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Born To Love: Instinct and Natural Mothering: An essay to introduce this book

In 1970 I read John Bowlby's book Attachment and lots of things in my life fell into place. Attachment is not an easy read and I would not have been aware of its existence but for a NY Times review. It is a big thick book in which Bowlby makes a watertight case for the role of instinct in infant behavior. Perhaps today that does not seem a point that needs arguing. But in 1970 the field of human psychology was dominated by B.F. Skinner who argued that human behavior was no more than vastly elaborated conditioned reflexes. You ring a bell and the dog salivates. You pick up a baby when it cries and you teach it to cry.

Bowlby's premise was that babies, like all primates, are evolved to cling to their mothers. Contact with the mother is life. Separation from the mother is abandonment and, in the environment in which humans and other primates evolved, abandonment is death. A baby is born with a job: maintaining proximity to its mother. To serve this end, the baby is born with some innate baggage called instincts. Remember, Bowlby wrote this at a time when the existence of instinct in humans had been officially declared nonexistent and anyone who asserted otherwise was clearly enslaved by superstition. He or she could be derided and dismissed. But Bowlby could not be dismissed. He had been director of the World Health Organization within the United Nations and had written numerous well-recognized books based on his years of experience working with children orphaned during World War II. He was Chief of Psychiatry at the London School of Medicine and enjoyed international respect. His work could have been hailed as revelation, thus standing departments of psychology on their ears. Or it could be ignored. Most psychologists and psychiatrists chose the latter course.

Born To Love: Instinct and Natural Mothering, was intended as a popularization of Bowlby's premise. Bowlby identified five infant behaviors, which are innate and serve the goal of maintaining proximity to mother. These are sucking, crying, smiling, clinging and following. These behaviors, operating within the "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" (Bowlby's awkward phrase for home life) elicit a maternal response, which supports infant survival. This news arrived at a time, and none too soon, when mothers had been hounded for 70 years to not respond to these signals. To not let the baby suck. To not carry it about. To not respond to crying as her own instincts told her to, but to make the baby "cry it out" and "learn to be independent"….all preambles to death, as the baby (still back in the stone age) perceives it. The price of ignoring a baby's instinctive signals is severe psychological damage. A baby learns everything by and through his principal attachment figure: his mother. She is his/her organizing principle. Her reliable and appropriate response permits the growth of trust. It permits a baby to dare to post pone gratification.

So in 1974 I wrote this book, and many women who read it said that at last they felt empowered to do what they knew in their hearts was right. But this is getting a little ahead of my story. I wrote Born To Love while I was still living in England and sent it to American publishers. It was read and rejected. This was the beginning of the Women's Movement. Women, especially younger women, did not wish to hear that mothers and babies needed to be together. Bowlby's concept may have threatened departments of Psychology, but it enraged many women. An editor at Atheneum accompanied my rejection slip with a personal note expressing the hope that I would remain in England and keep my ideas out of the USA.

But I did return to the USA, and bought a farm in Maine. Since 1969 I had been a La Leche League leader in England and the US. LLL did not have quite so much trouble accepting attachment, although they went with the flow and endorsed mothers working outside the home, so long as they left breast milk for the baby. What LLL objected to was my chapter on abortion, the appropriateness of which I questioned. I probably should have kept my mouth shut on abortion. This was before Roe v. Wade and abortion wasn't yet legalized in the US. It was legal in England, and after their abortions women were directed next door to counseling clinics designed to help them get over feeling guilty, which nobody was supposed to feel. Guilt was very old fashioned. LLL offered my book for sale for a number of years but accompanied it with a long disclaimer explaining that my views on abortion were not those of LLL.

I believe now that the abortion material belonged in another book. You don't need two hot button discussions in one book. Accepting the inescapable evolutionary foundation for mother/baby togetherness was enough of a leap for most people. Women who breastfed and carried their babies around were often getting a lot of disapproval from their mothers-in-law. These women appreciated my endorsement of their mothering style.

Attachment is a topic I care about enormously. It is absolutely the key to mental health and happiness for babies and for mothers too. Physical health is also important, and they tend to be very closely entwined. LLL has done a good job of reintroducing breastfeeding to the USA and to the world. Babies of women who breastfeed develop strong attachments to their mothers. And even more important, (Bowlby ignored this totally) their mothers develop a healthy attachment to them. Mothers who do not breastfeed often suffer little pain or discomfort when they leave their babies with others. Second-generation mothers who were not breastfed and who fail to breastfeed their own babies are often remarkably indifferent mothers who scarcely notice when their babies cry. Lactation induces an overwhelming attachment.

The role of instinct in the mother/infant bond remains largely ignored even though its healthy expression under girds self-esteem and frees the baby's energy to learn and love. Bowlby makes a persuasive case that the development of conscience is dependent upon a healthy degree of attachment. Children to whom attachment is impossible either because no reliable attachment figure is available, or because the only available figure is an object of fear, do not develop a normal conscience. A friend of mine who read Born To Love observed, "Attachment is the architectonic basis of Natural Law." Attachment is the architecture upon which a healthy personality is structured.

Shortly after Born To Love was self-published, my marriage fell apart. I was left with three boys and a cow and few other resources. It appeared to me that with or without a scientific understanding of why they were doing it, intelligent women everywhere were insisting on breastfeeding their babies, and many people were effectively supporting their decision, with or without recognizing the importance of attachment. But nutrition in the USA was taking a dangerous direction. I am doing what I can about that. Families with a father and mother and children and a cow are mentally and physically healthy, as God and Nature intended.

Footnote: The anti mothering legacy of Twentieth Century psychology continues to dominate Departments of Human Service. Mary Callahan has written movingly about this in a guest column that appeared January 4, 2004, in the Lewiston Sun Journal, in Maine. She reminds us of the tragedy of five-year-old Logan Marr, a well-publicized case in which a child died in foster care. Logan suffocated when her foster mother punished her for talking by binding her with duct tape. She was wrapped into a high chair placed in the cellar with duct tape over her mouth to keep her quiet. Logan had a cold and suffocated, apparently because she could not breathe through her nose.

Logan and her younger sister had been taken into custody because their mother had left them for several days with a friend. There was no charge of abuse, only of neglect, a charge that their mother has consistently denied. Logan was extremely solicitous of her little sister's welfare. This was interpreted by DHS as evidence of their mother's neglect. They wrote up Logan has having become "parented", a pejorative term. Callahan calls this interpretation of behavior "junk science". Right on, Mary Callahan. Callahan is a nurse and foster parent who has seen a lot of DHS from inside the system.

In an earlier foster home, Logan had turned in a paper to her teacher saying, "I just want somebody to want me". Her own mother was denied access.

For perspective, yesterday our paper carried the story of a 12 year old boy in Parkersburg WV who saved his two year old sister from their burning home. He kicked in a window and suffered from smoke inhalation in the process. The boy is quoted as saying, "She's my sister. I'm supposed to take care of her." Out in the real world, nobody is stigmatizing him as "parented". In fact, he is receiving an award from the local fire department.

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