The teaching

Start with the boring part, because the boring part is the inheritance. Before anything goes wrong there is a scene on a rock at sunrise: a very large lion gesturing at the horizon like a man reading out a legal document, and a very small lion not listening. Watch the small one’s body. He walks ahead without checking behind him. He interrupts. He asks a stupid question and then a second one, and it does not occur to him that there is a limit. Security there is not a warm feeling. It is an absence — the absence of a calculation. Nobody has thoughts about the floor.

For much of the twentieth century the professional consensus was that babies love their mothers because mothers have the food. Cupboard love. You bond with the vending machine. Bowlby spent three decades arguing this was backwards, publishing his case in three volumes between 1969 and 1980. The food is incidental. The child is not shopping. The child is running a survival program, and what it builds is not a feeling but a forecast — a term Bowlby took from the cognitive scientist Kenneth Craik. Is help available? Reliably, or only on certain days? Am I the kind of creature help comes to? It gets assembled from thousands of unremarkable data points: how long the crying went on, whether the face came back, what happened the last four hundred times you needed something. You are not consulting it on purpose. That is the trouble.

Ainsworth built a way to see it. The Strange Situation, published in full in 1978, runs twenty minutes: a room, a baby, a mother, some toys, a stranger. The mother leaves, comes back, leaves, comes back. Her insight was that the separation is not the interesting part — babies cry when their mothers leave, congratulations, you have discovered babies. The interesting part is the reunion. Some go to her, fuss, settle, and are back at the toys inside ninety seconds. Some barely look up, very busy, very independent. Some cling and arch away at once and never settle. For how common each is, use the 1988 meta-analysis by van IJzendoorn and Kroonenberg — thirty-two samples, eight countries, nearly two thousand infants: roughly 65 percent secure, 21 percent avoidant, 14 percent resistant. About a third of people are not carrying a forecast that says help is available. You are a statistical commonplace who happens to feel like a secret.

Now the stampede, which is not the part I want. In ninety seconds a four-year-old loses his father, his home, his mother, his whole social group, every adult who knows his history, and the future he was trained for. He gets one piece of information in exchange, from the person who caused it: this was your fault. Then he walks into a desert. There are whole shelves about that. What there are not shelves about is what follows — the kingdom holds a funeral instead of a search, the film cuts, and almost nobody notices they have watched a child written off by an entire society. Sarabi believes her son is dead. Scar told the pride they both died in the gorge, and she spends the next act starving under a regime that would take a dim view of a search party. Her name, in Swahili, means mirage.

Which sets up the distinction the course rests on. Almost everything written for people who had hard childhoods is about one sentence: something bad happened to me. For an enormous number of people that is not the sentence that organises the life. A second one arrives right behind it, quieter. And then nobody came. Two different injuries. The first is an event, with a date and a shape. The second is a non-event — the sound of a phone not ringing, extended over years — with no date, no shape and no name, which is why you have never managed to explain it at a dinner party. We know why nobody came; we watched Scar lie. Simba does not. A child does not experience your reasons. A child experiences your absence, and nobody hands a seven-year-old the file.

None of this requires anyone to leave. Missing does not require leaving. A parent can be missing while making your lunch — missing from a chair eleven feet away, every night, for a decade, with no record of it anywhere. No form, no agency, no relative who says at the funeral well, she was never really there. The family therapist Pauline Boss named this by distinguishing the person who is physically gone but psychologically present from the person who is physically present and psychologically absent. Her harder point is that this kind of loss has no verification, no ritual and no consensus that a loss occurred, and therefore no closure. Boss calls closure a myth, and offers meaning and a raised tolerance for ambiguity instead.

Meanwhile the clock keeps running. No developing child can file for an extension. The parts of Simba that were, that week, halfway through learning to regulate fear kept building with whatever was on site, and on site were a canyon, a body, and an explanation from an interested party. A child does not experience catastrophe as an interruption of development. A child experiences it as curriculum. In August 1952 James Robertson, working at the Tavistock Clinic with Bowlby’s support, filmed a two-year-old girl — Laura, in the film — across the eight days of a hernia admission under the era’s restrictive visiting rules. It made the medical profession furious, and it fed substantially into the 1959 Platt Report, which changed the visiting rules of a national health service.

The mechanism underneath has been filmed at four months old. In 1978 Edward Tronick, with Als, Adamson, Wise and T. Brazelton, published the still-face procedure in the Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry. A mother and her baby have the enormously serious conversation about nothing that mothers and babies have always had. Then she is signalled to stop — not to leave, not to frown, just to hold her face still. The baby clocks it instantly and goes to work: smiles bigger, points, vocalises, kicks, arches, reaches, then tries the smile again, because the smile is the reliable one. All of that is attachment behaviour, the built-in repertoire for closing the distance to a protective adult. The face does not come back. And within a few seconds to a couple of long minutes, he stops, turns away, finds his own fist, and manages, alone. The famous part of that footage is the distress. The important part is the turning away, because turning away is not the collapse of a strategy. It is a strategy.

Now the half nobody talks about. In the third volume of his trilogy, in 1980, Bowlby set out four phases of adult mourning: numbing, then yearning and searching, then disorganisation and despair, then reorganisation. Keep it separate from Robertson’s three phases; different model, different thing, and the two get blended into slurry online. I want the second phase. Not sadness. Searching. Bereaved people do not merely feel bad; they look. They scan crowds, think they see him in a car, keep the phone charged, walk a route with no memory of deciding to. Bowlby read this as attachment behaviour still running in an animal whose attachment figure is gone. The system has no category for permanent. It has one move, and the move is find them. Now consider a child whose parent has not died. Same program, because it is the only program — but you cannot organise a search party for someone sitting on the couch, so it comes out sideways. A stomachache invented on a Tuesday. A straight-A report card set down in a living room, casually, face up. Every one is a call that can go unanswered without anyone understanding a call was placed.

The mourner searches and reality eventually answers. The grave is there. The chair stays empty. It is unbearable and it is an answer, and around it some reorganisation becomes possible. The child gets a maybe — warm on Thursday, a good Christmas, the person she needs at unpredictable intervals — and is never told to stop, so does not stop. Two consequences. This grief has nowhere public to go: Kenneth Doka called it disenfranchised grief, grief that cannot be openly acknowledged, socially validated or publicly supported. Nobody brings a casserole for a mother who is technically in the kitchen. And the searching is not itself a symptom. In 2004 Wrobel, Grotevant and McRoy studied ninety-three adopted adolescents and found search behaviour had no significant relationship to family dysfunction or problem behaviour. One caveat, stated once: that is adoption research, which is neither foster care nor the case of a child growing up with an unreachable parent in the house.

A wider caveat, then the good news. Nearly everything above was measured on a narrow slice of humanity: Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan reported in 2010 that about 96 percent of subjects in top psychology journals came from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic countries. Asking a child directly about their feelings is a culturally specific technology, and its absence is not an absence of care. Now Kauai. Werner and Smith followed all six hundred and ninety-eight children born on the island in 1955 into their thirties and beyond. About a third grew up under concentrated adversity, and roughly a third of that high-risk group — about seventy-two children — arrived in adulthood competent, confident and caring. Werner kept landing not on temperament or luck but on this: each had at least one person who accepted them unconditionally. Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child put it flatly in a 2015 working paper: children who do well despite serious hardship “have had at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive adult.” I am giving you the field’s most hopeful finding from the underside, because to the person this module is about it does not read as hope. It reads as an inventory. Mother, no. Father, complicated. Grandmother, died when I was six.