Two babies, two theories

Some years ago, two friends of mine, a psychoanalyst and a psychologist, had fraternal twins — that is to say, non-identical ones. On a visit I paid them a few days after the birth, they told me how different the babies were: one was serene, quiet, woke up with a minimum of fuss, suckled placidly and, after a few minutes, fell back into a peaceful sleep; the other, by contrast, woke up screaming, as though attacked by demons, and remained so agitated that he could not even find the nipple when his mother tried to put him to the breast; he choked on his own crying while trying to feed and, on reaching a point of satiety or perhaps of exasperation, spat out the nipple and went on crying until he fell into a restless sleep laden with sighs.

My friends commented: it is clear that one of them has a far greater tolerance of frustration than the other. Perhaps one had already begun to internalise a good breast; or perhaps the small amount of his thanatic drives protected him from turning his hunger into an experience of an attacking breast; while the other was probably tormented by his low tolerance of anxiety, and at the mercy of a malevolent and destructive breast. They had concluded from this that a certain priority should be given to the agitated baby, feeding him first and soothing him as far as possible, since the other seemed able to tolerate waiting without too much distress.

A few days later I visited them again and, speaking of that decision, they confessed to me that they were taken aback by the stupidity of their first resolution: had they fallen into the relational trap of always attending first to the baby with the problematic behaviour, they said, they would have rewarded his troublesome conduct and punished the other for being nothing but a charming baby, at the risk of inaugurating a family pattern that would produce a sociopath and an abandonment-prone schizoid! They therefore informed me — seriously, while laughing a little at themselves — that they had decided not to grant any preferential treatment to the agitated baby, without complicating their lives with the good breast or the bad breast. Their ecumenical behaviour would consist in attending to one of them one day and to the other the next.

I shall spare you the detail of the oscillations that went on characterising the life of that couple of young parents, for my friends kept up for some time the alternation of their frames of reference, between an all-out Kleinianism and a mixture of Skinner and Bowlby sprinkled with family systems thinking, with the frequent change of their guidelines for behaviour that followed from it.

What we come into the world with

In the last instance, let us acknowledge it, my friends were responding to what we have known for centuries — even if we do not often take it into account in our practice —, namely that the different ways of being with which we are equipped at birth tend to keep their presence, without much variation, throughout life, facilitated or discouraged only up to a certain point by the traits of the family, cultural or socio-economic environment that the lottery of existence brings us.

My friends’ first line of decision does in fact have certain merits: there are research findings showing that the more negative and more reactive babies benefit more from devoted care, from rapid contingent responses and from a secure loving bond (Gunnar et al., 1996) ¹. But the second decision can be grounded as well: complementary research shows that babies who ask for attention, whether in a positive or a negative way, develop better than those who appear inhibited and do not cry — passive babies leading parents ² to become less involved (Gunnar & Nelson, 1994). In fact, babies train their parents as much as, if not more than, the latter train their babies.

An interdisciplinary exercise

This presentation will deal with the relation between what we bring into the world and what the world gives us, between genes and environment. This interdisciplinary exercise should not be new to family therapists. In fact, family therapy was born in an interdisciplinary environment, ready to throw bridges towards different ways of knowing, and open to borrowing and testing ideas and models coming from other fields. Granted: we may have lost something of that youthful momentum and fervour, doubtless as the inevitable result of having become a discipline (echoes of Foucault!), with over-civilised behaviour, too narrow a vision, a mistrust of our neighbours, becoming our own jailers. Perhaps the wound inflicted on our identity when the systemic view, and then the narrative view, ceased to be a lens belonging to family therapy has also contributed to this. Another factor of deep trauma may have been the marginalisation of advanced therapeutic practices by private insurers and health funds, further aggravated by the recent “decade of the brain” of the (United States) National Institute of Mental Health and by its insistence on basic neuroscience research, to the exclusion of any psychosocial variable.