Attachment
10/1/24
In my senior year of college, I lived with a pet crested gecko named Loki.
He had pupils that would dilate into a black ball when he was happy and become a
thin line when not, which was most of the time. From his glass tank, he mostly saw me
with books on British psychoanalysis, John Bowlby, and Darwin.
Darwin was born to a wealthy doctor. His mom died when he was eight. He was a normal boy -
his biographers wrote that he had been “unmarked by the slightest trace of genius” in his youth.1
After his mom’s death, Darwin was sent to boarding school, where he was deemed “unsuccessful.”
His dad once told him "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will
be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."2
Meanwhile, 86 miles away, a boy named Alfred Russel Wallace was born.
He was a middle-class baby born to a middle-class man who trained in law but never practiced it.
Darwin’s dad pulled him out of boarding school early and pushed him into a medical degree
at the University of Edinburgh. Darwin was disgusted by medicine (the blood in particular).
He was much more interested in zoology, taking walks with a naturalist who believed in evolution
but didn’t know how it worked. Darwin left university without a degree. His dad, anxious that
the kid was going to waste his life, sent Darwin to prepare for the clergy at Cambridge (at the
time, zoology and theology were two sides of the same coin, because of the belief that God designed nature).
At 22, Darwin’s life took a turn. He was invited to board the HMS Beagle, a royal navy ship,
that was going to sail across the world. Dad thought it was a waste of time. For the next five years,
Darwin dug up fossils, climbed mountains, met savages, witnessed tropical paradise, and wrote
that his mind was “a chaos of delight.”3
That was the year Wallace was pulled out of school not because of a lack of interest,
but a lack of funds. He went to London to learn the trade of surveying, large-scale map making,
with his older brother. He started collecting beetles with a friend, and headed on a voyage to
Brazil when he was 25 to collect more specimens. Later, he set off alone to Southeast Asia.
He figured that living things change over time, though he couldn’t explain how.
He had a fever one day. On a remote island in the Malay archipelago,
he lay bed-ridden with cold and hot fits, having “nothing to do but to think over
any subjects then particularly interesting me.”4 He thought of Thomas Malthus’ essay
“Principle of Population,” that he read 12 years before.
Malthus argued that the population grows faster than food production does.
More people than food in the world. This leads to “population pressure,”
which would lead to checks like famine, war, disease, and poverty.5
Wallace considered the animal world. Animals breed much more rapidly than humans,
yet year after year, their population numbers stay stable. Otherwise, the world would
be “densely crowded with those that breed most quickly.” He thought, “why do some die and some live?”
His answer, which “suddenly flashed” upon him, was that only the best fitted lived,
which would necessarily improve the race. He waited for his fever to be over so he could write
the idea down. He wrote a letter to Darwin, knowing he was interested in evolution, hoping the idea
“would be as new to him as it was to [Wallace].”
Darwin was horrified. He’d been working on a book, a magnum opus, on this theory for the past
20 years. “All my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed,”6
he wrote to a friend. Darwin read Malthus a while ago, had a similar thought, and began to work quietly.
Both men, independently, came up with the theory of natural selection.
Wallace’s letter set Darwin into action. He asked his friends for help.
They said the most fair thing to do would be to present his and Wallace’s work side by side,
and then quickly publish On the Origin of Species. Which he did, in 1859, and
revolutionized the world.
Darwin once summarized natural selection in ten words:
“[M]ultiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.”7
Strongest does not mean bulkiest, it means best adapted to the environment.
Author Robert Wright says that if this seems easy to believe, we’re probably not getting it.8
History has conducted experiments, trials and errors, all at random,
to see which traits work best in a given environment. You can imagine it like a choose
your own adventure game, except there have been way more adventures that led to death than to life.
Your line of ancestry somehow always picked the adventure that led to life. Each one of your organs -
your brain, heart, lungs, intestines - is an adaptation that worked for your ancestry.
If you’re here today, my god, what a miracle.
It’s important to mention that not everyone believes in evolution.
No other scientific concept caused so much fury, because no other explained how we got here.
Humans operate with stories about themselves to root their place in the world.
Creationists believe God designed nature.
“It gnaws at their sense of self… If humans are just one of many outcomes of
natural selection, maybe we aren’t so special after all,”9 writes biologist Jerry Coyne.
When atomic physicist Pervez A. Hoodboy taught human evolution in Pakistan,
near riots broke out and he had to be escorted out of the lecture hall. Kenneth Chang
quotes him in the NYT: “That’s the one thing that will never be possible to bridge. Your
lineage is what determines your worth.”10
Across the world however, the scientific community largely agrees that evolution by natural
selection is an empirical fact.11,12
A century later, a man named John Bowlby drew on Darwin’s theory of natural selection,
and many others - object relations theory, control systems theory, ethology and cognitive
psychology - to come up with attachment theory.13
Bowlby’s mother believed that parental affection would spoil her children,
so the kids were taken care of by different nannies. At eight, (which I’m realizing
is an age where a lot of children go through life-altering events) Bowlby was sent off
to boarding school. He later told his wife Ursula that he “wouldn’t send a dog away to
boarding school at that age.”14
Bowlby proposed that there’s an evolutionary system called the attachment system wired
in human beings. It serves the purpose of promoting survival when we are small and pathetic.
Attachment theory says that our early caregiving experiences organize individual and relational
developmental processes, leaving imprints in our brain that guide our behavior in all future
relationships. Early love dictates our behavior in future love.
Human babies have the longest period of vulnerability of any species on earth.
For most of our infancy, we’re in need of protection so that we don’t die.
Bowlby began with the observation that across all cultures, babies tend to display a sequence
of reactions after being separated from caregivers. This attachment figure is usually the mother,
but it need not be - it can be anyone who consistently responds.
The first stage of separation is protest. Take a puppy. Separate the puppy from
his mother and he protests. He paces, scans, barks, scratches, and tries scaling
the walls. His heart rate, body temperature, cortisol levels, and alertness levels rise.
This protest behavior was for survival. If a baby doesn’t cry when under threat, he might die.
If the screaming and crying doesn’t work, the baby will enter a second stage: despair.
Motor activity slows down. Silence takes hold. Alertness turns into lethargy.
Appetite suppresses. Bodily rhythms are disrupted. Heart rate drops,
sleep changes (with less dreaming and more spontaneous nocturnal awakenings).
Circadian rhythms shift. The level of growth hormone in the blood will plummet. Immune regulation,
hormone levels, and cardiovascular function deteriorate.15
This strategy also made sense in terms of survival. Excessive protest without response may
result in accident, injury, or attracting predators. Hence, if going on the offensive - protesting -
fails, the baby goes on the defensive.
The third and final stage after despair is detachment. The caregiver can return and
the baby won't react much. Bowlby thought the evolutionary purpose of detachment is
to pave the way for new bonds with other potential caregivers.16
This theory overtook the Freudian “cupboard love” theory, which said that the baby values
food over love and values the mother because she feeds him. Attachment theory proposed
that the baby valued a mother’s love more than her ability to give food.
Harry Harlow’s famous surrogate mother experiment is an example of this.
Harlow worked with isolated baby monkeys. He gave them two choices for a surrogate
mother: A wire mesh mother with a feeding bottle and a soft, terry cloth mother.
Harlow found that the baby monkeys spent significantly more time with the terry
cloth mother than they did with the wire one with food. They preferred the comfort and
security of a soft, cloth-covered surface, rather than just food without warmth.17
Babies continuously monitor their mother’s expressions. Take the visual cliff
experiment. A group of one year olds were left to crawl on a surface that was half solid,
half clear plexiglass. Every time the baby reached the edge, he faced uncertainty - he
could fall and die. The baby then looked at the mother. If the mother’s face was calm,
the baby crossed. If it showed signs of distress, the baby stopped and cried.18
Additionally, when a study made a baby interact with his mother through a screen,
both mother and child were perfectly happy. But if you put the baby in front of a
video recording of his mother, he grew distraught. Babies thus require facial synchrony.19
The main question babies are asking in infancy is whether their primary caregiver
will be there for them when they need them. The answer determines their style of attachment,
which were first distinguished by psychologist Mary Ainsworth.
When a baby cries to signal distress and is immediately soothed by mom, the baby’s
attachment radar shuts down. They let out a sigh of relief, gain confidence, and turn
attention to other things, like play or exploration. This person will come out of childhood
with a positive view of themselves and other people, believing they are loveable and
others reliable and trustworthy. This is secure attachment.
When a baby cries and is sometimes soothed and sometimes not, the baby becomes
hypervigilant about keeping the caregiver around. They go the extra mile, protesting
and crying even more to get the caregiver’s attention. This child will most likely
pick up a belief that they need to work for love, will have a negative view of the
self and a positive view of others. This is anxious attachment, a form of insecure attachment.
When a baby cries and isn’t soothed at all, the baby shuts down and withdraws.
The child has discovered that the protesting doesn’t work, that emotions must be
dealt with on their own. This looks like repression. This child will pick up a
belief that others cannot be trusted and will be wary of intimacy. They will have a
positive view of the self and a negative view of others. This is avoidant attachment,
another form of insecure attachment.
You can watch a form of this in action here.
Those with insecure attachment styles generally believe relationships will
end up being hurtful, rejecting, or unsafe.20 According to the theory, this
is wired into them since childhood, something they will most likely be unaware
of until they step into intimacy in their adult life.
This reminds me of a Sally Field quote:
"The task as a grown up person is to realize what garment you knit
for yourself to survive as a child, in the winter of your childhood. But when you're
in the summer, so to speak, of your adulthood, you're boiling hot and you can't figure out,
"Why am I so fucking hot all the time?" And it's because you can't take off this garment
that you knitted for yourself as a child that you no longer need. You can't realize,
you don't realize that this way of behaving, this functional way that your brain
taught you to behave, to survive, it gets in your way now."21
Anxious and avoidants are attracted to one another. They might zap
together like magnets. If they zap instantly, it’s likely historical. A bad sign.
Both reinforce each other’s core beliefs. The anxious confirms to the avoidant
their need for independence. The avoidant confirms to the anxious that they will be
abandoned and are unworthy of love. They feel familiar, as they’ve adapted to deal
with one another, even though they no longer need the adaptation. When the avoidant
pushes people away, and the anxious works incessantly for love, they are operating
by the mental model that supported their survival in infancy. It’s wired in.
This is called the “anxious-avoidant trap.”
It comes down to a lack of love. The anxious baby got tastes of it,
drops of elixir that kept them alive, so they did everything to keep getting it.
The avoidant baby barely got any, perhaps they never tasted it, so they had to
learn to live without it.
The escape? Self-awareness. A look into the past. This Jung quote:
“To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself,
is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful.
Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we
all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us.
You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that
experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question—whether you can
love yourself, and that will be the test.”22
Even if they confront their past, achieve self-love and self-awareness, the anxious
will still feel an alarm bell going off in their chest when a loved one is perceived to pull away.
A radar. A SOS signal. Distance likely meant death. The avoidant will still feel the alarm
when someone comes too close to them. Something in them, subconsciously, will tell them to
push the other away. Closeness likely meant death. Degrees of anxiety and avoidance will
always remain, as Bowlby said, “from the cradle to the grave.”
After Darwin returned from his voyage, he suffered from a mystery illness for most of
his adult life. It was a strange combination of symptoms that no doctor could diagnose.
Chronic fatigue and exhaustion, severe gastrointestinal problems, nausea, frequent vomiting,
a swimming head, severe headaches, trembling, insomnia, joint pain, rashes, eczema, mouth ulcers,
boils, tooth and gum problems, heart palpitations, poor resistance to infections, depression.23
The man, in his characteristic politeness, said “Even ill-health, though it has annihilated several
years of my life, has saved me from the distractions of society and amusement.”24
At 81, Bowlby’s last work was a biography of Darwin. Bowlby argued that his lifelong ailments
were a result of repressed feelings about his mother’s death when Darwin was eight.25
Bowlby died two years later.
Loki, the gecko I was living with, is a solitary animal. He cannot cohabitate
with other geckos, because he’ll likely kill them or just wither and die. Reptile forums say Loki
does not seek friendship and does not feel loneliness. He isn’t “wired for connection.”
He’s wired to swing from artificial branch to branch during the night time, sleep during the day,
and eat Watermelon-flavored whey protein every two days. Sometimes I wonder whose life is better.
Citations:
1 Clark, J. (1984). A history of Darwinism: Evolutionary thought from the ancient Greeks to the modern synthesis (p. 6). Cambridge University Press.
2 Darwin, C. (1892). The autobiography of Charles Darwin and selected letters (pp. 8–11). New York: D. Appleton and Company.
3 Darwin, C. (1845). A naturalist’s voyage round the world. John Murray.
4 Wallace, A. R. (1905). My life: A record of events and opinions (Vol. 1). London: Chapman and Hall.
5 Malthus, T. R. (1798). An essay on the principle of population. J. Johnson.
6 Darwin, C. (1858). Letter no. 2285: Darwin, C. R. to Hooker, J. D. Darwin Correspondence Project.
7 Darwin, C. (1968). The origin of species. New York: Penguin Books.
8 Wright, R. (1994). The moral animal: Why we are the way we are: The new science of evolutionary psychology. Vintage.
9 Coyne, J. A. (2009). Why evolution is true. Viking.
10 Chang, K. (2009, November 2). Creationism, minus a young Earth, emerges in the Islamic world. The New York Times.
11 InterAcademies Panel on International Issues. (2006, May). IAP statement on the teaching of evolution. InterAcademy Partnership.
12 National Science Teachers Association. (2003). NSTA position statement: The teaching of evolution. National Science Teachers Association.
13 Bosmans, G., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., Vervliet, B., Verhees, M. W. F. T., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2020). A learning theory of attachment: Unraveling the black box of attachment development. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 113, 287-298.
14 Ross, L. R. (2014). Reading Ursula Bowlby’s Letters (1939-1940): A Chronicle of First Time Motherhood. Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, 5(1).
15 Lewis, T., Amini, F., & Lannon, R. (2001). A general theory of love. Vintage.
16 Cassidy, J., & Shaver, P. R. (Eds.). (1999). Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications. The Guilford Press.
17 Harlow's classic studies revealed the importance of maternal contact. (n.d.). Association for Psychological Science.
18 Sorce, J. F., Emde, R. N., Campos, J. J., & Klinnert, M. D. (1985). Maternal emotional signaling: Its effect on the visual cliff behavior of 1-year-olds. Developmental Psychology, 21(1), 195–200.
19 Keller, H. (2019). The function of emotions in early infant communication and development. ResearchGate.
20 Doyle, C., & Cicchetti, D. (2017). From the cradle to the grave: The effect of adverse caregiving environments on attachment and relationships throughout the lifespan. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 24(2), 203–217.
21 Field, S. Julia gets wise. Lemonada Media.
22 Jung, C. G. (1988). Zarathustra seminars. Princeton University Press.
23 Campbell, A. K., & Matthews, S. B. (2005). Darwin’s illness revealed. Postgraduate Medical Journal, 81(954), 248–251.
24 Darwin, C. (n.d.). Darwin online: The autobiography of Charles Darwin. Darwin Online.
25 Bowlby, J. (1991). Charles Darwin: A new life. W.W. Norton & Company.