Development and Attachment

No question in this archive has come a longer way than what early experience makes of a person. At the start stood a doctrine that reasoned backwards from the consulting room: what the adult on the couch recounts betrays what must have happened to the child. At the end stand coding systems, longitudinal studies spanning decades and a twenty-minute laboratory procedure. The road between runs through war, theft and a break with one’s own school.

The first systematic observation was delivered, of all things, by catastrophe. Anna Freud’s war nurseries in London — index card by index card, child by child — recorded that it was not the bombs that marked the children but the separation from the mother: children who sat in the shelters with their families fared better than the evacuated ones. The well-meant rescue proved the greater burden. It was the first research on separation, conducted in an institution that would not have existed without the separations.

John Bowlby turned the finding into a theory and paid for it with his guild. His thieves study counted what analysis interpreted; his WHO report carried the separation question around the world; and he fetched his explanation not from Freud but from Lorenz and Tinbergen — attachment as a biological system, not a by-product of drives. The British Psycho-Analytical Society treated him thereafter as a renegade. Robertson’s hospital film of 1952, a clock in the picture against the suspicion of selective editing, in the end opened the children’s wards to parents — the most consequential application of this theme.

The theory became testable through an observer. Mary Ainsworth sat in living rooms, first in Uganda, then in Baltimore, and out of hundreds of hours of observation developed the Strange Situation: eight episodes, twenty minutes, classification by behaviour at the reunion. Her coding discipline — weeks of training, drift checks — made the procedure a world standard and its studies at once expensive and small. The categories are strategies, not diagnoses: the avoidant child, too, has learned something sensible.

The corrections came and struck the strong versions. Michael Rutter took monotropy apart and separated separation from deprivation; the Romanian orphans after 1989 became the test nobody had planned — with catch-up curves that show how much can be recovered and where the limits lie. And the paperback edition of the WHO report, deployed for decades against mothers in paid work, belongs to the history of effect as much as the findings do: reach has its price.

What remains is a layered balance. Early experience shifts probabilities and seals no fates; sensitivity can be fostered, with small, real effects; the predictive power of the early classification is genuine and modest. Between the dark infant of Kleinian theory and the measurable child of attachment research lies the road of this theme — from interpretation to observation, without the question having grown any smaller.