by Tim Kreider
Another part of me, perhaps more sentimental but also more truthful, has to acknowledge that although this cat may be less complex than me, perhaps not what we’d call self-aware, she is still undeniably another being in the world, a fellow Self experiencing her one chance at being alive, just like I am. It’s always amused me to hit or elongate the word you in speaking to the cat, as in “Yooouu would probably like that!”—because it’s funny (and funny often means disquieting and true) to remind myself that there really is another ego in the room with me, with her own likes and dislikes and idiosyncrasies and exasperatingly wrongheaded notions. It is not an insoluble epistemological mystery to divine what the cat wants when I wake up and see her face two inches from mine and the Tentative Paw slowly withdrawing from my lip.
Sometimes it strikes me that an animal is living in my house, and it seems as surreal as if I had a raccoon or a kinkajou loose in here. There are plenty of opportunities for misinterpretations in interspecies interactions: I used to regard the cat’s hatred of traveling as a reflection of my own neurotic resistance to change, but cats are predators, territorial animals who become decreasingly confident the farther they get from their home territory, so repeatedly uprooting her from her familiar environs has probably not been a nuisance but something more like cruel.
And yet somehow this animal and I have learned, on some level, to understand one another. We coexist. Although I love to plunge my nose into her fur when she comes in from a chilly day and inhale deeply of the crisp wintry tang of the Coldcat Smell, the cat does not like this one bit, and flees me. For a while I would chase her around the house yelling “Gimme a little whiff!” and she would slink behind the couch to hide from my hateful touch. But eventually I realized that this was wrong of me. In the end a compromise was reached: now I let her in and pretend to have no interest whatsoever in smelling her, and go read on the couch, and after not more than a minute or so the cat will casually approach me and deign to be smelt. I really should be no less impressed by this accord than if I’d successfully communicated with a Paleolithic Papuan tribesman or decoded a message from the stars.
I’ve read that feng shui advises keeping a pet to maintain the chi of your house or apartment when you’re not there; the very presence of an animal enlivens and charges the space. Although I suspect feng shui of being high-end hooey, I have learned, when my cat’s been temporarily put up elsewhere, that a house without a cat in it feels very different from a house with one. It feels truly empty, inanimate, dead. It gives me some foreboding of how my life will feel after this cat is gone. We don’t know what goes on inside an animal’s head; we may doubt whether they have anything we’d call consciousness, and we can’t know how much they understand or what their emotions feel like. I will never know what, if anything, that cat thinks of me. But I can tell you this much: a man who is in a room with a cat—whatever else we might say about that man—is not alone.
* * *
I. The network was looking for a new show about someone who worked with animals for a living, but they’d already played out the obvious professions—vets, dog trainers, lion tamers. A production company had been developing a show around a psychic who received her psychic vibrations via the medium of her cat, except that then the psychic, in an evidently unforeseen development, died. Disquietingly, her cat died a week before she did, which seemed like some sort of posthumous validation of her, or at least the cat’s, paranormal powers.
II. It occurred to me only later that maybe the cat was not the one who was exaggerating her declining health to get me back home for Christmas.
The Strange Situation
Abstract
My mother likes to tell a story about the time she volunteered me for a psychological study as an infant. “The psychologists at Johns Hopkins University laughed because [you] played with all their toys,” she wrote in my baby book. “Two and three at a time, so they couldn’t write down that [you] preferred any.” Mom, being a mom, thought of this anecdote as evidence of my precocious curiosity and creativity. I, as an adult, sometimes thought of it as a sort of predictor of, or metaphor for, my romantic life: I wasn’t about to commit to any one thing when there were so many tantalizing options available. I wanted to sample everything, have as much fun as possible, play with all the toys.
I had just broken up with the first girlfriend I’d been willing to call a “girlfriend” in years—or, rather, had left her no choice but to break up with me—and had finally decided that I might have what psychologists call attachment issues. I was reading a book about the history of attachment theory when I came across a description of a famous experiment conducted in the late ’60s, Mary Ainsworth’s “strange situation,” that included the detail: “At one end of the room was a child’s chair heaped with and surrounded by toys.”1 When I mentioned this to my mother, she said: “Ainsworth! That was the name of the researcher.”
When therapists or social workers learn that I was one of the original subjects of the strange situation, they react in the way that a more general audience might if they were to learn I’d played one of the kids in The Goonies. The strange situation is still the most widely used lab setup in developmental psychology. The subject of the study was not, as it turns out, toy preference. What the researchers were observing were my reactions to my mother: what I did when she left the room, when she returned, when a stranger entered. (Mom tells me I didn’t cry when she left and started to crawl toward her when she came back, but got distracted by a toy.) It’s now the standard method of evaluating the attachment bond between infants and mothers, the way IQ tests are used to measure intelligence. It classifies infants into three distinct attachment patterns, which have proven to be disturbingly stable in longitudinal studies, meaning that most of us are still classified the same way we would’ve been in infancy—e.g., an infant who acts unconcerned when his mother leaves and ignores her when she returns might, as an adult, be reluctant to call the woman he’s dating a “girlfriend,” or subtly maneuver her into leaving him.
This probably ought not to come as shocking news to those of us reared in the post-Freudian world, which tells us we’re all shaped and driven by the unremembered past, but it’s still disquieting to see it borne out by hard data, or in your own life. I had told my friends that if this most recent relationship didn’t work out, it might be time to accept that I didn’t really want to be in a relationship at all. At age forty-seven, I’d never so much as lived with a woman, let alone been married. Summer was undeniably over; I now found myself living in an increasingly chilly vacation cabin with my partner in what had been by far the longest-term relationship of my life, a nineteen-year-old cat who was succumbing to senility and kidney failure. The cat had been given a year or two to live just about two years ago. She’d recently stopped using the sanctioned litter box and was now urinating on the carpet, the furniture, the woodstove, my record albums, even on the sofa right next to me when I was reading. My life now consisted of watching the cat like a raptor at all times, leaping up and whisking her outside whenever she started to pee, and then feeling ashamed for scaring her. The cat had taken to sitting up in the rafters, looking down at me as though I were a volatile lunatic. These are circumstances conducive to reflection.
We’ve all arrived at those moments when we look up from our lives and ask: Why am I this person I would rather not be? Where exactly did things go wrong? How did I end up alone in this cabin with a demented and incontinent cat? But, unlike most people, I was in a rare and oddly privileged position, having clinical data available about my infant self—what I imagined as my essential self, uncontaminated by experience, a control me. Somewhere in an old cardboard box or metal filing cabinet or on a piece of microfilm was a record of my attachment classification at eleven months, like a snapshot of the primordial universe. Mine is one of the first generations in history that could conceivably have had access to such information—or, probably, that would’ve cared. So that gray autumn, as I tended my senescent cat, I undert
ook a research project of my own: to track down the specific study in which I’d been a subject and find the raw data on myself from 1968.
To this end I enlisted the aid of my friend Margot, a professional science reporter. Margot’s broken stories about strains of plague that could wipe us all out inside a month, but spends most of her time on what she calls cute-robot and “critter” stories. Not for nothing do they pay Margot, it turns out: within a couple hours of my asking her advice, she’d forwarded me more information than I would’ve unearthed in a year of poking around online myself. She sent me links and contact information for the archivists at the library of Johns Hopkins University, where the experiment was conducted, the Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron, where Mary Ainsworth’s papers are stored, and for one of Ainsworth’s former grad students, Mary Main, who was still alive and professionally active. Margot, an implacable researcher, urged me not to give up until I knew the data was either inaccessible or destroyed.
“NPR aired a documentary by a guy who found the medical records of his own childhood lobotomy,” she said, by way of encouragement. “He found a photo of himself with a knife in his eyeball, as I recall.”
I also asked Margot’s advice about my cat situation. She and her husband had owned a cat with a spraying problem so severe that they’d stopped inviting people over and consulted a pet psychologist. Margot suggested it might be a physical problem; she said she’d see a vet. She recommended I find one who would come to my house to euthanize the cat if necessary. When her own cat had been diagnosed with cancer, Margot was unable to bring herself to have it put to sleep, and it was now exiled to the backyard, where it pawed at the window, yowling stridently, so that Margot had to brace herself before walking into her own kitchen to make coffee every morning. She warned me that I would soon be grappling with cat-sized versions of some major moral and philosophical questions.
I don’t know how much the past can tell you about yourself, or whether such understanding is of much use in trying to change. But it’s become evident to me, in midlife, that my own history of intimate relationships—not wanting to choose, trying everything, never settling—may not have been the kind of experiment I thought it was, either. Its true subject may not have been all the alluring playthings I found so diverting but the thing that wasn’t there, that I was pretending I didn’t miss.
Introduction
That children are attached to their mothers may not sound like a discovery on par with the double helix. But only a couple of generations ago, the dogma among psychoanalysts was that infants’ inner lives were ruled by internal fantasies—good versus evil breasts, Oedipal intrigues and parricides—not stuff that happened out in real life. And the conventional wisdom among behavioral psychologists, who must’ve made fun dads, was that children not only didn’t need affection but could be actively damaged by it; mothers were cautioned against the hazards of kissing and cuddling, and warned not to feed their babies every time they cried or go to them when they woke in the night, lest they reinforce the behavior.
The father of attachment theory, John Bowlby, saw well-nourished children waste away when they were separated from their mothers for long periods during World War II. He posited that attachment was a primary drive, innate as aggression or libido: infants have an instinctive predisposition to attach to their mothers in order to protect themselves, in the same way that goslings “imprint” on the first thing they see (a phenomenon frequently observed in animated cartoons, as when baby chicks glom onto some inappropriate maternal figure like Foghorn Leghorn). You’ve probably seen photos of Harry Harlow’s famous piteous-baby-monkey experiments: infant rhesus monkeys clinging to soft, carpeted dummy mothers, which they preferred to bare metal mothers that dispensed food, effectively refuting behaviorist claims that attachment was all about feeding, not feeling. But because human beings are animals with complex brains and long maturation periods, the development of attachment can be interrupted or distorted, affecting our future capacity for intimacy.
There was no way of objectively observing or measuring attachment until Bowlby’s protégé, Mary Ainsworth, developed the strange situation in the late sixties at Johns Hopkins (the same university I would attend as an adult). Ainsworth later said that she and a colleague thought it up in about half an hour. It’s an elegant twenty-minute lab procedure, staged in a room with two chairs, a door, and a one-way mirror. It consists of a sequence of eight orchestrated “episodes,” including separations from and reunions with the mother, as well as the introduction of a stranger, both with and without the mother present. The toys my mom remembered were there to arouse the infant’s curiosity and desire to explore; the mother’s absence, and the appearance of the stranger, were meant to inhibit exploratory behavior and trigger his instinct to cling to the comfort of his mother.I Infants’ reactions to all these stimuli were recorded in minute and quantifiable detail: observers watching through the one-way mirror took written notes and/or dictated them into a tape recorder, with a beep at fifteen-second intervals providing a timeline; the floor was divided into a grid for the precise measurement of the infant’s every movement toward and away from his mother. All this data was then crunched and collated every which way imaginable using punch cards and room-sized computers.
In a graph of the subjects’ scores, you can see infants clustering into three distinct groups, like stars falling into the main sequence, supergiants, and white dwarfs: (1) secure attachment and two types of insecure attachment, (2) avoidant and (3) anxious (also sometimes called “ambivalent”).2 In normal populations about 60 percent of infants are securely attached, with the remaining third falling into one of the two insecure categories.II Significantly, these results correlated well with months of observations Ainsworth had conducted in the subjects’ homes.
In videos of the strange situation, you can see Bowlby’s hypothesis that children use their mothers as a “secure base” for exploration enacted: securely attached children happily investigate the room and the toys, constantly looking back at their mothers for reassurance that it’s safe to proceed. Although they cry when their mothers leave the room, they’re easily comforted when they return. It’s an infant’s reaction on reunion with the mother that’s the most telling of his classification. An avoidantly insecure child can look precociously independent, exploring fearlessly and displaying a curious lack of distress when his mother leaves, but when the mother returns, he may start to go toward her but then avert his eyes, act distracted, or draw away from her attempts to comfort him—he snubs her. An anxiously insecure child is too preoccupied with his mother to explore much at all, and gets extremely upset by her departure. Even when the mother comes back, he remains angry and inconsolable, twisting and kicking to get out of her arms, slapping away any toys proffered, as if her physical presence somehow can’t compensate for her unforgivable absence.
It all sounds so arbitrary and inconsequential: one baby squirms, one cries, another shies away. But Margot forwarded me one longitudinal study showing that 72 percent of people in their twenties were still classified, as measured by the Adult Attachment Interview,III in the same way they had been at six months.3 Those infinitesimal gestures resonate through the decades, echoing in our flirtations, fights, and breakups. Pretending not to notice the mother’s return becomes not calling after an intimate weekend; inconsolable crying at being abandoned turns into sixteen texts in a row sent after midnight. Through the attachment process, infants form what psychologists call an “internal working model,” an unconscious template for all their future relationships, which is why your girlfriend or husband sometimes seems to be reacting in a crazily inappropriate or disproportionate way, as if to someone other than you, and why you cannot seem to stop acting insane in relationships even when you know you are acting insane.
Adults who are classified as avoidant tend to separate sex and affection, fucking for fun instead of love, and are likelier to have multiple relationships or marriages. At an extreme,
they may suffer from what the authors of one paper call “melancholic sexuality” or “the sexuality of despair,” which they describe as “a cold arctic-like desert unwarmed by human relationship that barely achieves expression.”IV4 The anxiously attached, by contrast, use sex to get the affection they’re starved for, and long to merge totally with their partners; they’re always scaring people off with the intensity of their need. (You might caricature these types as the guy who can’t commit and the clingy girl—and these styles do seem to correlate, to some extent, with gender.) Interestingly, neither the avoidant nor the anxious are compatible with their own types, whereas avoidant/anxious couples can be depressingly stable—those couples who endlessly break up and get together again, or live miserably ever after.5 Some researchers have pointed out that people may play different roles in different relationships: sometimes you’re the one who flees, sometimes you’re the one who clings. Those who are insecurely attached in infancy are likely not only to have similar issues in their adult relationships but also to repeat the same pattern with their own children: one survey of studies involving hundreds of mother-infant pairs showed that 75 percent of mothers and infants matched up in their secure-versus-insecure classifications.6 Since the strange situation was first developed, researchers have tried to correlate attachment classification with everything else they could think of—relationships and marriage, school and work performance, addiction, grief, political ideology and religiosityV—and suffice it to say the securely attached are generally healthier, happier, and more functional in just about every area of life.
Which must be nice for them. My own life increasingly revolves around accommodating the declining health of a small animal. Per Margot’s suggestion, I took my cat to the vet, who diagnosed her as nineteen years old. He advised against euthanizing her so long as she was still eating and mobile. (I didn’t tell the vet that it would not occur to me to have the cat euthanized so long as she was still right-side out.) For the time being, she seems content to sit purring on my lap seventeen hours a day, occasionally pissing on my things. Margot recommended I buy “puppy pads” for the cat, so there are now little throw rugs of absorbent diaperlike material placed around my house, which some might view as a deterioration of basic living standards. I’ve made the executive decision to abandon the cat’s special medicated kidney-health cat food and go back to Fancy Feast. Albacore tuna, bacon, fuck it—whatever the cat wants. I had assumed at first that she was entering a swift terminal decline, but instead she seems to have leveled off at a new, fairly low plateau. It’s possible this is just what my life is like now.