by Melanie Gill, TCW
‘THERE is no such thing as a baby,’ wrote renowned paediatrician Donald Winnicott in 1942. ‘There is a baby and someone.’
His meaning was simple and profound: an infant does not and cannot exist in isolation. It is attached. In the 1960s John Bowlby’s great insight into child psychology known as ‘attachment theory’ explained why. Over the last few decades neuroscientific research has confirmed the observations his theory (of attachment, maternal deprivation and separation anxiety) were based on. A baby comes into being initially through its attachment to its mother – ideally through attuned care, emotional presence and the steady regulation of distress by either parent. This infant dependency is not a flaw to be overcome, it is the foundation of its development.
Yet it is precisely this truth that contemporary feminist ideology and thinking denies. As science has clarified and confirmed the importance of connection, social practices have moved in the opposite direction. Practices that formally cut or break this connection, from abortion to institutionalised early day-care through to family separation, have increased or been normalised in recent years. Decisions that are framed in terms of autonomy share a common feature: the deliberate severing of human dependency at its most vulnerable points.
We are living through a cultural moment that denies such dependency, sees attachment as danger, and relational need as oppression. In the name of ‘liberation’ and ‘progressiveness’, the family is dismantled, fathers marginalised, and children quietly reshaped to fit adult belief systems. What is presented as progress increasingly resembles something else: a refusal to accept the basic conditions under which human beings develop at all. The casualties from this are not abstract. They are children.