Attachment & Society

Alan Challoner MA MChS

The adult personality is a very complex issue, and although there are obvious guidelines, the interaction between parent and child, in my view, plays a large part. If either or both parents have some mental illness (particularly if it is the mother) then not only will this affect the attachment progress and the working model situation, but there may also be genetic implications. I have not done any clinical work (or clinical training) but I do feel that it is rarely productive to work from symptoms to treatment before there has been an understanding of the developmental period.Thus family relationships play an important part in understanding the impact of attachment on personal growth and society in general. I would recommend that you look at the work of Marris. In particular his early work on bereavement. 1 Marris offers views of unique relationships that help to clarify both the connection between attachment behaviour and family structure, and its connection to other unique relationships. If we assume that a baby, all being well, forms an attachment to a nurturing figure very early in life, then feelings, purposes, patterns of behaviour will begin to become structured around that relationship. But as a principle of organisation, this model of relationship can be applied to other figures who seem to behave in the same way and respond as lovingly. The earliest experiences of attachment to a mothering figure must in any society, he believes, establish in a young child the predisposition to understand nurturing relationships as embodied in unique figures. Being mothered is, from the first, associated with a particular, identified, special person, and that quality of relationship therefore, is extended only to other particular, identifiable, special people. The range of constant, reliable, nurturing figures a child finds varies, for example, from the great traditional family compounds of a West African native tribe, to a single parent’s anonymous apartment in a city block. Unless children learn early in their lives that there can be several unique nurturing figures in their lives who seem to have a particular, special love for them, they are not, he believes, likely later on to create the conditions in which they can discover or understand the nature of nurturing relationships. It is suggested by Marris that children learn first through their experience of attachment, that there is a class of relationships (which may have only one or no constant examples in their lives) in which they can discover and recognise a unique bond between themselves and each other person of this class. Perhaps the easiest way to see uniqueness as a generalised quality is in intimate friendships. We evolve with each of our close friends an idiosyncratic relationship of mutual loyalty. Each is irreplaceable, and its loss would grieve us. Yet we can sustain, if we are lucky, a good many intimate friendships. All these unique relationships share the same qualities: they are nurturing, can claim priority, and are more or less exclusive. They are not primarily instrumental but to be enjoyed for their own sake, and so embody the meanings around which we organise our lives.He is suggesting that while attachment behaviour itself, as Bowlby describes it, arises from an innate predisposition, the way in which the experience of attachment comes to be interpreted and developed in a child’s evolving structure of meaning is learned. Yet he believes that any pattern of child rearing could inculcate a structure of meaning in which unique relationships cease to be important. Communitarian idealists have sometimes argued that any selective, exclusive bonds whether of marriage, parenting, or friendship are narrow, selfish, and inhibit the growth of true community spirit. The Oneida community, for instance, which flourished in upstate New York between 1848 1 Marris, P. Widows and their Families. London; Routledge and Kegan Paul; 1958] and later his paper in: [Parkes, C.M. Stevenson-Hinde, J. & Marris, P. [Eds.] Attachment Across the Life Cycle. London & New York, Tavistock/ Routledge. 1991.

and 1879, practised a form of complex marriage where exclusive sexual partnerships were forbidden and philoprogenitiveness (maternal love for one’s own children) was constantly rebuked. 2 Yet, despite three decades of preaching and stern repression, the women of the community were convinced more than ever at the end of its long and, on the whole, happy career that they wanted husbands and children of their own. Why should it not be possible to educate the earliest experiences of attachment into a diffused, undifferentiated, loving, caring relationship with all the members of one’s society? The most obvious and perhaps most fundamental reason is that loving, caring relationships depend upon selective loyalties. I can try to behave in a loving way towards everyone, but I can only give the attention, care, and support that love requires to very few. The meaning of a relationship, in the structure of my life, depends on its degree of priority in a hierarchy of claims, on what I will willingly give up for its sake. In practice, Marris argues, it is virtually impossible to structure the meaning of one’s life either conceptually or socially without a hierarchy of priorities. Otherwise there would be no basis for choosing between the claims of relationships, finding one always bewildered and unreliable. So those who try to live without exclusive ties of relationship, like the people of Oneida or the members of a monastic order, have to create a surrogate that will fulfil for them the same structural need for some ordering of priorities of concern. Characteristically, they find it in a symbolic relationship with the same emotional connotations as a personal bond; they are brides of Christ, children of a supernatural father. The young women of Oneida pledged to John Humphrey Noyes, the community’s founder and leader, in 1869 that:

…we do not belong to ourselves in any respect, but that we first belong to God, and second to Mr. Noyes as God’s true representative. ... Above all, we offer ourselves ‘living sacrifices’ to God and true Communism. 3

Marris invites the view that such symbolic relationships define the crucial bond that gives life its meaning, but because they pre-empt any mundane human ties of affection, they do not provide principles of organisation until they are interpreted. The emotional commitment to the symbol becomes a practical subordination to the symbol’s interpreter, each implying the other, so that societies structured around such meanings will tend to be highly authoritarian. As time goes by and this subordination to the communitarian ideal becomes routine in the traditions and principles of an established social order, the followers will find it harder and harder to identify this institutionalised authority structure with a unique symbolic bond, and they will begin to search again for someone of their own to love. Marris believes that these communitarian experiments are not merely bizarre aberrations. They represent a fundamental dilemma of social organisation. We want all the relationships on which we depend to be nurturing and supportive, as if all the members of society were brothers and sisters, parents and children to each other. We idealise society as a family, membership in it as a fraternity, our loyalty to it as loyalty to a mother- or fatherland. Yet the actual relationships that this ideal reflects are necessarily selective and exclusive. They serve to differentiate claims and obligations within society, contradicting the notion of the universal family. The communitarianism of the Oneidans, and the opposite emphasis on the private family as the only legitimate refuge of loving relationships, represent equally extreme refusals to acknowledge the dilemma. Both are inherently strained, uncompromising resolutions of an underlying ambivalence. Marris’s view has been accepted by some authorities. However it seems unrealistic that one’s attachments could take on the homogenous characteristics that he represents by, “…each of our close friends (enjoy with us) …mutual loyalty”. When we become attached there is always a price to pay for the exclusivity of the arrangement. This is not simply loyalty, but includes not least, an ongoing obligation of compromise. In order 2 Hayden, D. Seven American Utopias. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T Press. 1976; and Kern, L. J. Ideology and reality: Sexuality and women’s status in the Oneida community. Radical History Review 20 (spring/summer): 180-205. 1979.3 Kern, L. J. Ideology and reality: Sexuality and women’s status in the Oneida community. Radical History Review 20 (spring/summer): 180-205. 1979 (pp., 184-185)

for each partner to continue the relationship then they not only need to love the other (in a nurturing sense at least) but there has to be a willingness to put one’s own needs after those of the other. Not all the time of course, as we are all individuals with our own emotional and egotistical needs, but we find ourselves subordinating them from time to time in order to accommodate the needs of the partner (in any sense). This brings about a demand on our emotional energy that may at times exhaust it. Thus the more attachments there are at that level the less emotional energy there will be available for each. It seems likely therefore that the classic representation of attachment will be to one other person, with all the rest being subsidiary ones.

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Reprinted with permission from: For Want of a Better GoodAuthor: Alan Challoner MA (Phil) MChSAny additions or changes to these materials must be pre-approved by the author.

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