THIS BOOK PRESENTS WORK WE HAVE PURSUED COLLABORATIVELY FOR more than three decades. We would like to recognize our many colleagues, former and current students, and students of our students who have vastly enriched our professional and personal lives in general and advanced our theoretical and empirical understanding of the role of death awareness in life in particular. Special thanks to our friends and colleagues Jamie Goldenberg and Jamie Arndt, whose studies are featured in chapters 8 through 10. Beyond the two Jamies, there are too many others to identify their specific contributions, so we list them here alphabetically in order to convey our deep appreciation: John Allen, Alisabeth Ayars, Jack Brehm, Mike Breus, Brian Burke, John Burling, Emanuele Castano, Stephen Cave, Steve Chaplin, Armand Chatard, Florette Cohen, Cathy Cox, David Cullier, Mark Dechesne, Samantha Dowd, Shelly Duvall, Gerry Erchak, Victor Florian, Immo Fritsche, Michael Halloran, Eddie Harmon-Jones, Josh Hart, Joe Hayes, Nathan Heflick, Gilad Hirschberger, Nicholas Humphrey, Eva Jonas, Pelin Kesebir, Sander Koole, Spee Kosloff, Mark Landau, Joel Lieberman, Daniel Liechty, Uri Lifshin, Deb Lyon, Andy Martens, Molly Maxfield, Simon McCabe, Shannon McCoy, Holly McGregor, Mario Mikulincer, Matt Motyl, Balfour Mount, Randolph Ochsmann, Heather Omahen, Jerry Piven, Markus Quirin, Tomi-Ann Roberts, Abram Rosenblatt, Zach Rosenfeld, Zach Rothschild, Clay Routledge, Bastiaan Rutjens, Mike Salzman, Jeff Schimel, Michelle See, Leila Selimbegovic, Linda Simon, Melissa Soenke, Eric Strachan, Daniel “Sully” Sullivan, Orit Taubman-Ben-Ari, Ken Vail, Matt Vess, Tyler Volk, Dave Weise, Bob Wicklund, and Todd Williams.
We are also profoundly grateful to Neil Elgee and the Ernest Becker Foundation for keeping Ernest Becker’s ideas alive and generative, and for more than two decades of financial, intellectual, and psychosocial support for our terror management theory and research. Thanks to filmmakers Patrick Shen and Greg Bennick for their wonderful award-winning documentary film, Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality, about Ernest Becker and terror management theory (and for their generous permission to use images from their film in our book). Furthermore, we are thankful for permission from Random House to reprint part of W.H. Auden’s poem “The Cultural Presupposition”; from Basic Books to reprint passages from Sylvia Anthony’s interviews with mothers and their children from The Discovery of Death in Childhood and After; and from the Smithsonian Institution Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery to reprint T’ang Yin’s Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Cottage.
We are additionally obliged to the National Science Foundation (particular thanks to Jean Intermaggio, Steve Breckler, and Brett Pelham), the National Institutes of Health (particular thanks to Lisbeth Nielsen), and the John Templeton Foundation (particular thanks to John Martin Fischer) for financial support for our research. And we are grateful to Skidmore College, the University of Arizona, and the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and the many people who make these schools the institutions of higher learning they truly are, for providing academic environments that have afforded us the freedom and resources to pursue our research and writing.
Extraordinary thanks and praise to Jill Kneerim, our fabulous agent, and her staff (especially Hope Denekamp) at the Kneerim, Williams & Bloom Literary Agency. Jill’s unwavering good cheer, wise guidance, and enthusiasm for this project from start to finish have been critical to making this book a reality. We are also very grateful to Random House senior editor Will Murphy for sharing Jill’s belief that we had important ideas to disseminate to a wide audience, and for resolutely insisting that we keep rewriting the manuscript until we got it right. Thanks to assistant editor Mika Kasuga for providing extremely useful feedback, and to Evan Cam-field and the rest of the Random House production team. Also kudos and thanks to Bronwyn Fryer, who helped with background research, contributed some of the stories, provided input on organizational matters, and helped make our prose, especially the descriptions of our studies, more lively and engaging throughout.
Finally we thank our parents, spouses, and children: Blanche and Frank Solomon, Maureen Monaghan, Ruby and Sam Solomon, Murray, Edith, Liz, Jonathan, and Camila Greenberg, Thomas P. Pyszczynski, Mary Anne Petershack, Wendy Matuszewski, and Marya Myszczynski. Their love and support helped us arrive here, where we could produce this book. They have served throughout our lives as reminders of the wisdom of Sherwood Anderson’s tombstone epitaph: “Life, not death, is the great adventure.”
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV,
Speak, Memory: A Memoir
ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1971, SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD JULIANE KOEPCKE AND her mother, Maria, a German ornithologist, were flying from Lima, Peru, in a plane with ninety other passengers over the Amazon jungle. They were on their way to celebrate Christmas with Juliane’s father, the brilliant zoologist Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, in the city of Pucallpa. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning hit the airliner’s fuel tank. The entire plane broke apart in smoke, fuselage, and cinders, two miles above the gigantic, sparsely inhabited rain forest.
Swept from the plane, Juliane found herself flying into the open sky. All was silent. Strapped into her seat, she felt herself tumbling through the air and saw the jungle canopy spinning toward her as she hurtled earthward toward what seemed like her certain death. Her fall was broken by the thick foliage. She fainted.
When she came to, she unbuckled herself from the still attached seat and felt around. One shoe was missing, as were her glasses. She felt her collarbone; it was broken. She discovered a deep gash in her leg and a wound in her arm. One of her nearsighted eyes had been swollen shut; the other was just a slit. She was dizzy from a bad concussion. But because she was in shock, she felt no pain. She called, and called, and called for her mother. No response. She found that she could walk. And so she walked.
For eleven days, Juliane stumbled through the Amazon jungle—home to caimans, tarantulas, poisonous frogs, electric eels, and freshwater stingrays. She endured torrential downpours, sucking mud, brutal heat, and the constant onslaughts of swarming, stinging insects. Eventually, she found a small creek. Remembering what her father had taught her—that most people tend to live near waterways—she followed the stream to a larger river. She waded into the piranha- and stingray-infested water and began slowly swimming and floating downstream.
Her state of shock saved her. She wasn’t really hungry, and felt as if she’d been psychologically “muffled in cotton.” But the clouds of biting, stinging insects tortured her. She tried to rest under the trees, but sleep was nearly impossible. Maggots took up residence in her wounds. Her insect bites became badly infected. She got so sunburned from floating on the river under the Amazonian sun that she bled. But she pressed numbly on.
Finally, she came upon a motorboat. She had the presence of mind to pour gasoline from a small tank on the maggots, killing many of them. After a few days, the owners of the boat found her near their small hut and took her to the nearest town, seven hours away.
She was the only survivor of the crash.
WE’VE ALL HEARD AMAZING TALES of people who defy death against all odds: the survivors of the Donner Party and the Titanic, those who lived through the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Such stories reflect the fact that all living beings are born with biological systems oriented toward self-preservation. Over billions of years, a vast array of complex life-forms have evolved, each distinctively adapted to survive long enough to reproduce and pass their genes on to future generations. Fish have gills; rosebushes have thorns; squirrels bury acorns and retrieve them months later; termites eat wood. There seems to be no limit to the marvelous variety of ways creatures of all species adhere to the fundamental biological imperative: staying alive.
If you discover a bat flittering around in your closet and you enter the dark space with a tennis racket to kill it, you’ll be in for a battle royal, because that creature will fight to survive. Even earthworms strenuously avoid death, as anyone who’s tried to bait a hook can attest. You split them in two; they persist. You try to get them on the hook; they struggle mightily. Once impaled, they defecate on your hand.
Unlike bats and worms, however, we humans know that no matter what we do, sooner or later we will lose the battle against death. This is a profoundly unnerving thought. We may think we are afraid to die because our bodies will rot, stink, and turn to dust, because we will leave our loved ones behind, because we’ve left important things unaccomplished, or because we have the sneaking suspicion that no loving God awaits us, ready to enfold us in his arms. But underlying all these concerns is that fundamental biological imperative. As Juliane Koepcke and other survivors have discovered, we will do just about anything to stay alive. Yet we live with the knowledge that this desire will inevitably be thwarted.
How did we get into this predicament? Although we humans inherited the basic imperative to survive, we are different from all other forms of life in several crucial ways. We are not terribly impressive from a purely physical perspective. We are not especially large, nor are our senses particularly keen. We move more slowly than cheetahs, wolves, and horses. Our claws are no more than fragile, dull fingernails; our teeth aren’t constructed for tearing into anything much tougher than an overdone steak.
But the small band of African hominids from which we all descended were highly social, and, thanks to the evolution of their progeny’s cerebral cortices, our species eventually became extremely intelligent. These developments fostered cooperation and the division of labor, and they ultimately led our forebears to invent tools, agriculture, cooking, houses, and a host of other useful things. We, their progeny, multiplied and thrived; our civilizations took root around the world.
The evolution of the human brain led to two particularly important human intellectual capacities: a high degree of self-awareness, and the capacity to think in terms of past, present, and future. Only we humans are, as far as anyone knows, aware of ourselves as existing in a particular time and place. This is an important distinction. Unlike geese, monkeys, and wombats, we can carefully consider our current situation, together with both the past and the future, before choosing a course of action.
This awareness of our own existence gives us a high degree of behavioral flexibility that helps us stay alive. Simpler life-forms respond immediately and invariably to their surroundings. Moths, for example, invariably fly toward light. Although the moth’s behavior is generally useful for navigation and avoiding predators, it can be deadly when the source of illumination is a candle or campfire. Unlike moths, we humans can shift attention away from the ongoing flow of our sensory experience. We aren’t inexorably sucked toward the flame; we can choose to act in a number of different ways, depending not only on our instincts, but on our capacity to learn and think as well. We can ponder alternative responses to situations and their potential consequences and imagine new possibilities.
Self-awareness has generally served us well. It has increased our ability to survive, reproduce, and pass our genes on to future generations. It also feels good. We can reflect on the fact that each of us is, in Otto Rank’s lovely words, a “temporal representative of the cosmic primal force.” We are all directly descended from, and consequently related to, the first living organism, as well as to every earth-dwelling creature that has ever been alive or will live in the future. What a joy it is for us to be alive, and at the same moment know it!
However, because we humans are aware that we exist, we also know that someday we will no longer exist. Death can come at any time, which we can neither predict nor control. This is decidedly unwelcome news. Even if we are lucky enough to dodge attacks by poisonous insects or biting beasts, knives, bullets, plane crashes, car accidents, cancer, or earthquakes, we understand that we can’t go on forever.
This awareness of death is the downside of human intellect. If you think about this for a moment, death awareness presents each of us with an appalling predicament; it even feels like a cosmic joke. On one hand, we share the intense desire for continued existence common to all living things; on the other, we are smart enough to recognize the ultimate futility of this fundamental quest. We pay a heavy price for being self-conscious.
Terror is the natural and generally adaptive response to the imminent threat of death. All mammals, including humans, experience terror. When an impala sees a lion about to pounce on her, the amygdala in her brain passes signals to her limbic system, triggering a fight, flight, or freezing response. A similar process happens with us. Whenever we feel mortally threatened—by a car spinning out of control, a knife-wielding mugger, a tightening in the chest, a suspicious lump, extreme turbulence on an airplane, a suicide bomber exploding in a crowd—the feeling of terror consumes us; we are driven to fight, flee, or freeze. Panic ensues.
And here’s the really tragic part of our condition: only we humans, due to our enlarged and sophisticated neocortex, can experience this terror in the absence of looming danger. Our death “waits like an old roué,” as the great Belgian songwriter Jacques Brel noted, lurking in the psychological shadows. This realization threatens to put us in a persistent state of existential fear.
The poet W. H. Auden eloquently captured this uniquely human conundrum:
Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read
The Hunter’s waking thoughts, lucky the leaf
Unable to predict the fall, lucky indeed
The rampant suffering suffocating jelly
Burgeoning in pools, lapping the grits of the desert,
But what shall man do, who can whistle tunes by heart,
Knows to the bar when death shall cut him short like the cry of the shearwater,
What can he do but defend himself from his knowledge?
This ever-present potential for incapacitating terror is the “worm at the core” of the human condition. To manage this terror of death, we must defend ourselves.
Fortunately, we humans are an ingenious species. Once our intelligence had evolved to the point that this ultimate existential crisis dawned on us, we used that same intelligence to devise the means to keep that potentially devastating existential terror at bay. Our shared cultural worldviews—the beliefs we create to explain the nature of reality to ourselves—give us a sense of meaning, an account for the origin of the universe, a blueprint for valued conduct on earth, and the promise of immortality.
Since the dawn of humankind, cultural worldviews have offered immense comfort to death-fearing humans. Throughout the ages and around the globe, the vast majority of people, past and present, have been led by their religions to believe that their existence literally continues in some form beyond the point of physical death. Some of us believe that our souls fly up to heaven, where we will meet our departed loved ones and bask in the loving glow of our creator. Others “know” that at the moment of death, our souls migrate into a new, reincarnated form. Still others are convinced that our souls simply pass to another, unknown plane of existence. In all these cases, we believe that we are, one way or another, literally immortal.
Our cultures also offer hope of symbolic immortality, the sense that we are part of something greater than ourselves that will continue long after we die. This is why we strive to be part of meaningful groups and have a lasting impact on the world—whether through our creative works of art or science, through the buildings and people named after us, through the possessions and genes we pass on to our children, or through the memories others hold of us. Just as we remember those we loved and admired who died before us, we feel the same will be done for us. We “live on” symbolically through our work, through the people we have known, through the memorials marking our graves, and through our progeny.
These cultural modes of transcending death allow us to feel that we are significant contributors to a permanent world. They protect us from the notion that we are merely purposeless animals that no longer exist upon death. Our beliefs in literal and symbolic immortality help us manage the potential for terror that comes from knowing that our physical death is inevitable.
This brings us to the central tenets of terror management theory. We humans all manage the problem of knowing we are mortal by calling on two basic psychological resources. First, we need to sustain faith in our cultural worldview, which imbues our sense of reality with order, meaning, and permanence. Although we typically take our cultural worldview for granted, it is actually a fragile human construction that people spend great energy creating, maintaining, and defending. Since we’re constantly on the brink of realizing that our existence is precarious, we cling to our culture’s governmental, educational, and religious institutions and rituals to buttress our view of human life as uniquely significant and eternal.
But we don’t just need to view life in general this way; we need to view our own life this way. The paths to literal and symbolic immortality laid out by our worldviews require us to feel that we are valuable members of our cultures. Hence, the second vital resource for managing terror is a feeling of personal significance, commonly known as self-esteem. Just as cultural worldviews vary, so do the ways we attain and maintain self-esteem. For the Dinka of Sudan, the man who owns the largest herd of long-horned cattle is the most highly regarded. In the Trobriand Islands, a man’s worth is measured by the size of the pyramid of yams he builds in front of his sister’s house and leaves to rot. For many Canadians, the man who best uses his stick to slap rubber pucks into nets guarded by masked opponents is considered a national hero.
The desire for self-esteem drives us all, and drives us hard. Self-esteem shields us against the rumblings of dread that lie beneath the surface of our everyday experience. Self-esteem enables each of us to believe we are enduring, significant beings rather than material creatures destined to be obliterated. The twin motives of affirming the correctness of our worldviews and demonstrating our personal worth combine to protect us from the uniquely human fear of inevitable death. And these same impulses have driven much of what humans have achieved over the course of our history.
THE IDEA THAT KNOWLEDGE of our mortality plays a pivotal role in human affairs is ancient. It can be found in the Bible, the Torah, the Qur’an, and ancient Buddhist texts. Twenty-five hundred years ago the Greek historian Thucydides, in The History of the Peloponnesian War, saw the problem of death as the primary cause of protracted violent conflict. Socrates defined the task of philosophy as “learning how to die.” For Hegel, history was a record of “what man does with death.” Over the last two centuries, these ideas have been taken up by philosophers (such as Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche), theologians (for instance, Paul Tillich and Martin Buber), psychoanalytic and existential psychologists (from Sigmund Freud to Otto Rank to Robert Jay Lifton), not to mention enduring works of literature by everyone from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Philip Roth.
But in the realm of scientific psychology, the problem of death has never garnered much attention. Even today, many psychologists remain surprisingly indifferent. If you scour the influential contemporary social science tomes that attempt to shed light on matters such as human nature, the mind, culture, religion, war, history, and consciousness, you might conclude that death is not only unimportant, it scarcely exists.
This is probably due to the widespread belief that the effects of our relationship to death could not be understood or tested in a rigorous scientific manner. In the post-Freudian era in which psychology was still struggling to be taken seriously as a legitimate science, psychologists were wary of big, sweeping ideas, especially those involving the impact of unconscious thoughts and emotions on everyday behavior.
As experimental social psychologists, we wondered about this. Why couldn’t these ideas be framed scientifically and then put to the test? Perhaps the scientific method could be deployed to explain exactly how people cope with subconscious existential fears.
We began conducting studies in which one (experimental) group of participants was reminded of their mortality, and another (control) group was not. We wanted to see whether, when reminded of death, people in the experimental groups would intensify their efforts to uphold their culturally acquired beliefs. We started back in 1987 by testing this idea with twenty-two municipal court judges in Tucson, Arizona. That’s when things started getting interesting.
Enter Judge Michael Garner, who helped us out in our first scientific experiment.
Reviewing the prostitute’s case and setting her bail was all part of the day’s work for Judge Garner. He came into work in the morning and sat down in his chambers to look over the files recording the usual misbehavior committed during the previous night: drunk driving, shoplifting, disorderly conduct. Then he opened the file containing the prosecutor’s notes for the case of one Carol Ann Dennis.
The police citation and the prosecutor’s report noted that the twenty-five-year-old woman had been arrested a little after 9:30 P.M. on a stretch of the Miracle Mile. Dennis, dressed in short shorts, high heels, and a halter top, had stood on the street corner soliciting johns. A man in his thirties had driven up in a pickup truck and pulled over, rolling down the window. Neither of them saw the unmarked police car lurking down the street.
According to the report, Dennis was handcuffed and helped into the back of the police car. She was then carted off to the city jail and charged with soliciting for acts of prostitution. Because she couldn’t verify a permanent address, she was waiting to be released on bond.
Judge Garner closed the file and sighed. He’d seen cases like this before; the typical bail for this type of infraction at that time was $50. Then he turned to another folder, which contained some personality questionnaires that a fellow judge had asked him to fill out for his girlfriend, who was helping her professor with an academic study on “personality, attitudes and bond decisions.”
One of the questionnaires was a two-question “Morality Attitudes Personality Survey.” First, we asked the judge to “please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you.”
“I don’t think about it much, but I guess I would feel very sad for my family, who would miss me,” he wrote.
Next we asked the judge to “jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die, and once you are physically dead.”
He wrote: “I feel that I will enter a tunnel of pain and then release into the light. I will notice that my body will be buried and eventually decay under the earth, but my soul will rise up to heaven where I will meet my Savior.”
After completing a few more questions, the judge chatted with his clerk for a few minutes, then returned to his chambers to resume his work.
HOW DID JUDGE GARNER and the other judges who’d thought about their own mortality before setting Carol Ann Dennis’s bond respond? The judges in the control group who did not complete the survey imposed the average bond of $50. However, the judges reminded of their death hammered Carol Ann (who, by the way, was not a real person) with a far more punitive bond—on average, $455, more than nine times the typical tab. The scales of justice were tipped, if not toppled, by the judges who had pondered their demise.
Judges are supposed to be supremely rational experts who gauge cases based on the facts. And indeed, the judges insisted that answering some questions about death could not possibly have had any effect on their legal pronouncements. How, then, could a brief reminder of death so radically—and without their knowing it—alter their decisions?
When we set up the experiment, we figured that judges, generally speaking, were people who had pretty strong views of right and wrong to begin with, and we thought that Carol Ann Dennis’s behavior would offend their moral sensibilities. The results showed that the judges who thought about their own mortality reacted by trying to do the right thing as prescribed by their culture. Accordingly, they upheld the law more vigorously than their colleagues who were not reminded of death. By setting an extremely high bond for the alleged prostitute, they ensured that she would show up for trial to receive not just a mere slap on the wrist, but also the punishment she “deserved” for her moral transgression.
Reminders of death don’t just provoke more negative reactions to those who fail to live up to our values. They also spawn more positive responses to people who uphold them. In one study, death reminders tripled the monetary reward people recommended for someone who reported a dangerous criminal to the police. And the effects of death reminders aren’t limited to those we judge to be immoral or noble. They also increase our general desire to fortify our faith in the correctness of our beliefs and the goodness of our culture. So after being reminded of death, we react generously to anyone or anything that reinforces our cherished beliefs, and reject anyone or anything that calls those beliefs into question.
In another study we conducted shortly after our research with the judges, we had a group of American students come to our lab. We asked those in the control group to simply describe something neutral—specifically, the emotions that the thought of food and the act of eating aroused in them. Those in the experimental group answered the same unsavory, death-related questions we’d asked Judge Garner.
A few minutes later, we asked each group to read two interviews that we (falsely) told them had come from Political Science Quarterly: one with a professor who was staunchly in favor of America’s political system and another with a professor who railed against it. In his interview, the pro-U.S. professor conceded the United States had its difficulties. Economic inequality was a problem, he noted, and the government had made foreign policy mistakes. But in general, he concluded, “In this country, the people and not the government will be the final judges of the value of what I have to say. That is what makes this country a great place to live freely.”
The anti-U.S. professor, on the other hand, acknowledged some of America’s many virtues but went on to emphasize the malignant influence of the power elite and the “economically motivated and amoral behavior of the United States abroad.” He concluded that “morality has absolutely nothing to do with our foreign policy. That’s why the idea that the U.S. is a promoter of world democracy and freedom is a total sham.” He even suggested that a violent overthrow of the present government was in order.
All the students in our study liked what the pro-U.S. professor had to say. They found him to be more knowledgeable and truthful than the anti-U.S. professor. But the people who had first thought about their eventual death rated the pro-American much more positively, and the anti-U.S. interviewee far more negatively, than those in the control group.
Since we embarked on this path, more than five hundred studies and counting have demonstrated the many ways that cultural worldviews protect us from the terror that the knowledge of the inevitability of death might otherwise arouse. When confronted with reminders of death, we react by criticizing and punishing those who oppose or violate our beliefs, and praising and rewarding those who support or uphold our beliefs. Participants have been reminded of death in many different ways. Aside from answering questions about death, they might see gory accident footage, write one sentence about death, or just be standing near a funeral parlor or cemetery. Fascinatingly, their belief-supporting responses are uniquely correlated with reminders of death. This is important, because reminders of other negative events, such as social rejection, failing an exam, intense pain, or losing a limb in a car accident, do not produce the same effects as being reminded of one’s own mortality.
Throughout this book, we will show how efforts to manage existential terror affect virtually all human affairs. In fact, concerns about mortality influence everything from the mundane to the momentous—what you eat for lunch, how much sunscreen you put on at the beach, whom you voted for in the last election, your attitudes about shopping, your mental health and physical well-being, whom you love and whom you hate.
But we’re not born with this terror. As infants, we are too young to focus on anything beyond being fed and kept warm. Why and how, then, does each human child become embedded in, and a defender of, a symbolic world of meaning and self-worth? And when and how does death enter the psychological picture?
The scheme of things is a system of order. … It is self-evidently true, is accepted so naturally and automatically that one is not aware of an act of acceptance having taken place. … We seek the largest possible scheme of things, not in a reaching out for truth, but because the more comprehensive the scheme the greater its promise of banishing dread. If we can make our lives mean something in a cosmic scheme we will live in the certainty of immortality.
—ALLEN WHEELIS,
The Scheme of Things
WE BEGIN LIFE AS DIAPER-DRENCHING, PACIFIER-SUCKING CREATURES, but we don’t remember that time. We know our names but do not recall having received them. Yet we have fairly solid recollections of our lives after the age of five, give or take a year or two: favorite pets, toys, teachers, friends, unwelcome hugs by overzealous aunts, scoring a goal, summer camp, Halloween trick-or-treating. Eventually, we each become aware of ourselves, not just as individuals but as part of a broader social context: we become Brazilian, Nigerian, Mexican, Italian, Lebanese, Chinese, Dutch, Mexican, Japanese, or American, in a wider world of meanings and symbols.
“From the child of five to myself is but a step,” Leo Tolstoy observed, “but from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance.” How do we transform from crying, cooing neonates to adults with names and nationalities, seeking significance in our respective cultures? And how does this transition allow us to function securely in the world? Let’s consider how this appalling distance is traversed, how concerns about death influence the course of the journey, and what happens thereafter.
Our early years are very important for establishing psychological security. If they don’t go well, the journey toward adulthood can be incredibly harrowing.
Consider the case of Cyprian, a healthy and cute baby boy born in Carpenis, Romania, in April 1990. The baby’s birth mother, Alin, really didn’t want to bring him into the world. He was her fourth child. The government of Romania, under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, had outlawed both contraception and abortion, and Alin and her family barely survived on the chickens they raised on their tiny farm and the few vegetables from their scrappy yard. Desperately poor, she and her husband decided they could not afford to keep their new son. So right after he was born, they dropped him off at a state orphanage and went back to the grim work of keeping themselves and their remaining children alive.
Cyprian was one of about 170,000 Romanian babies crammed into orphanages that were like terrible zoos. The babies were barely fed and only occasionally changed. They were never taken outside into the fresh air. The rooms they were housed in reeked of urine and body odor. With a ratio of dozens of children to one or two caregivers, the abandoned babies were never cuddled. They had no toys to play with. Because they were often tied to their filthy cribs, they didn’t learn to crawl or walk. Instead of learning to talk, they banged their heads on the metal bars of their cribs. By the time Cyprian’s adoptive parents picked him up in Bucharest in the summer of 1992, he was “failing to thrive,” meaning that he’d stopped growing and developing. Physically, he was a shrunken, malnourished two-year-old; mentally he was far worse off.
Cyprian was one of the few lucky ones. His new parents renamed him Cameron and brought him to America. His new family showered love and care on him. He was coddled and fed; he learned to walk and grew to a normal weight for his age. For a while, he seemed to be normal and healthy. But at around the age of four, he began behaving strangely. “He was terrified of walking on the grass,” recalls his father, Daniel. “He developed an obsession for patent leather shoes. He stuffed food into his cheeks like a squirrel. He often fell into violent, screaming fits. He broke things. He didn’t pick up on social cues. We had no idea what was wrong with him.”
Only when Cameron entered therapy at the age of five did Daniel and his wife begin to understand what afflicted their beautiful son. Cameron suffered from a severe psychological condition called “reactive attachment disorder,” which shows up in traumatized children who don’t have an opportunity to bond with their very first caregivers—usually their mothers. Cameron’s disorder was due to his desperate but unmet need, as an infant, for psychological security.
THESE FEELINGS OF SECURITY are every bit as critical to a baby as milk and warmth. But such feelings don’t come easy to little humans. Guppies are born swimming, eating, and dodging predators. Puppies and kittens are fully weaned and completely independent in two months. In contrast, human newborns are the most immature and helpless of all living creatures. Fresh out of the womb, we can’t even lift our heads or turn over without assistance. Forming strong emotional bonds to parents assures that children get what they need to survive and thrive. How does this happen?
For most of the twentieth century, psychologists believed that babies love their parents for one reason only: their parents feed them. According to Sigmund Freud, milk produces pleasure, which causes the baby to form an attachment to its mother and to develop affection for her. Basically, Freud thought that as infants, we love those who make us feel this pleasure. Later on, behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner theorized that bonding in infancy was all about reinforcement: whoever shows up with milk, over and over, receives the baby’s attachment and affection because she or he is reliably associated with getting fed.
Freud’s disciple Otto Rank disputed this view of why infants form attachments. He and other psychoanalytic thinkers, such as Harry Stack Sullivan and Melanie Klein, argued that emotional bonds are forged by feelings of being loved and protected. However, this alternative view of attachment wasn’t widely accepted until the late 1950s, when Harry Harlow conducted a set of famous experiments. Harlow separated rhesus monkeys from their biological mothers at birth and raised them in cages with two inanimate “mothers,” one made of bare wire mesh and the other covered with soft terry cloth. The monkeys spent most of their time clinging to the terry cloth mother, even when nourished by a bottle mounted on the bare wire mother.
In another study, the monkeys were separated; one group was fed by wire mothers while another group was fed by the terry cloth mothers. Although both groups of monkeys drank equal amounts of milk and grew at the same rate, they responded very differently in novel and frightening situations. When wandering around their cages and unexpectedly exposed to a mechanical teddy bear beating a drum, the monkeys with the soft terry cloth mother scampered to her and clung to her tenaciously. Seemingly comforted, they then ventured forth and explored their surroundings. Interestingly, the other monkeys, rather than making their way back to “Mother Metallica,” hurled themselves on the ground, rocked back and forth, or groped themselves and screamed in obvious distress—very much as the neglected children in the Romanian orphanages behaved.
The baby monkeys, Harlow argued, used their terry cloth mothers as a secure base. Once their initial fright was quelled by comforting contact with the soft mother, they regained their confidence. We don’t love our parents because they feed us, he concluded; we love them because physical contact with our parents provides comforting security.
While Harlow was conducting his experiments, psychiatrist John Bowlby was developing a companion idea he called “attachment theory.” The theory was based on Bowlby’s psychoanalytic training, his knowledge of primate evolution and ethology, and his studies of young children who had been separated from their parents during World War II. Bowlby proposed that if an infant is to survive, he or she needs to be emotionally attached to a responsive caregiver. Because of their helplessness and vulnerability, fledgling humans are especially prone to anxiety, and separation from attachment figures, literally or figuratively, is the ultimate threat to them. Hence, he observed, it was vitally important for infants to develop “basic trust,” the sense that they are safe and sound, in the first year of life. And they could do this only through the seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent help of people who cared about them.
Today, thanks to the work of Rank, Harlow, Bowlby, and others, we understand that the primary source of psychological security in early infancy is parental love and protection. When we cuddle and coo over our babies, they feel secure and emboldened to explore. They crawl around on the floor and happily investigate every nook and cranny they can reach, which is why soon-to-be parents often “childproof” their homes.
If you are lucky enough to be born into a loving family, it’s pretty cool to be a new baby. You snuggle into your mother’s warm breast, where you receive sweet nourishment. You are swaddled, cuddled, fed, and entertained. When you pee or poop, the wetness disappears into soft dryness. In your early days, simply existing is sufficient for you to be showered with love and comfort from all those wonderful people who look at you with their shining, admiring eyes. When you successfully grasp a toy and get more food into your mouth than on the floor, it’s a blissful occasion for your parents. Later, a first step, a gurgling approximation of “Mommy” or “Daddy,” or bouncing a tennis ball off the dog’s head evokes effusive displays of pride and affection from your adult fans.
As you become a toddler, it takes a bit more work for you to elicit these sorts of pleasurable parental reactions, especially when you do things that Mom or Dad doesn’t like. You might put dirt into your mouth. You might pee in the fishbowl instead of the toilet. You might chase a runaway ball into the street. And when you are corrected, it’s not pleasant. If Mom pulls your grabbing hands away from the candy counter or stops you from pulling the dog’s tail, you become decidedly unhappy; you scream and wail.
To stay in their parents’ good graces, children must learn to do things they do not want to do, and not to do things they do want to do. Sometimes the stakes are literally life and death. Tumbling off the diving board of the family swimming pool can make for a hasty departure from the family gene pool. Long before youngsters are mature enough to be persuaded by reason to abstain from risky, unpleasant, or socially unacceptable behaviors, parents use approval to promote preferred actions and disapproval to deter undesirable ones. When our children do what we want them to do, we praise and reward them; our approval keeps our kids feeling safe and secure. But when they behave inappropriately, as they inevitably do, we parents respond with rebukes, time-outs, physical punishment, or the stark absence of approval. Confronted by these disturbingly stern adult behaviors, little boys and girls feel upset, anxious, and sometimes terrified.