by Tim Kreider
“On the other hand,” said Margot, “what if your mom’s description suggests you were not firmly attached, but you looked at the original data and they thought you were?” This question gave me pause. I was prepared to learn potentially unpleasant truths about myself, but less prepared for pleasant ones. When I’d described my mom’s recollection of my behavior in the strange situation to a dinner table full of psychoanalysts, they told me it sounded like pretty healthy exploratory behavior. Embarrassingly, I was disappointed. Although it would be troubling to learn I’d been classed as avoidant, it would also be a kind of relief, somehow validating. “Whereas if I was securely attached as an infant,” I told Margot, “it would mean that I’m not a victim of some primal loss or trauma but just another dickhead.”
“My point exactly,” she said. “Even if you were traumatized, and even if you had some scientifically documented evidence for this, you are still ultimately responsible for any dickhead behavior. Inasmuch as anyone can be held responsible for anything,” she added—“Does free will exist, blah blah blah.”
Well. There’s a case to be made that we’re all so many wind-up toys set in motion by our pasts, colliding and battering each other to pieces. Some days self-awareness mostly seems like a source of embarrassment, enabling you to watch yourself fucking up with greater clarity. I found my own tendencies in relationships enumerated with humiliating accuracy in self-help books’ chapters on the avoidant type: maintaining emotional distance, not admitting that a relationship is a “real” relationship, withdrawing after intimate times together, feeling controlled, amplifying your partner’s faults, imagining there’s some other perfect person out there, pining over idealized exes. It’s even characteristic of avoidants, once they’ve successfully driven off their partners, to belatedly experience all the feelings of deep attachment they’d been repressing. Reading these books was so upsetting that I kept setting them aside to read John Keegan’s horrific descriptions of wounds inflicted at Waterloo and the Somme instead.13
Margot wasn’t buying this deterministic bullshit. “I don’t know,” she said. “The ‘science’ of all this seems pretty squishy.” Margot’s a skeptic on the social sciences and disdains the sort of reporters who announce the existence of a “romance gene” based on genetic variants found in monogamous prairie voles. Human personalities are complex and messy; it’s impossible to isolate a single variable or trace causality in an individual history. As Margot asked, “What do the observations of some stranger, a self-proclaimed expert, from forty years ago on your infant behavior in a completely artificial situation mean for you?”IX
I’d taken the 72 percent stability of attachment classifications in that longitudinal study as depressing evidence of the determinism of early experience. But Margot, an optimist by policy if not temperament, chooses to look at the glass as 28 percent full. Like most things in life, attachment is more easily changed for the worse, mostly by major stressors like divorce, abuse, the serious illness (including mental illness) or death of a parent. But kids really are resilient, and can become securely attached to a foster parent, an aunt or a grandparent, even a teacher or a coach. And parents have been known, in some instances, to get their shit together: that same longitudinal study cites the case of a child who developed a chronic illness and whose parents responded “with consistent sensitive care,” after which her classification changed from insecure to secure. “So it’s not as if something that was one way in childhood dooms you forever to one state of being,” Margot concluded. “At least, if you believe all this ‘science.’ ”
Eventually you get sick of thinking about yourself. The last thing you want is to end up carrying armloads of self-help books home from the library, blathering on about your Journey, still bitterly blaming the tiny senile people who were once your parents for your middle-aged life. In the end I gambled on honesty: I wrote to Dr. Bell care of the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and told her I was a writer working on an essay about attachment and also, it happened, a former subject of her dissertation study. I said I’d be interested in talking to her about attachment in general and her own research in particular. I enclosed a copy of my first book and mailed it off. I did not mention in my letter that I’d learned that we had the same birthday.
“Do you really believe you have ‘attachment issues’?” Margot finally asked me. I would’ve thought that Margot, of all people, would know. Back when she and I were dating, I figured I’d probably get married someday for the same reason I assume I’ll probably die: everybody else eventually seems to. At that time I treated relationship talks like getting sent to the principal’s office: you just say whatever it seems like they want to hear so you can get out of there as quickly as possible. But as Margot pressed the question of our long-term plans, I started having bad dreams. The word doomed started coming up a lot in our conversations. Finally I got infatuated with someone who was safely unavailable long enough for Margot to find out.
My last girlfriend had been surprisingly patient with my panic at finding myself in a relationship. She’d likened me to a fainting goat, those animals with a genetic defect that causes them to topple comically over when startled. It’s hard not to laugh in a shamefaced way when you see videos of it: it’s such a pitiful, ridiculous thing to do. How could such a maladaptive mechanism ever have evolved?
Mary Ainsworth took pains to dispel any notion that she’d identified any preexisting “types” of children; all infants are naturally attached to their mothers. Even the ones who remain outwardly indifferent when their mothers leave the room show the elevated heart rates associated with distress.14 All children have the same need for attention, but because that need is sometimes ignored, rebuked, or inconsistently met, some of them learn coping strategies to maximize contact with the mother while minimizing the possibility of rejection—by suppressing their need, redirecting it, or reacting against it. We adopt these behaviors because they work, more or less, when we’re seven months old. But it can take up to forty-seven years to notice that they aren’t working so well anymore. We erect increasingly elaborate structures to prop up and protect something that’s essentially failing, like this system of cat ramps, boxes, and cushions that’s turned my home into a Caligarian cat hospice.
I understand that there’s something I’m missing out on. The secure infant-mother relationship is said to provide a “secure base for exploration,” and according to attachment researcher Mary Main we are happiest living our lives this way—saying I love you and kissing each other good-bye in the morning, venturing out into the uncaring world to have all kinds of adventures, then returning home to share our daily pocketful of collected anecdotes and complaints.15 An unshared life feels scarily as if it might not be occurring. Driving through a corridor of autumnal color or a cawing gauntlet of crows, I have an impulse to tell someone about it. Who am I going to call when this cat dies?
There was a night not long after we broke up when Margot called my cabin because there was some footage on TV of Nixon playing the piano that she knew I’d want to see. “I let the phone ring and ring but no one picked up,” she wrote me later in a postcard. I’d been out having dinner with a neighbor when she called. “Inside, my heart keeps ringing and ringing,” she wrote. “I can’t hang up but there’s nobody home.” That was seventeen years ago, but I still think about that night sometimes.
One of the last times I saw Margot, she had embarked on a radical decluttering campaign, ruthlessly throwing out attic ephemera—the seating chart for her wedding, leaves pressed by long-dead aunts—and she asked me bluntly whether I’d like a box of my old love letters to her back. She figured that, as a writer, I might be able to use them. “Look,” she said, seeing the expression on my face, “we have a relationship now, in the present. Isn’t that more important than some love affair we had when I was nineteen?” What I really wanted was for Margot to clasp these letters to her breast on her deathbed, weeping with love and regret. But Margot is no
t one for maundering over the past. She always signs her emails:
Onward,
M.
Margot’s right: the past doesn’t exist. It’s only a story, one we keep rewriting. If you’d asked me why she and I broke up right after it happened, I would’ve told you that although she said she wanted to marry me, she didn’t seem to like anything about me. Ten years later I would’ve told you I was depressed and drinking too much and blew a good thing. These days I like to think it was because I’m avoidantly insecure. (Margot would tell you her own, much different story.) Maybe we just go through life telling ourselves one story after another to get through the days, replacing the old ones with newer ones as needed, like shoes. In the ’50s, psychoanalysis promised to make sense of us with its unconscious complexes, dreams and free association; in the ’60s, behaviorism explained it all through positive and negative reinforcement, food pellets and shocks; now attachment is in intellectual fashion, and seems like a fuller, more empirical explanation. No doubt a hundred years from now all these hypotheses will seem like crude approximations.
It’d be nice to believe we’re replacing old stories with truer, more useful ones, spiraling asymptotically in on the Truth even if we’ll never quite touch it. But I sometimes feel as if the older I get, the less sense life makes, and the more all attempts at explanation seem like fictions—that, in all honesty, I have no idea why anything happened or what it all meant. Some mornings I sit at my laptop over my first cup of coffee, trying to think of one true sentence I can write, staring into space with longer and longer pauses between typing, wondering what to make of this life. Why am I spending this cold autumn alone, waiting for a cat to die? Was it being given up for adoption? My father’s death? Does free will exist blah blah blah? It rings and rings but nobody’s home.
Results
Dear Mr. Kreider,
I was delighted to hear of your interest in attachment and in making contact with me after so many years. I did receive your book, as well as your letter, and would be quite pleased to speak with you. You may reach me directly either via email or, preferably, by calling my office.
Best,
Silvia Bell
“The last time she saw you, you were a wee babe,” Margot exulted. “Now, a man, you return to face the one who sat in judgment of you. You are like the replicant in Blade Runner finding and confronting its maker.” I hoped my interview with Dr. Bell would end more amicably than that one, but I had to admit our meeting felt portentous. On the phone, Dr. Bell told me I was the first of her former subjects ever to contact her. It occurred to me that to her I might represent a very narrow longitudinal study. We arranged to meet at her home office in Baltimore on the morning of Friday the fourteenth, which neither of us mentioned was Valentine’s Day.
Silvia Bell introduced herself in the waiting room of her office, where I’d been studying a find-the-hidden-picture drawing in Highlights magazine that was either badly drawn or sadistically difficult. (I couldn’t believe they were inflicting this puzzle on young children. Where was the fucking snake?) She was much younger than I’d expected—she told me later that she’d been nineteen when she started her doctoral program at Johns Hopkins. My mother remembered her as “a tiny thing,” and she was still small and fine-boned, with a very un-old-ladylike mane of tawny hair going gray. I’d brought her some potted daffodils to thank her for seeing me.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I told her. “Though I guess we’ve met before.”
“In a way,” she said.
“I suppose I look different now,” I said.
Dr. Bell’s office is equipped with both chairs and the traditional couch. I opted for the chair. Maybe it was the setting, but it felt like an oddly ambiguous conversation; it was unclear to me, at least, whether I was approaching her as an interviewer or a patient.
Margot had advised me that scientists like to talk about science, so you should let them, because it gets them comfortable before you ask them your real questions. Dr. Bell’s papers are couched in clinical language, but in person she’s less circumspect about her real agenda, which was in formulating a theory of communication, and of mind. “My interest,” she said, “has always been in meaning.” (Whenever Dr. Bell says meaning, you can tell it’s in italics.) “God forbid you would label it ‘the growth of love,’ ” she said (words like love are considered unprofessionally mushy) but what she was really studying was the point at which a child begins to connect certain experiences and feelings—meaning—with another human being. Attachment isn’t just about your relationships with others, she explained, but about your sense of self and of the world. “In the process of becoming attached to the mother,” she explained, “the infant discovers not only that the mother has a mind but that he has a mind.” I wondered whether attachment could shape your whole worldview; what seemed like an objective perception of the universe as indifferent or capricious might be something a lot more personal.
Without clever segue, I just came out and asked Dr. Bell whether I could find out how I’d been classified. She told me that she wouldn’t be able to find that data even if she wanted to. “The first thing that you do the moment you refer somebody [for a study] is to create a number for them,” she explained, “and you do not mix numbers with names or any identifying information.” It would be hard to say whether I was disappointed; in a way it felt like calling someone you don’t want to talk to and getting their voice mail.
“The only thing I will say,” she confided, “is I do remember a Timothy in my study.” (“The most beautiful words any reporter can hear,” Margot had told me, “are ‘I probably shouldn’t be telling you this . . .’ ”) “And I remember just a delightful experience.” She laughed and looked, for a moment, like the nineteen-year-old girl she’d been when we first met, around this same time of year in 1968. “I don’t have any details,” she said, “but I do remember having a wonderful time with you. Just having fun. There was a lot of back-and-forth that was”—she smiled again, and I could see her remembering me—“you know, fun.”
Dr. Bell’s particular experiment had found a correlation between secure attachment and early development of object and person permanence. “The essence of my study relied on particular game I would have played with you,” she explained, “which was a hide-and-seek game. And, um,” she added, not unplayfully, “I thought that hiding and seeking seems to have some meaning for you in your life.” I asked her if she could elaborate, but Dr. Bell was cagey. “I think in everybody’s life hide-and-seek is a big deal,” she said.
In general, psychologists aren’t as fatalistic about the effect of early experience as they used to be back when “fixed by six” was the grim formula in child development. In her experience, Dr. Bell said, “the resilience of human beings is not something we can theoretically cap in any way.” A catchword in psychology now is epigenetic, a term cribbed from biology, “meaning that you have phases,” she explained, “and that what happens in one phase does impact the next, but the next is also an opportunity to rework the earlier phase. The question is: What happens next?”
Like most psychoanalysts, Dr. Bell is not in the business of handing out answers. “I think people turn to inquire about the past when they’re stuck in the present in some way,” she told me. It felt like a hint, as if she were trying to tell me the data I wanted was right in front of my face. Forty-six years later, we were still playing hide-and-seek. “It is a joy to be hidden,” pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott wrote, “but disaster not to be found.”16 The snake was hidden in the bark of the tree, it turned out. The giveaway was the dot of the eye.
I walked out of my interview feeling as if I’d gotten to have my one quick handshake talk with God, and He’d said, Oh, yeah—I remember you. I always liked you, kid, and given me a little sock on the arm. That Valentine’s Day was one of those days of freakish, unexpected clemency you sometimes get in the dead of winter: the sun was shining and the latest heavy snow was thawing in a sloppy, exhilar
ating rush; hills of craggy black ice were still heaped up in supermarket parking lots, but you also had to leap over deep puddles and rivulets of meltwater everywhere. The world was a mess, the way your house gets messier when you’re in the middle of a serious cleaning. It wasn’t here yet, and wouldn’t be for a couple more dark months to come, but that day it at least felt possible to believe in spring.
Discussion
Margot and I had been corresponding throughout most of our research project, but one night when I visited her city we sat up late talking long after her husband and kids had gone to bed. We were at her kitchen table, watching a late-April snow squall whirl down outside the window, a last fuck-you from a long, relentless winter. She still looked much the same to me as she did at eighteen—the same wry intelligence behind new, azure-armed glasses. Unbeknownst to me, Margot had been having a much worse time of it than I had that winter—“unbeknownst” because, unlike me, Margot isn’t a complainer. Another difference between Margot and me is that when she finds herself doing things that she doesn’t approve of, or that alarm her, she does something about it. When she started having anxiety attacks at age thirteen, she informed her parents she needed help and called a psychologist herself to make an appointment. When she quit drinking, she didn’t join a twelve-step program; she just stopped. She’d always prided herself on being one of the few people she knew who wasn’t in therapy or on medication. But recently, more for her family’s sake than her own, she had warily sought professional help.