Here’s how I spent the drive to college with my parents: sobbing in the backseat, consumed by anxiety and anticipatory homesickness, worried that my parents would not love me after I went away to college—“away,” in this case, being a mere three miles from my parents’ house.
Why could I never feel assured of my parents’ love or protection? Why were ordinary childhood activities so difficult? What existential reassurance was I seeking in my nightly call-and-response with my mother?
The first anxiety is the loss of the object in the form of maternal care; after infancy and throughout the rest of life loss of love … becomes a new and far more abiding danger and occasion for anxiety.
—SIGMUND FREUD, The Problem of Anxiety (1926)
In 1905, Sigmund Freud wrote, “Anxiety in children is nothing other than an expression of the fact that they are feeling the loss of the person they love,” and so-called separation anxiety has remained a focus of researchers and clinicians ever since. Decades of studies by psychologists, primatologists, anthropologists, endocrinologists, ethologists, and others have revealed again and again, in myriad ways, the paramount significance of the early mother-child bond in determining the lifelong well-being of the child. The nature of that mother-child relationship starts getting established at the moment the infant enters the world—with “the trauma of birth,” as the early Freudian psychoanalyst Otto Rank put it—if not earlier than that. Experiences in the womb and during infancy can have profound effects on a child’s sense of well-being that last for decades—and that can even, according to recent research, persist into subsequent generations of offspring.
Yet for all his astuteness about the role of early childhood experiences in predicting lifelong emotional health, Freud was for most of his career strangely blind to the ways early parent-child relationships affect the human psyche. This seems to have been especially true in the case of his own psyche.
For many years, Freud endured a debilitating phobia of train travel. The train phobia first presented itself, according to Freud’s own account, in 1859, when he was three years old. His father’s wool business had collapsed, prompting the Freuds to relocate from Freiberg, a small Austro-Hungarian town (now P?íbor, in the Czech Republic), to Vienna. When the family arrived at the train station in Freiberg, young Sigmund was filled with dread: the gas-jet lights that illuminated the station made him think of “souls burning in hell”; he was terrified that the train would depart without him, taking his parents and leaving him behind. For years thereafter, train travel caused him anxiety attacks.
His life was circumscribed by his travel phobia. For a long time, he professed a desire to visit Rome—but was deterred from going by what he came to call his “Rome neurosis.” When compelled to travel anywhere by train with his family, he would book himself into a separate compartment from his wife and children because he was ashamed to have them witness his fits of anxiety. He compulsively insisted on getting to railway stations hours in advance of departure because he forever retained the intense fear of being left behind that he first experienced as a three-year-old.
A modern therapist might naturally attribute Freud’s travel phobia to his childhood fears of abandonment. Freud himself did not. Rather, as he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in 1897, he believed that what prompted his anxiety was seeing his mother naked in their train compartment while en route from Freiberg to Vienna. Witnessing this at a time when his “libido toward matrem had awakened” must have aroused him sexually, Freud surmised, and even as a three-year-old he would have known the taboo nature of such incestuous desire and would therefore have repressed it. This act of repression, he theorized, generated anxiety that he neurotically transmuted into a phobia of trains. “You yourself have seen my travel anxiety at its height,” he reminds Fliess.
Tellingly, Freud couldn’t actually recall seeing his mother nude on the train; he just supposed that he must have and that he’d then pushed the image down into his unconscious. From this (strained) supposition he generalized that all train phobia derives from repressed sexual desire and that those who are “subject to attacks of anxiety on the journey” are actually protecting themselves “against a repetition of the painful experience by a dread of railway-travel.”
On the basis of this (quite likely imagined) experience, Freud over the years elaborated his Oedipus complex and concluded that this was “a universal event in early childhood.” He would eventually make the Oedipus complex the centerpiece of his psychoanalytic theory of neurosis.†
Was my own separation anxiety as a young boy—and are my abiding anxiety and dependency issues as an adult—attributable to my repressed sexual feelings for my mother? It certainly never felt that way to me. Of course, Freud would say that it wouldn’t have felt that way: his whole point was that such feelings are repressed into the unconscious and transmuted into anxiety about other things—trains or heights or snakes or whatever. And in support of Freud, I confess there is this: The name of my first crush, in fifth grade, was Anne; the name of my first postcollege girlfriend, whom I dated for three years, was Ann; the girl I dated immediately after Ann, for nearly two years, was named Anna; the girl I left Anna for was named Anne; and my wife’s name is Susanna. My mother’s name? Anne, of course. I used to joke that dating all those Anns, Annes, and Annas reduced the likelihood I would call any of them by the wrong name—because even the wrong name would sound like the right one. But Freud would say that what I was really in danger of calling them—that what I was seeking with all those Anns, Annes, and Annas—was Mom. Lending still further Oedipal determinism to my romantic relations is the fact that my paternal grandmother was also named Anne—meaning that my father also married a woman with the same name as his mother.
But there is, of course, a less sexual explanation for how Freud’s early childhood experiences might have produced his lifelong anxiety and train phobia.
The first years of Freud’s life were colored by loss, and by the wavering attention of his mother, Amalia. Shortly after he was born, in 1856, his mother got pregnant again, giving birth to another son, Julius. Less than a year later, Julius died, felled by an intestinal infection. At the time, the Freud family lived in a one-room apartment, so it’s likely that Sigmund, as a toddler, witnessed at close hand his brother’s death and his parents’ reaction to it. Some of Freud’s biographers have suggested that Julius’s death sent Amalia into a depression that would have made her remote and unavailable to Sigmund. (Depression in mothers of children this age can be highly predictive of anxiety and depression in those children later in life.) With his mother emotionally unavailable, Freud naturally turned to an alternative maternal figure—the nursemaid, a Czech Catholic woman, who cared for him in the early years of his life. But while Sigmund was still a small child, the nursemaid was caught stealing and sent to jail; he never saw her again.
The logical conclusion here would seem to be that Freud’s train phobia was a response to the fear of abandonment produced by this string of childhood losses—the death of his brother, the emotional unavailability of his mother, and the sudden disappearance of his primary caretaker. But Freud remained fixated on proving the rightness of his sexual explanations of anxiety and his Oedipus complex. He would exile from the fold anyone (including Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, and Otto Rank) who dared question their centrality.
All anxiety goes back to the anxiety at birth.
—OTTO RANK, The Trauma of Birth (1924)
Later in his career, as Freud moved from his repressed libido theory of anxiety to his intrapsychic conflict theory, he began to take more account of the way in which parent-child relations—“object relations,” in the psychoanalytic argot—related to anxiety.
The final shifts in Freud’s theory of anxiety were motivated by his disavowal of a book written by one of his most devoted acolytes. Otto Rank, the secretary of Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, had intended The Trauma of Birth, published in 1924, as a tribute to his mentor. (The book is dedicated t
o Freud, “the explorer of the unconscious, creator of psychoanalysis.”) Rank’s basic argument, elaborated at great length, was that birth—both the physical act of passing through the uterine canal and the psychological fact of separation from the mother—is so traumatic that the experience becomes the template for all future experiences of anxiety. In making this claim, Rank was building on what Freud himself had already argued. “The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety,” Freud had written in a footnote to the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1908, and he repeated this notion in a speech he gave to the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society the following year.‡
But The Trauma of Birth was a work of such extravagant interpretive brio that Freud, though no stranger to extravagant interpretive leaps himself, found it alienating and bewildering, and he devoted a full chapter of The Problem of Anxiety to renouncing it.§ Rank’s arguments forced Freud to wrestle once more with the ways in which early life experiences are relevant to anxiety. This led him to revise his own theory of it.
In the final chapter of The Problem of Anxiety, Freud gives brief attention to what he called the “biological factor,” by which he meant “the protracted helplessness and dependence of the young of the human species.”
Freud writes that “the human infant is sent into the world more unfinished than the young [of other species]”—meaning that humans emerge much more highly dependent on their mothers for their survival than do other animals.‖ The infant seems to be born with an instinctive sense that the mother can provide sustenance and succor, and learns very quickly that whereas the mother’s presence equals safety and comfort, her absence equals danger and discomfort. Observing this, Freud concluded that the earliest human anxiety, and thus to some degree the source of all subsequent ones, is a reaction to “the loss of the object”—the “object” being the mother. “This biological factor of helplessness thus brings into being the need to be loved which the human being is destined never to renounce,” Freud writes. The first anxiety is about the loss of a mother’s care; throughout the balance of life, “loss of love … becomes a new and far more abiding danger and occasion for anxiety.”
In the final pages of The Problem of Anxiety, Freud briefly develops the idea that phobic anxiety in adults is the residue of human evolutionary adaptations: phobias of such things as thunderstorms, animals, strangers, being alone, and being in the dark represent “the atrophied remnants of innate preparedness” against real dangers that existed in the state of nature. For early man and woman, being alone, or in the dark, or bitten by a snake or a lion—and, of course, the separation of an infant from his mother—were legitimate mortal threats. In all of this, Freud was anticipating the work of the biologists and neuroscientists who would study phobias in the decades ahead.a
In other words, Freud was, in his seventies, in an addendum to one of his final works, finally moving closer to what would become the modern scientific understanding of anxiety. But by then it was too late. Freud’s followers were off to the races with “Oedipus conflicts” and “penis envy” and “castration anxiety”—and “inferiority complexes” (Adler) and the “collective unconscious” (Jung) and “death instincts” (Melanie Klein) and “oral and anal fixations” (Karl Abraham) and so-called “phantasies” about “the good breast and the bad breast” (Klein again). For a generation, as the field grew in the years leading up to and following the Second World War, the prevailing psychoanalytic view was that anxiety was caused by dammed-up sexual drives.
While parents are held to play a major role in causing a child to develop a heightened susceptibility to fear, their behaviour is seen not in terms of moral condemnation but as having been determined by the experiences they themselves had as children.
—JOHN BOWLBY, Separation: Anxiety and Anger (1973)
The person most responsible for unlocking the mysteries of separation anxiety, and for installing the concept near the center of modern psychiatry, was the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who did as much as anyone to rescue psychoanalysis from its more torturous theoretical overreaching. Trained in the 1930s by Freud’s protégé Melanie Klein, Bowlby would go on to develop what has become known as attachment theory—the idea that an individual’s anxiety level derives largely from the nature of the relationship with early attachment figures, most commonly the mother.
Bowlby was born in 1907 to an aristocratic surgeon who ministered to the king of England, and he would later claim that his “was a very stable background.” But it’s not hard to see that Bowlby’s clinical and research interests, like Freud’s, were informed by his own childhood experiences. Bowlby’s mother, according to the psychologist Robert Karen, was “a sharp, hard, self-centered woman who never praised the children and seemed oblivious to their emotional lives”; Bowlby’s father, generally absent, was “something of an inflated bully.” The Bowlby children ate completely apart from their parents until they were twelve years old—at which age they would be permitted to join their parents only for dessert. By the time Bowlby turned twelve, he’d already been away from home, at boarding school, for four years. Publicly, he would always say his parents had sent him away because they wanted to protect him from the bombs they feared German zeppelins would drop on London during the First World War; in private, however, he confessed that he’d hated boarding school and that he wouldn’t send a dog away so young.b
Psychoanalysts before Bowlby were generally uninterested in the day-to-day relationship between parents and children. What interest they did have was focused on breast-feeding, toilet training, and (especially) instances in which a child witnessed his parents having sexual intercourse. Anyone who placed undue emphasis on a child’s real experience—as opposed to on his internal fantasies—“was regarded as pitifully naive,” Bowlby would later recall. Once, while still a medical student, he watched with dismay as a series of case studies presented at the British Psychoanalytic Society traced patients’ emotional disorders to childhood fantasies. Unable to bear it any longer, he blurted: “But there is such a thing as a bad mother!” This sort of thing did not endear him to the psychoanalytic establishment.
In 1938, while still in good standing with the mandarins of psychoanalysis, he was assigned as a supervisor a doyenne of the Freudian establishment, Melanie Klein.c
Bowlby would soon come to find himself at odds with many of Klein’s views—such as that babies were seething miasmas of hatred, libido, envy, sadism, death instincts, and rage against the restraining superego and that neuroses arose because of conflicts between the “good breast” and the “evil breast.” Klein herself was by most accounts an unpleasant person; Bowlby would later describe her as “a frightfully vain old woman who manipulated people.” But what most appalled him was Klein’s disregard for the actual relationship between mother and child. The first case he treated under Klein’s supervision was an anxious, hyperactive young boy. Bowlby noticed right away that the boy’s mother was “an extremely anxious, distressed woman, who was wringing her hands, in a very tense, unhappy state.” To him it seemed obvious that the mother’s emotional problems were contributing to the boy’s and that a sensible course of treatment would include counseling for the mother. But Klein forbade Bowlby to talk to the woman. When the mother was eventually admitted to a mental hospital after a nervous breakdown, Klein’s response was exasperation at having to find a new patient, since there was no longer anyone who could bring the boy to his appointments. “The fact that this poor woman had had a breakdown was of no clinical interest to [Klein] whatever,” Bowlby would say later. “This horrified me, to be quite frank. And from that point onwards my mission in life was to demonstrate that real-life experiences have a very important effect on development.”
In 1950, the chief of the mental health section of the World Health Organization, Ronald Hargreaves, commissioned from Bowlby a report on the psychological problems of the thousands of European children rendered homeless by th
e disruptions of World War II. Bowlby’s report, Maternal Care and Mental Health, urged governments to recognize that a mother’s affection was as important for mental health “as are vitamins and proteins for physical health.” Strange as it may seem now, in 1950 there wasn’t much recognition of the effects of parenting on psychological development—especially within psychiatry, where treatment still often focused on the processing of inner fantasies.d
Bowlby’s early research focused on what happened when children, through the intrusions of war or illness, were separated from their mothers. Psychoanalytic and behaviorist theory held that separations from the mother didn’t really matter as long as the child’s basic needs (food, shelter) were taken care of. Bowlby found that not to be true at all: when young children were separated from their mothers for any substantial period of time, they tended to display acute distress. Bowlby wondered if the effects of prolonged separation in young childhood could lead to mental illness later on. The children who became clingy upon postseparation reunions, Bowlby suspected, were those who would grow up to be needy, neurotic adults; those who became hostile were those who would eschew intimacy and have difficulty forming deep relationships.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, while serving as head of the children’s department at a health clinic in London, he began to explore how the early day-to-day relationship between mother and child—what he would come to call the attachment style—affected the child’s psychological well-being. He found the same patterns again and again. When mothers had “secure attachment” relationships with their infants or toddlers—the mothers calm and available but not smothering or overprotective—the children were calmer, more adventurous, happier; they struck a healthy balance between maintaining proximity to their mothers and exploring their environment.
My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind Page 29