Human Condition - Universalmuseum Joanneum

66 Ibid., p. 133.
67 Ibid., p. 136.
68 Ibid.
While all of this appears incontrovertible, Bowlby took the ethologists’ insights a step
further, noting that among mammals, attachment behavior is only part of the unfolding
relationship with the mother. A seemingly antithetical behavior is also at work. He
noted that in mammals, “exploratory activity is of great importance in its own right,
enabling a person or an animal to build up a coherent picture of environmental features
which may at any time become of importance for survival.” Bowlby points out that
[c]hildren and other young creatures are notoriously curious and inquiring, which
commonly leads them to move away from their attachment figure. In this sense
exploratory behaviour is antithetical to attachment behaviour. In healthy individuals
the two kinds of behaviour normally alternate.66
The critical question is what connects the two forms of behavior that are so widely
observed among mothers and their infants in the animal world? It is here that Bowlby
found the dialectic relations that exists between attachment and independence
that would shape his own theory about human nature. The just good enough parent,
says Bowlby, provides a child “with a secure base” and “encourage(s] to explore
from it.”67
Unless a parent provides a baby with a secure sense of protection, care, and affection,
he or she will not be able to develop to the point of engaging the world and becoming
an independent being. Yet, at the same time, a parent needs to encourage the baby’s
innate desire to explore and engage the world that surrounds. It is the success or
failure of this delicate process that determines the future emotional life and sociability
of every child. Bowlby concludes that a just good enough parent needs to have an
intuitive and sympathetic understanding of the child’s attachment behaviour and
a willingness to meet it and thereby terminate it, and, second, recognition that one
of the commonest sources of a child’s anger is the frustration of his desire for love
and care, and that his anxiety commonly reflects uncertainty whether parents will
continue to be available. Complementary in importance to a parent’s respect for a
child’s attachment desires is respect for his desire to explore and gradually to extend
his relationships both with peers and with other adults.68
If the parent is able to create the right balance between maintain ing secure attachment
and at the same time encouraging independent exploration, the child will
develop a healthy sense of self and acquire the appropriate emotional maturity to
engage others and develop meaning ful relationships. If, however, the parent is not
able to provide a sense of warmth and security and allow the infant to explore the
world, the child will grow up with an arrested sense of self and be unable to enter into
more than superficial relationships with others.
Bowlby did not devote a lot of attention to the question of why one parent might be
better attuned than another to make the process work. Subsequent research into
the parent/ child dynamic, however, clearly shows that the more empathic the mother
or father figure, the more able they are to identify emotionally and cognitively and
to read their child’s needs. A parent with immature, inadequate, or deficient empathic
sensitivity is not going to be as successful in producing a well-adjusted, trusting, and
caring child, who feels both secure and independent and able to enter into meaningful
relationships with oth ers. And a child without a consistent parent figure or who
is without one altogether is unable to establish meaningful social relationships from
the get-go.
Bowlby’s own research suggested that in the United States and Britain more than half
the children were growing up with the proper parenting to allow them to thrive, while