Human Condition - Universalmuseum Joanneum

234 — 235
Jeremy Rifkin
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid., p. 137.
71 Ibid., p. 141.
72 John B. Watson, Psychological
Care of Infant and Child (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1928), pp. 81–82.
more than one third were not.69 The latter grew up with parents who were unresponsive
to the child’s care-eliciting behavior or disparaged the child or rejected the child
outright. Any of those parental behaviors can lead the child to live in a constant state
of anxiety -what Bowlby calls anxious attachment – for fear of losing an attachment
figure and result in a range of pathogenic behavior, from neurotic and phobic in nature
to psychotic and sociopathic.70
A child can also exhibit what Bowlby calls a compulsive self-reliant behavior, just the
opposite of anxious attachment. Instead of seeking love that is elusive, he or she
keeps a stiff upper lip and attempts to be completely autonomous and without need
of the warmth and affection of others. This behavior is often referred to as avoidant.
These children are distrustful of close relationships and often crack under stress and
experience a high rate of depression.
Bowlby emphasized that
whatever representational models of attachment figures and of self an individual
builds during his childhood and adolescence, tend to persist relatively unchanged
into and throughout adult life.71
In other words, he or she will tend to attach to new people in his life – friends, a spouse,
an employer – in the same manner and express ing the same behavioral repertoire as
he or she did with their first adult attachment figure in infancy.
Bowlby’s analysis seems rather commonplace today. Yet we need to understand that
it wasn’t until the 1960s that pediatricians in the United States and the UK began
to take notice and change the way they counseled parents on relating to their infants
and not until the late 1970s that pediatricians in continental Europe caught up to
the change in infant care.
Bowlby’s theory wasn’t accepted overnight. The opposition was fierce. The Freudians
were reluctant to give up their materialist and utilitarian ideas about human nature
and clung to the notion that the body is biologically driven to satiate material and
sexual desires. Oth ers argued that attachment theory put far too much emphasis
on the relationship with the parent in how the child develops and not enough on the
inborn temperament of the child.
The behavioralists were equally unimpressed, arguing that there is no evidence to
suggest that infants are biologically wired for compan ionship. Rather, they are
born tabula rasa, and because they seek plea sure and attempt to avoid pain, their
behavior is infinitely malleable by proper conditioning. The behavioralists were
particularly dismissive of Bowlby’s attachment theory. After all, they adhered to
the notion, advanced by the psychologist John B. Watson in the 1920s, that too
much affection and “coddling” of babies spoiled them and made them less malleable
to molding later on. Watson counseled young mothers to
[t]reat them [the babies] as though they were young adults. Dress them, bathe
them with care and circumspection. Let your behavior always be objective and kindly
firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss
them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the
morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinary good job
of a difficult task.72
Even some early feminists and professional career women were miffed, arguing that
Bowlby was attempting to imprison women in the traditional role of sole caretaker of
children. It should be pointed out that Bowlby had no such intention in mind. Although
he was quick to emphasize that a baby needs a consistent parent figure until the age