Mourning, Integration, and Repair
In this unpublished excerpt from Becoming Attached, Robert Karen explores how John Bowlby grew to understand how childhood grief shaped a child’s attachment style.
In 1990, the year he died, John Bowlby published a biography of Charles Darwin, one of his heroes. Bowlby had spent most of his 83 years fighting for the critical importance of a loving parent-child bond and the idea that each of us comes into the world both ready and longing to be cherished, protected, guided, and taught. Bowlby’s Attachment Theory was shunned when he first proposed it in 1958, but the benefits of secure attachment in the early years, which depended on the child’s having at least one parent who was lovingly, reliably, often exuberantly available, had by 1990 been verified by a mountain of research.
Bowlby’s Charles Darwin is both a biography and an attempt to clear up a medical mystery, for Darwin had all his life suffered from a debilitating, anxious condition, which included bouts of nausea and vomiting that had never been satisfactorily explained. Bowlby attributed Darwin’s troubles to a sequence of unhappy childhood experiences, of which the most devastating was the loss of his mother at age eight. After her death, his father and sisters were so aggrieved they refused to speak of her or allow her name to be uttered. The wall of silence made it impossible for the boy to mourn her loss. Years later Darwin seemed to have even forgotten that she had existed. Add to this a difficult relationship with his father, of whose love and respect he never felt certain, and his reproving older sister, who undertook to fill the maternal role, and Darwin becomes a poignant study in spoiled attachment. To say that the young Darwin never mourned does not mean he wasn’t ravaged by the loss. But he was unable to do the gradual emotional unwinding by which one comes to terms with it. Mourning in childhood depends on the love and guidance of parental figures. But the spirit of Darwin’s home was all buckle down and get past it, and the effort Darwin made to comply came at the cost of chronic nausea and vomiting.
A child, like Darwin, who’s lost his mother, is likely to feel as if his heart has been ripped out and the wound is beyond repair. It is a catastrophe in which all the beauty of the world may lose taste and meaning. The rituals of daily life, so imbued with her love, go dead. Why even eat a sandwich made by someone else? A little girl’s ambivalent feelings toward her mother, which are inevitable and universal, may have been manageable before but arouse spikes of guilt or self-loathing now. She may become chronically ill, dissociated, aggressive, or some combination thereof. The stage of protest, which Bowlby’s colleague, James Robertson, witnessed in hospitalized children, may give way to despair. And if things don’t go well, as they did not for the young Darwin, detachment may follow.
Consider three-year-old Patrick, whose mother disappeared for six days a week during the blitz. Patrick was staying in Anna Freud’s and Dorothy Burlingham’s nursery for safe-keeping. His mother, who was sleeping in the Underground with her husband, visited him weekly, but only weekly, and she wouldn’t let him cry. To cry and be comforted is, of course, fundamental to healing. To feel that one’s pain is understood and shared, to be reassured, to be told that life is still good and things will get better — all this holding is what healthy mourning is about for children. It is central to all the ways we look at the parent’s position in the development of security. Without that loving response to fear or hurt or loss, something goes bad inside. Patrick, determined to be the boy his mother wanted, developed a strange, self-soothing ritual. It consisted of repeating certain phrases by which he described what his mother would do when she came for him: “She will put on my coat and leggings, she will zip up my zipper, she will put on pixie hat.” He did not cry, but he became insular, detached, and annoying, and when asked if he could please stop these endless repetitions, he complied as best he could. He changed his ritual to a strictly physical enactment of the mother’s visit. When that too was protested, he became the strange boy in the corner, his enactment having devolved into a series of seemingly inexplicable tics.
To feel that one’s pain is understood and shared, to be reassured, to be told that life is still good and things will get better — all this holding is what healthy mourning is about for children.
In separation, love is at risk. In death, more so. Abandoned children take the loss of a parent personally. They blame themselves. They locate the cause of death in some altercation or bad behavior on their part or an unkind word they spoke. It would not be unusual for a child in young Darwin’s position to feel: She didn’t love me, that’s why she left me. Children confronting such losses are in dire need. Something akin to early, deeply attuned holding is wanted, so that they can protest, cry, pour forth their anger in every direction, including toward the dead parent, be encouraged, be heard, be helped to understand themselves, and reassured. It is all essential, Bowlby believed, to rebuilding a child’s sense of security.
Anger and bitterness toward the lost parent are often part of the drama. Bowlby cites the case of Richard Steele, the famed eighteenth-century English journalist, founder of The Spectator, whose father died when he was four. Steele recalled that he had beaten on the coffin in a blind rage. “How could he have left me!” In a similar vein, Bowlby writes, “a student teacher described how she had reacted at the age of five toward another parental-type figure when told that her father had been killed in the war. ‘I shouted at God all night. I just couldn’t believe that he had let them kill my father. I loathed him for it.’” Anger at the parent himself may be suppressed out of guilt. If the child is not helped to express it, the anger and the guilt may intermingle and harden over time.
In separation, love is at risk. In death, more so
Bess, a child whose mother died when she was three and a half, announced one evening to her father, “Mommy called and said she’d have dinner with us,” clearly believing it to be true. Her father said: “I think you wish mommy would have dinner with us. When we miss mommy so very much we’d like to think that she is not really dead. I guess it will be a sad dinner for both of us.” His touching sensitivity and carefully chosen words seem to take Bess by the hand and lovingly redirect her down a healing path, where a good life does not require the obliteration of a sad truth.
With adequate holding, sadness and rage become manageable. The mourning process will encourage a deeper, less persecuted understanding of what happened and some acceptance of the permanence of the loss. Often the child will identify more strongly with the lost parent, like the mother in Bess’s case, as a way of honoring her, loving her, and keeping her close. Later, if things go well and the self is strong enough and able to bear it — in the sense that her security has been adequately rebuilt — she may give up a bit of her idealization, such that she no longer needs her to be the best mother who ever was. In all this, the once-threatened love is further solidified, and goodness continues to seep back into life.
For the child who is insecurely attached to the lost parent, unresolved hurt and anger, already apparent at twelve months when quality of attachment is assessed in the Strange Situation, may become an intolerable specter. What is he to do with such feelings now that the parent is dead? Faced with the calamity of total loss, followed immediately by the living’s systematic sanctification of the dead, his integration falters, black-and-white thinking intensifies, and whatever strands of security existed begin to unravel. What is a child to do with his bitterness over the fact that his now-dead mother was never there enough? What now, when she’s walked out on him for good? What is he to do with this unspeakable loss, his guilty hatred, his growing certainty as time passes that his hatred itself must have killed her? We know that a grieving child copes in part by internalizing the dead parent, setting him up in a special place internally and wanting to be like him. But what will be the nature of that internalization for a child who can’t get past the feeling that the parent left him and didn’t care?
Idealization, a natural tendency in any case, is now, with death, turbo-charged by the relatives and the culture: The Greatest Dad, always loving, always there, champion provider. But if he’s the greatest, he’s also the worst; that’s the nature of splitting, of binary thinking. It takes arduous, unconscious psychic work to keep the bad part separated out. Suppressed and locked away, it grows more untouchable, a haunting, over-hanging presence. The psychic split between the good father and the bad is often accompanied by a second split, between the idealized father and the hateful, ungrateful child. And there may be yet a third split, between Dad the Wonderful and Mom the Useless. The mother who’s caught up in her own grieving, who suddenly has more than she can handle, may not find a way to help her suffering child for whom gray has dropped out of the picture.
The challenge for the remaining parent was noted by Bowlby: “A widow caring for her children,” he wrote, “is likely to be both sad and anxious. Preoccupied with her sorrows and the practical problems confronting her, it is far from easy for her to give the children as much time as she gave them formerly and all too easy for her to become impatient and angry when they claim attention and become whiny when they do not get it.” Some widows were found to get angry at their children, even violent, and others to expect a child to take the place of the lost mate by becoming his replica.
Ricky Ledée, a ballplayer in the New York Yankees organization, whose father died when he was twelve, was a strangely enigmatic man during his time with the team. His teammates could not understand why his spirit rarely matched his native talent. This question became the subject of a story in The Times. According to the report, the young Ledée had argued with his father one morning, and when his father left for work, Ricky refused to kiss him goodbye. Later that day his father was killed in a car accident, and, after that, the son seemed pulled down by a depressive undertow. His pregnant mother was lost in her own tears, and Ricky escaped by watching the horses graze near his house. Meanwhile, he made a decision: “never be mean to anyone, ever again.”
“I just changed,‘‘ he said in his soft voice. ‘‘I get mad, but I don’t really want to hurt anybody. I just stay quiet. Sometimes I feel crazy, but I just stay quiet. There are times that I feel hurt, but I just stay quiet.”¹
Failed mourning leaves behind insecurity and disturbance. It is like a debt to the past that remains unpaid. The grieving child, never rescued from his guilt, may come to feel like a dangerous, ungrateful being, capable of destroying the people he loves. As the years go by, he may settle into a kind of depressive exile, stripped of his self-love, his joy, his protest and aggression. Successful mourning, on the other hand, is the loom on which security gets rewoven. It guides one to a place where sadness and loss do not compromise the self.
Learning to deal with loss of all kinds is part of the foundation of attachment security. Through protest, misery, care, and reflection — but, above all, through being lovingly held — a good feeling gradually wraps itself around the bad until what was once indigestible is dissolved and becomes a part of us in a new way. This process, encouraged and guided in childhood, becomes built into the way one lives, a friend to oneself in sadness. Secure attachment, therefore, may be thought of as giving birth to a faith in sadness; while in insecure attachment, the fear of sadness is born.
Some hurts, of course, never disappear. No matter when you lose a parent, a pang will often remain. The loss of a best friend, a sister, do we ever get over it, truly? But in successful mourning there is some solace. The pining becomes bearable and, in some way, enriching; crying comes to an end, perhaps never to return, and the occasional pangs of longing no longer interfere with one’s other connections or one’s relish for life. It’s as if, in the game of Go, a subtle shift has altered the balance on the board. Where the dark stones had reigned, the board now reveals itself as the crazy quilt life is, but with a tilt toward love, such that the light stones are now once again defining.
¹ Olney, B. March 8, 2000, New York Times.
Robert Karen is Assistant Clinical Professor at the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies, Adelphi University; Adjunct Clinical Faculty, Postgraduate Training Program in Group Psychotherapy, Adelphi University. The revised and updated edition of Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love is available from Oxford University Press.
