The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America by Marga Vicedo (review)

In the early twentieth century, when physicians and scientists in the U.S. and Britain debated what children needed to develop into healthy citizens, they spoke largely in terms of nutrition and environmental factors. But as infant and child mortality declined, concerns over children’s emotional and psychological needs gradually assumed center stage. In response to the horrific violence of World War II, numerous researchers in the psychological and social sciences turned their attention to the role of emotions in fomenting political instability. Above all, they focused on that most primal of human relationships—the mother-child dyad. Only warm, consistent, and uninterrupted maternal love during infancy and early childhood, they argued, would yield an emotionally sound citizenry capable of sustaining peace and democracy in the new atomic age.

In her learned and provocative study, The Nature and Nurture of Love, Marga Vicedo shows how this political and intellectual context gave rise to attachment theory, a highly influential school of thought that described mother love—the infant’s attempts to connect with its mother and vice versa—as manifestations of biologically based instincts. The maternal-infant relationship, according to attachment theory, determines the quality of subsequent relationships and overall emotional well being. At the heart of Vicedo’s study is John Bowlby, a British psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who, along with psychologist Mary Ainsworth, is today widely viewed as the theory’s co-founder. The book also provides original and in-depth analyses of figures like ethologist Konrad Lorenz and psychologist Harry Harlow, whose works were enlisted to support attachment theory, and psychoanalyst Anna Freud and comparative psychologist Daniel Lehrman, who trenchantly critiqued it. The Nature and Nurture of Love represents a major contribution to the history of the psychological sciences (and mid-century science more broadly), for it is the first deeply researched historical account of attachment theory—a fact that is somewhat surprising, given the interest it elicits both within and beyond the academy. Yet Vicedo’s book is not simply an historical account. Trained as both a philosopher and a historian of science, Vicedo puts her cards on the table, leveling a rigorous critique of the theory’s central claims and founding works.

John Bowlby attended medical school and pursued psychiatric and psychoanalytic training in 1930s London. But he ultimately strayed far from psychoanalysis, embracing a view of instinct at odds with the psychoanalytic notions drives, which emphasizes the role of fantasy in shaping individual mental life. Intimations of Bowlby’s future trajectory are apparent his highly influential Maternal Care and Mental Health, a report commissioned by the World Health Organization in 1951 to better understand the emotional needs of orphaned children. (For instance, his characterization of the mother as the infant’s “psychic organizer” drew upon a concept from embryology.) Soon thereafter, he discovered the work of Austrian ethologist Karl Lorenz, who famously developed the concept of “imprinting” to describe how gosling ducks became attached to the first being or object they saw after hatching. Strongly influenced by Lorenz, Bowlby in the late 1950s attempted to synthesize psychoanalysis and ethology, describing the quest for attachment as an evolutionarily determined process that progressed through certain stages during the first two years of life.

Around this same time, psychologist Harry Harlow was conducting his legendary experiments on the effects of maternal deprivation on rhesus monkeys. In what is perhaps the book’s most riveting chapter, Vicedo offers a fascinating and revisionist account of Harlow’s ideas and the role they played in helping to validate attachment theory. In Harlow’s lab, infant monkeys, deprived of their mothers, were provided with inanimate surrogates, some made simply of wire, others covered with terry cloth and warmed by a light bulb. The infants elected to spend almost all their time with the soft surrogates, even when the wire ones dispensed all of their meals. From this, Harlow...