurse and five assistant nurses for forty-five babies.
The first little baby is shown just after her mother had dropped her off for a threemonth
stay. The baby is smiling, giggling, and playing with an adult supervisor. Seven
days later, the same child has turned into another person. She looks forlorn and is
unresponsive. She sobs uncon trollably, sometimes kicking the adult supervisor. Her
expression is one of utter terror. The film scans other babies who appear dazed,
depressed, and lifeless. Many of the babies are emaciated and exhibit stereotypical
behaviors, including gnawing at their hands. A number of the babies cannot even sit
or stand. They remain expressionless and motionless, devoid of spirit. They are empty
shells. A title card appears on the screen saying, “The cure: Give mother back to baby.”59
The impact of the film on the psychologists, doctors, and nurses was overwhelming.
Some openly wept. In the coming years, thousands of professional psychologists,
psychiatrists, social workers, doctors, and nurses would view the film. Many more
read Spitz’s book on the sub ject, The First Year of Life. It transformed the debate over
infant care, but it would be two more decades before a solid majority of the pediatric
profession would embrace the underlying findings and the implications that flowed
from the Spitz film.
The man most responsible for advancing a coherent theory to explain what Spitz and
the other researchers were chronicling was an English psychiatrist, John Bowlby.
His Attachment Theory was articulated in a series of three scientific papers delivered
at the British Psychoanalytic Society in London between 1958 and 1960. The first