Читать книгу Church of the Graveyard Saints - C. Joseph Greaves - Страница 8

What becomes of our earliest childhood—its sights and sounds, its textures and smells? Of diapers and talcum, nursing and teething, babbled words and first baby steps? All of life’s novelties, miraculous and shining and, one would think, indelible. Yet their memory, so dear and enduring to the parent, is lost somehow to the child in the way that breath is snatched from the rising in a whoosh of sudden acceleration.

Intellectually at least, Addie Decker knew the answer. Something to do with the hippocampus and an infant’s inability to bundle memories in the absence of a functional vocabulary. Not, as Freud would have it, because of some repressed infantile sexuality. That was the thing Addie had learned about Freud—that practically everything he’d written was about sex and yet what he’d actually known about sex you could fit on the back of an envelope.

Which was not to say forgotten wounds couldn’t leave a permanent scar.

Attachment Theory, a post-Freudian model, holds that children’s earliest interactions forge the die from which their later relationships are cast. So at one end of the spectrum, secure infants—those that in a clinical setting become upset when left by their mothers and embrace them when they return—grow into emotionally healthy adults who will trust and find comfort in their later life partners. At the other end of the spectrum, so-called insecure avoidants—infants that demonstrate indifference to maternal absence—grow up to have intimacy issues and are much more likely to distrust even good and supportive relationships.

So went the theory. But unlike Freud’s speculative musings, Attachment Theory had been tested and validated and found to be highly accurate. And yet to Addie’s way of thinking, its predictive value still suffered from two major shortcomings.

The first was that without childhood memories of our own, we’re forced to rely on those very same parents—be they nurturing or neglectful, truthful or treacherous—to fill in our early-life blanks.

The second problem with Attachment Theory was that it failed to answer the basic question: What happens when your mother leaves you and never returns?