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These same people tend to minimize the importance of early
relationships. They say, “I am the way I am; I don’t think my past has anything to do with it”.....

Learning to Love: From Your Mother’s Arms To Your Lover’s ArmsTheodore Waters
University of Toronto

W hen love really works it seems effortless.
Both partners give and both receive. They
support and receive support. The relationship doesn’t
tie them down. Instead it allows them to explore
the world with great confidence, knowing that their
partner is right behind them. Of course rules of relationships
differ in different cultures but all cultures
know about falling in love.
Anybody who has been in love knows love is
easy, loving is not. Being a good partner is difficult
and for most doesn’t come naturally. If you want a
relationship to last it takes a lot of work. But often
times no matter how badly we want things to work
out they don’t. Sometimes we are too needy. Sometimes
we want to be loved so badly we cling, or neglect
our partner. There is no back and forth, no
give and take.

Early Ideas About Relationships
Over 100 years ago, Sigmund Freud, discoverer
of the unconscious mind and inventor of psychoanalysis,
suggested that the roots of love are not in
the trial and error or even in successes and failures
of adolescence. He theorized that the roots of love
are in infancy. The roots of love are in our early
experiences. The roots of love are in our mothers
arms. In his last book, over 60 years ago, he said the
infant’s tie to its mother is the first and longest lasting
relationship, as well the prototype for all later
affairs of the heart.
This was an astonishing and improbable idea.
Astonishing because in Freud’s time early experience
was thought to be irrelevant. Psychologist and
physicians assumed that the social and emotional
life of infants and children was empty or immediately
forgotten. How could experiences so early in
life have such long lasting affects? Could early experience
really affect adulthood?

Modern Understandings Applied To Freud’s Ideas
Even today, with all we know about infant development,
the idea of infant experience affecting
adulthood seems astonishing. Infants and children
are much more sophisticated than we once believed.
Until recently psychologists thought children were
just merely smaller or half-finished versions of
adults. In fact, some very clever experiments have
shown that infants are not less than adults, they are
different. Infants and young children perceive the
world very differently than we do. They move,
look, reach, grasp, speak, think, and even experience
emotion according to infant rules, not adult
rules.
The change from infancy to toddlerhood is not a
matter of getting bigger or better. It is a matter of
doing things differently. The same can be said
about the transitions from childhood to adolescence
and adolescence to adulthood. Our perception and
understanding of the world is always changing.
Psychologically, we are like caterpillars that literally
turn into something different at every stage of
development. So how could Freud be right? How
could things that affect us in one stage of life effect
us later when we have become something very different?
It doesn’t seem likely. And yet, the best evidence
shows that in some ways Freud was right.

Patterns of Attachment In Infancy
In order to test Freud’s hypothesis psychologists
have had to define attachment and figure out how to
measure it. For Freud, attachment meant clinginess
and dependency. But Freud didn’t actually work with
or observe children. When British psychoanalyst John
Bowlby and Canadian psychologist Mary Ainsworth
took a more systematic look, they saw something
very different. In the most common and most satisfying
infant-mother relationships, the infants were not
helpless, dependent little clingers. They were active,
competent explorers who used their mothers as a secure
base from which to explore all around their environment
and try out all their new skills.
Of course, some were better at this kind of relationship.
They seemed more confident in the
mother’s availability and thus more confident to explore
away. And more sure that she would always be
there for them if needed. Bowlby and Ainsworth
called these infants securely (confidently) attached.
Others who lacked this confidence they called insecurely
attached.
It isn’t immediately obvious why some babies
would be insecurely attached. But if you ask the question
this way, “Why would some babies lack confidence
in mother’s availability and responsiveness?”,
the answer seems obvious. Confidence comes from
experience. If you are always there for me, I expect
you’ll be there the next time. And if you let me down
when I need you, I don’t know what to expect the next
time. Just what you’d expect and just what Ainsworth
found in her research.
These were important steps toward testing Freud’s
ideas about the power of early experience. The next
big step was to develop an alternative to following
mothers and babies around for weeks to assess secure
and insecure attachment. The solution was a simple
20 minute laboratory test called the Strange Situation.
It works like this. A baby and its mother are videotaped
playing together in a small research room with
a chair for the mother and toys on the floor for the
baby. At two key points the mother is signaled to
leave the baby in the room for three minutes (once
with a female research assistant and once alone).
Many psychologists expected that the critical information
would be in the baby’s response to
mother’s departure. But Ainsworth didn’t prejudge
the issue. She carefully and patiently collected data
on almost thirty infants she had carefully observed at
home over a period of twelve months. Surprisingly,
infants who seemed secure or insecure at home didn’t
differ at all in whether they cried when mother left
the Strange Situation room. In both groups, half
cried and half didn’t. What really distinguished the
secure and insecure infants was how they responded
when mother returned.
Babies who were good secure base users at
home were happy to see the mom return. They approached
and reached to be picked up, or at least
greeted her happily with a smile or gesture across a
distance. Anything to reestablish psychological contact.
If they were crying, they held her tightly. And
being held worked – it calmed them down and they
were soon back at play. These infants were not
more strongly attached to their mothers, just more
confident in her and in their relationship. Ainsworth
called these babies secure.
Babies who had difficulty trusting mother and
using her as a secure base at home behaved very differently
in the Strange Situation. Their reunions were
very difficult. They turned away from their mothers
and refused to look as mother chided “Oh, don’t be
mad. I’m back”. Some began to approach only to
turn aside and sulk or become fascinated with a piece
of lint on the carpet or slap vacantly on a toy. Ainsworth
called the infants insecure – avoidant.
Other insecure infants cried desperately even after
mother returned but couldn’t muster an approach
or even a reach toward her. And if mother picked
them up they would push away. If they settled down
a bit, mothers quite naturally put them down with the
toys. But they weren’t really settled and would cry
long an hard at mother’s feet – without as much as
reaching for her or trying to be picked up. Ainsworth
called these infants insecure – ambivalent.
So the Strange Situation proved a valuable tool
for assessing infant attachment. Indeed, child psychologists
around the world voted her work among
the five most revolutionary studies in the history of
child psychology. Of course they weren’t thinking
just of her work with babies. In a series of studies
over two decades, students trained by Ainsworth
have shown that the patterns of secure, avoidant,
and ambivalent attachment in the Strange Situation
are also evident in adult relationships. This was
very surprising. It is also the key to testing Freud’s
ideas about the infant-mother relationship and relationships
in adulthood.

Patterns of Attachment in Adulthood
After Ainsworth solved the problem of assessing
infant attachment, the problem of assessing adult
attachment went unresolved for almost 20 years.
Adult’s relationships are just too inaccessible. They
take place over a much wider space and time and
they are much more private than infant-mother interactions.
Also, much more of what goes on in
adult relationships is in their minds. They don’t
have to be interacting at all to be thinking about
their partner and about things that they have done in
the past or might want to do in the future. That is, a
lot of their relationship is invisible to an observer.
Fortunately, Ainsworth’s student, Mary Main,
realized that we might not have to observe couples
together. Early experience doesn’t just shape later
behavior. It might have powerful effects by shaping
a person’s beliefs and expectations. So she developed
a carefully structured Adult Attachment Interview
to examine adults’ ideas about their view of
their relationship to each parent. After collecting
thousands of pages of such interviews she sat down
to organize her results. To her, and everyone else’s,
surprise, the interviews showed the same kinds of
differences Ainsworth had seen in the Strange
Situation. Most of the participants in her study told
coherent and believable stories about relationships
to their parents. They seemed to value these relationships
and had good recall of early experience to
back up their descriptions of their parents as kind,
funny, warm, and so on. She called these people
secure – coherent with respect to attachment.
More surprisingly, a significant number of the
participants sounded like the adult version of an insecure
– avoidant baby. They had difficulty describing
their relationships to their parents. That is, they
would just draw a blank. And when they come up
with a description like happy or warm they had
trouble remembering events from their childhood to
justify the description. The memories are there –
they recognize them if a parent talks about them.
But their understanding of their childhood is so incoherent
that they can’t retrieve the memories; cognitive
psychologists would say they have the memory
but lack an effective retrieval cue. These same
people tend to minimize the importance of early
relationships. They say, “I am the way I am; I don’t
think my past has anything to do with it”. Sometimes,
rather than thinking real thoughts about their
parents, they idealize them – everything is fine;
they were the best; couldn’t have been better. To a
psychologist this seems out of touch and avoidant
of real experiences and feelings. Indeed the term
avoidant seems to fit these people very well. But
Mary Main did not want to assume that these expressions
were necessarily related to the Strange
Situation. That is best addressed by data. So she
termed this pattern insecure – dismissing rather than
insecure-avoidant..
There was even an Adult Attachment Interview
pattern that seemed like the insecure-ambivalent pattern
from the Strange Situation. These were people
who lived with their relationship, indeed the whole
history of their relationship to their parents, as if
every uncertainty and unresolved issue were on the
table and happening today. Ask them if they were
ever left alone when they were children and you get a
story about the parents going to the Bahamas. Seems
ok. But then they become more and more intense.
They were left. They were only five. They didn’t
know the babysitter; she could have been anybody.
They never called; they didn’t bring a gift. And on
and on about something that was 20 years ago and
seemingly entirely ordinary. In a word, they were
preoccupied with relationship issues. Mary Main
called them insecure – preoccupied.
Judith Crowell and Everett Waters (also an
Ainsworth student) have recently adapted the Adult
Attachment Interview for use with couples. They
call this the Current Relationship Interview. In a
very similar interview, adults are asked not about
their relationship with parents but with their spouse.
And as in Adult Attachment Interview participants
seem to fall into patterns that are easily recognized
as secure, insecure-dismissing, and insecurepreoccupied.
The Strange Situation, the Adult Attachment
Interview, and the Current Relationship
Interview are the tools we have needed to test
Freud’s 100 year old hypothesis that the infantmother
relationship is the model for later adult relationships.

Testing Freud’s Hypothesis
The Strange Situation, the Adult Attachment
Interview, and the Current Relationship Interview
assess a person’s ability to use a partner as a secure
base. In infancy the partner is usually the mother
and the secure base behavior is out there for all to
see. The question is not whether infant attachment
behavior predicts adult attachment behavior. Instead,
it is whether an infant’s confidence in it’s
first relationships sets up beliefs and expectations
that can guide later relationships.
Waters and Crowell recently published two important
studies that lend considerable support to the
idea that early experience can influence adult relationships.
In the first they measured the attachment
security of 50 one-year-olds in the Strange Situation
and then saw the same subjects 20 years later in the
Adult Attachment Interview. Psychologists were
amazed that 85% of the babies who were secure in
the Strange Situation were secure – coherent in the
Adult Attachment Interview 20 years later. In addition,
the babies who were insecure at 12 months had
only a 25% chance of becoming secure – coherent
in their adult relationships with their parents. Even
IQ is not this stable from infancy to adulthood.
Clearly, early behavior patterns with parents set up
patterns of beliefs about family relationships in
adulthood.
But is there a link to relationships outside the
family? Crowell & Waters examined this by testing
a sample of several hundred engaged couples in both
the Adult Attachment Interview and the Current Relationship
Interview. They found that people who
were secure – coherent with respect to their parents
were much more likely than others to be secure –
coherent with their fiancées. And there were links to
behavior as well. For both males and females, having
secure – coherent beliefs about the romantic
partner was significantly related to secure base behavior
in the videotaped marriage discussions. People
who with secure – coherent beliefs about their
partner were significantly more able to use their
partner as a secure base, to ask for help, explain
what they needed, and accept help and support in the
difficult problem discussions. They were also more
able to recognize when their partner was asking for
help and more able to see and offer what was
needed. Both insecure – dismissing and insecure –
preoccupied were less effective at using and at serving
their partner as a secure base. They didn’t see
what was needed, or thought that offering help
meant admitting they were to blame, or were so consumed
with their own problems that they couldn’t
think about what their partner needed.
Taken together these studies show that infant
attachment affects relationship beliefs and attitudes
in adulthood and these reach outside the family to
affect behavior between romantic partners. Preliminary
results suggest that these beliefs and expectations
are also related to becoming a good parent and
instilling security in your children.
Seventy-five years ago, Freud was thinking that
early experience would affect drives and motivation
in adulthood. We don’t think so much in terms of
drives and motives any more. But today’s research
suggests there is something to the idea that early
experience is important. Early attachment experience
is clearly related to beliefs and behavior in
later relationships.
Freud suggested that we all grow up looking to
reestablish the relationship with our parents that we
had in our early years. Things don’t seem to work
that way. But our understanding of what it means to
have a secure base does have very early roots. So
there seems to be a seed of truth in Freud’s improbable
hypothesis. Of course, relationships to parents
are not the only influence on your ability to love
well as an adult. Even if you were an insecure infant,
there is a chance that you could get back on
the road to good relationships. Over time, good
friendships or a secure romantic partner might show
you a different way and help you get you back on
the road to happy, generous, fulfilling relationships.
It wouldn’t be easy, but nothing is set in stone. With
the help of a secure partner, anyone can learn to
give their partner and children the kind of love they
themselves never received. Still, these results are
strong support for his idea that there is a thread connecting
life in your mother’s arms to life in your
lover’s arms.