All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  In Freud’s wake, a host of analysts had turned their attention to the child–his own daughter, Anna Freud, amongst them. Britain became a fertile centre for the study of infancy and the kind of love under which children thrive. Here, a romantic tradition of childhood, elaborated in a wealth of literature, had long existed. From the turn of the nineteenth century on, play, too, had been seen as something of a child’s foundational and privileged right, as Antonia Byatt so well elaborates in her novel The Children’s Book.

  The analyst Melanie Klein, who established herself in London in 1926, used play to understand infants: her theories focused on the forces at work in the child before language developed. The infant who emerges from her writings is a dramatic creature whose inner landscape is the site of warfare between conflicting passions–aggressive and libidinal demands–all of them at first focused on the mother’s breast, which stands in for his whole life. Site of his satisfaction, or lack, the baby fantasizes the breast as good, loved, idealized; or bad, persecutory, destructive. This split cannot be reconciled until the infant is old enough to integrate his ‘self’ as a whole; in other words, to become another, a separate person. In some, the split is never reconciled. Klein’s followers suggested that this depends, in large part, on the kind of love the mother provides. Unlike Freud, whose work reflects his time’s patriarchal pre-eminence, Klein and her followers shifted the psychological focus within the family to the mother. In that spirit of scientific inquiry which always seems to propel searchers back to an understanding of earliest forces and origins, early mothering displaced castrating, disciplinary fathering as the crucial shaping influence on the child and on the formation of mind and inner life.

  Klein’s theories about the earliest life of the infant fed countless practitioners. Principal amongst them was Winnicott himself, who added psychotherapy with children to his practice as a hospital paediatrician. In the course of his working life Winnicott saw some sixty thousand children and their mothers, fathers and grandparents in his ‘paediatric snackbar’. Here he gathered a wealth of observations which fed his writing, much of it in common, comprehensible and playful language. Ordinary doctors and parents were his public, not only fellow professionals; and his BBC talks on childhood spoke to the nation, informing notions of childhood and good parenting.

  The Winnicottian baby is a bundle of ruthless instinctual forces utterly dependent on mother (or primary carer), without whom existence would not be possible. In this sense, mother and child are a couple. Yet she is primarily part, if the central part, of a facilitating environment. And she needs to trust herself to be responsive to her baby’s needs: simply put, to be interested in him, ‘to see the human being in the new-born infant’. Winnicott posits that in the last stage of pregnancy and in the first few weeks of a baby’s life, the mother inhabits a trance-like state of heightened sensitivity. This ‘primary maternal preoccupation’, a lulling attention in which she feels herself into the child’s place, is a crucial component of maternal love.

  Concerned to free mothers from the anxiety-inducing pressure of guidebooks and the conflicting advice of doctors, nurses, grandmothers and friends, Winnicott constantly reassures the mother that she will know just what to do ‘spontaneously’ in order to be ‘good enough’–not perfect. Striving for perfection, her anxiety infiltrates the baby, provoking his. Given good-enough mothering, good-enough love, the baby will go on to create what it is within him to create and contribute. In a BBC broadcast of 1949, Winnicott stated:

  In each baby is a vital spark, and this urge towards life and growth and development is a part of the baby, something the child is born with and which is carried forward in a way that we do not have to understand. For instance, if you have just put a bulb in the window-box you know perfectly well that you do not have to make the bulb grow into a daffodil. You supply the right kind of earth or fibre and you keep the bulb watered just the right amount, and the rest comes naturally, because the bulb has life in it.

  The baby needs attentiveness: she needs to be held and fed, more or less when she likes, and changed, perhaps not too soon, since she enjoys the warmth, and indeed the excitement, of producing and sometimes retaining excrement. Excited by feeding, which is also a sexual activity, she may turn away or prove aggressive, but eventually she will be satisfied, at least for the time being–which isn’t long. Babies cry and can be a downright nuisance. But Winnicottian babies are allowed, often enough, to shriek and scream: every mother will soon recognize which cries are to do with hunger or pain and which are simply a mark of what the baby is living out internally–for the baby has his own fears and fantasies to live through, which produce inner conflicts.

  Feeding difficulties are common amongst all children at one point or another, and can return periodically, Winnicott notes, thus calming his listeners. So, too, are orgies–of sex, food or excrement. This needn’t worry mother. There is a tug-of-war going on in the infant between inner and outer reality: destructive thoughts go along with excitement, and these frighten him. Growing fond of the person he gradually recognizes as mother, he may worry that he will destroy her in the very act of eating her, so he stops eating. As long as the good-enough mother (or her partner) doesn’t panic, shows the baby that she can withstand his attacks; as long as she is reliably there, alive and breathing, the baby will grow happily enough, sensing that his rampant needs and conflictual desires are somehow being held–and held together–as he moves towards that integration which marks his existence as a bounded self.

  Parents don’t need to know everything that goes on in the minds of their small children, any more than they need to know everything about physiology. (The analogy here might be with the state: we want it to provide basic security, but rebel against invasive surveillance.) Winnicott says: it’s not the head, but the heart that counts. Parents simply need ‘to have the imagination to recognize that parental love… is something which a child absolutely needs of them’. Above all, he needs mother to be ‘real’ for him, to provide security, so that he can hate her, bite, stab, kick, without destroying her. Gradually he’ll move from a state of illusion–that omnipotent, magical time when the imaginary world dominates–to ‘disillusion’, a recognition that there are other beings in the world, that satisfactions are dependent and may be sporadic and limited.

  Mother-love is what sees the child through and shapes the kind of being he will become.

  Winnicott is well aware that mothers grow despondent and also depressed, are sometimes absent even when physically present, perhaps because their baby evokes dimly flickering events from their own infancy. The child may follow suit, give up in some way, as children in institutions do when there is no one to hold them–to respond to their ruthless needs which are also a primitive form of love. Time can be made up, someone else may be able to step in. But when there is no rallying on the mother’s part, the consequences, Winnicott’s work with deprived and delinquent children showed him, could be harsh.

  …without the initial good-enough environmental provision, this self that can afford to die never develops. The feeling of real is absent and if there is not too much chaos the ultimate feeling is of futility. The inherent difficulties of life cannot be reached, let alone the satisfactions. If there is not chaos, there appears a false self that hides the true self, that complies with demands, that reacts to stimuli, that rids itself of instinctual experiences by having them, but that is only playing for time.

  This false, compliant self will eventually feel futile and inevitably at some period of later difficulty, break down.

  In all the schools of relational therapy that stem from Winnicott, the analyst, by providing or mimicking a good-enough childhood environment where trust and continuity reign despite the patient’s anger or aggression, tries to make good or at least bring into awareness the many permutations of lack and deprivation from early childhood. The hope is that failures in loving are not perpetuated through the generations.

  In the therapeutic models, much han
gs on mother’s or a first carer’s love. It is hardly surprising, then, that contemporary young women may feel daunted by the prospect of babies. When they do engage in the challenge, often at a later age than their mothers, they’re determined somehow to make a consummate success of it. So it’s as well to put things in perspective, to underline that ‘good enough’ may be far better than perfect, and that children have blossomed under many and varying regimes, some in which they were considered as diminutive adults, others in which childhood was separated off as a special sphere of innocence.

  The Child in History

  The place of the infant within the family has shifted greatly over the centuries. In historical agrarian societies, extended families constituted a team, sharing work. Children–conceived in large numbers although only a small percentage survived into maturity–were understood as an eventual part of the labour force. Once out of their swaddled state and past their earliest game-playing infancy, they took part in the tasks of the household. According to the seventeenth-century French cleric Pierre de Bérulle, childhood was ‘the most vile and abject state of human nature, after that of death’. Even unweaned children were enjoined to learn the catechism, while a special four-hundred-page version existed for the tutoring of five-year-olds. Shaping unruly children into disciplined adults, by means of either religion or the rod, was a primary preoccupation for Catholics and Puritans alike.

  Ushering in the Enlightenment, John Locke counselled that reason and education should guide child-rearing. In Some Thoughts concerning Education (1683) he drew on his experience as a tutor to advise on children’s diet, stool, clothes and cleanliness. He also drew attention to parents’ psychologically formative influence. Though each child had its own ‘natural Genius and Constitution’ and all should be ‘tenderly used… and have Play-things’,

  parents, by humouring and cockering [pampering] them when little, corrupt the principles of nature in their children, and wonder afterwards to taste the bitter waters, when they themselves have poison’d the fountain. For when their children are grown up, and these ill habits with them; when they are now too big to be dandled, and their parents can no longer make use of them as play-things, then they complain that the brats are untoward and perverse; then they are offended to see them wilful, and are troubled with those ill humours which they themselves infus’d and fomented in them; and then, perhaps too late, would be glad to get out those weeds which their own hands have planted, and which now have taken too deep root to be easily extirpated.

  The ‘Principle of all Vertue and Excellency,’ he continued, ‘lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own Desires, where Reason does not authorize them’.

  Locke’s ‘nature’ is a reasonable human nature, not the sublime one of the Romantics. That reason also advises that parents teach their children by example: their beatings incur more of the same in their children, as do their lies and gluttony. Though restraint is necessary, imperiousness only leads the child to ask the question, ‘When will you die, Father?’

  While the Romantics imagined childhood as a privileged, innocent space where the principles of a beloved and wild nature took their own shape, the Victorians brought that nature, at least for middle-class children, into a disciplined garden where happiness was intended to reign. This was the era of tough love and the inculcation of a rigid sense of duty. School became compulsory from 1870: the wealthy sent their sons off to board, far from mother-love, from a young age. Indeed, as Philippe Ariès argued in his classic Centuries of Childhood, for the rising middle classes from the seventeenth century onwards, schooling confined childhood within ‘a severe disciplinary system, which culminated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the total claustration of the boarding school’. Though it inflicted what was tantamount to the punishing life of a convict on the child, all was done out of an ‘obsessive love’. Rigid restraint and demand for obedience prevailed, both for the privileged middle-class and for the working child, bound in apprenticeship or in menial, repetitive toil. Corporal punishment was everywhere in use, as were those anti-masturbating devices that bear a close relationship to torture instruments. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, reformers campaigned to put an end to child labour and protect children from the adult sphere of work and responsibility.

  Though named the ‘century of the child’, the twentieth has seen as much cruelty to children as earlier ones. Nonetheless, expectations of how children should be treated have risen hugely. In the West, this has come in tandem with welfare provision for health, care and schooling to at least sixteen, and with various theorizations of infancy and childhood, each of which has drawn up its own guidelines for rearing. Alongside the rise of psychoanalytic theories like Winnicott’s emerged the influential ones of John Bowlby and his ‘attachment’ school. Based in part on animal observation, attachment theory even more emphatically prioritized the importance of mother-love, understood as a warm, intimate, secure and continuous relationship with the mother. Maternal deprivation caused the child to protest, then despair, and finally to enter a state of denial, the damaging effects of which would resurface later in life.

  Towards the end of the twentieth century and into our own, the values placed on childhood and on mother-love have both increased. This has coincided, perhaps not unexpectedly, with a generalized anxiety that children are everywhere in danger. Images of children under attack from famine or war feature regularly in the media. Statistics about child poverty, on the increase in our ever more stratified Western world, sit alongside sensationalist reports of abuse in the family: torture, and paedophilia. Teenagers unrestrained by parents seem ever to be on the rampage–at least on the news–though rarely at work in the universities which nearly half of them at least manage to attend. Divorce and lone or dysfunctional parenting are regularly elided with such problems, though poverty rarely plays into the same statistics-gathering and has a far greater impact. In such an environment, the pressure for perfect mother-love and calls for father-love looms ever larger. All of it sits uneasily with women’s need or desire to work, even though equality for women in all spheres is rightly championed and enshrined in law. Meanwhile little provision is made, except in the Scandinavian countries, for a life–work balance that might meet family needs.

  Probing the forces underlying the difficulties in love, marriage and parenting in our competitive capitalist world, sociologists Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim have pointed in the first instance to an economic model which undermines the stability of families. During the second half of the twentieth century, they note, an increasingly mobile job market has meant that individuals must follow the demands of work first. In thrall to economic forces, families have grown increasingly atomized, rarely living near potentially supportive kin. With both partners in a family needing or wanting to work, the birth-rate has fallen. Meanwhile, given our cultural habit of serial monogamy, lone parenting, at least for part of a child’s life, has increased. In the UK in 2004, one in four children lived in lone-parent families, up from one in fourteen in 1972. Despite this, we continue to assume marriage to be based on love and intimacy. And the nuclear family, with so much evidence to the contrary, persists in appearing as a secure haven.

  Bred in ever smaller numbers, children, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue, accrue greater and greater value. While the world of work trains one to behave rationally, to be efficient, quick and disciplined, the world of childhood emerges as its utopian opposite–enticingly green and golden. Play, the imagination, the love a partner can’t altogether or has failed to satisfy, all come to be located in the child. The baby holds out the promise that, through him, we may rediscover some of the lost sides of ourselves, express and fulfil all the needs that we fail to satisfy in the rest of our high-tech lives. For women in particular, motherhood may take on the glow of a refuge and fulfil the deepest private needs of home and love.

  When we do at last make the difficult decision to have this precious child, his ve
ry value marks him out as a site of demands and expense. He becomes ‘a focus of parental effort, a carefully tended plant, a work of art, a cult object’. Childhood is transformed into a ‘programme’ requiring careful surveillance and monitoring. Each of the child’s phases becomes heavy with meanings learned from the psychobabble industries, as well as a site for parental squabbling. The more changing of partners there is, the more special the child becomes, to emerge as the parent’s only alternative to loneliness, ‘a bastion against the vanishing chances of loving and being loved’, a bulwark against utter disenchantment, a stand-in for a more equal partner or, indeed, a compensation for that partner’s lacks. With such an investment of hopes, loving can be volatile and may quickly deteriorate into bitter disappointment and even cruelty.

  Enter the new technology of assisted reproduction: the glow of science now attends the making of babies, giving them an extra dimension of specialness. But this further complicates parental love. Like virtual dating and porn, AR seems to have expanded our sphere of possibilities and choice, at the same time making what once belonged more or less to the province of the uncontrollable into a rational, self-determined matter. Fertility is no longer a question of fate. Women can choose to have the desired children alone, independent of embodied males. They can store eggs and manipulate time. This can feel like a form of empowerment. But like all choices, it can also increase anxiety. Equally, the very fact of AR can resonate to reduce the value of being gendered female to that old reproductive function.