You Can't Go Home Again, or Back to the Cradle Either

I recently commented on a book by one Mary Evelyn Greene (http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2015/09/when-nonsense-hurts-mary-evelyn-greenes.html). Greene described all the difficulties of her adoption of children from a Russian orphanage, emphasizing the little boy’s “feral” nature and violent aggression. Subsequently, I received the following comment on my post (the commenter gave other information as well, so interested readers may want to look back at both the comments):

“ But in this book there is nothing about the treatment of Peter but only lyric debris and accusations against Russia and the orphanage. Although she could refuse, and even had an offer from the administration of the orphanage. It is impossible to separate brothers and sisters. She had two children to adopt or reject both. There was no deception. Only 6 months after the adoption has begun a significant regression of Peter. What's foster family did wrong during these 6 months? The book does not answer this question.

"Russian Roulette: A Review of When Rain Hurts: An Adoptive Mother's Journey with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome"
CHRISTINA GOMBAR
November 2014
- See more at: http://www.literarymama.com/reviews/archives/2014/11/russian-roulette-a-review-of-when-rain-hurts-an-adoptive-mothers-journey-with-fetal-alcohol-syndrome.html#sthash.xAgimZIh.dpuf
excerpts from the article -
"Having spent thousands of dollars and precious months filing paperwork, Greene and her husband finally took their first trip to a remote Russian outpost only to discover the boy they'd set their heart on was clearly too ill to take on. There they were introduced to a two-year-old girl, and instantly fell in love ..............
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After six months, this boy "woke up in a primal scream" and became completely uncontrollable-defecating at will (though long toilet trained in Russia), and vomiting at every meal. His speech was primitive, he refused eye contact, and he was physically destructive. Greene says he went from being "like a cuddly toddler" to something "more like an explosive device."
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A doctor advised them to try "attachment coaching." They needed to treat Peter like a baby, so he could experience the developmental stages he missed in the orphanage.
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"At times I felt we were breaking a horse," writes Greene before she realizes: "His entire repertoire of behaviors was designed to inoculate himself against the dangers of love and intimacy. I was not breaking a horse. I was nurturing a helpless foal .  “

Of course, I have no idea of the accuracy of anyone’s statements here --  Greene’s description,  the comments, or the review. However, all of these involve ideas that I think require close examination.

The first of these is ideas that if a child suddenly shows difficult behaviors after a calm six months, the cause of these behaviors must have occurred in earlier life , and not be associated with any more recent experiences. This thinking involves a kind of primitive “infantile determinism” that assumes that all problems must come from an early stage of development—ignoring the reality that past and present experiences as well as maturational factors work together to determine an individual’s present characteristics. The idea that the child woke with a “primal scream” (not just a scream) indicates the assumption that traumatic experiences in very early life have been repressed and now are breaking through; the whole “primal” or “primal scream” concept (popular in the 1970s following the proposals made by Janov) focused on the experience of birth as terrible, and impossible to handle in a rational way unless re-experienced and re-processed.  Related to this belief in “primal” is the view that a child who defecates without control and vomits frequently must be doing these things as emotional acting-out and not because of physical illness. Greene seems to have further revealed her belief system by saying that Peter defecated “at will”, echoing the claim of the holding therapist Keith Reber and others that children with attachment disorders could defecate or vomit voluntarily.

The second issue that needs addressing is the recommendation for so-called “attachment coaching” and for causing Peter to “experience the developmental stages he had missed in the orphanage”. This belief has a long history  (50-100 years of it) among the wilder psychoanalysts like Ferenczi and Fromm-Reichmann, who were convinced that by acting out nurturing  events for patients, they could somehow “re-do” the patients’ early experiences, which the therapists blamed for all mental illness including schizophrenia.  This view--  which naturally appeals to the wish we all have to be able to “fix” emotional disturbances—was also encouraged by claims that hypnosis or other techniques could cause age regression (these claims were strongly contradicted by systematic investigations).

It is not plausible that existing psychological development can be undone and started over, however unsatisfactory were the conditions in which it occurred. Think of that claim and what it would mean if it were made with respect to physical development. A child may be of unusually small stature or may have an unusual pattern of bone development due to early malnutrition. Could we rationally expect a good diet in later years to “regress” the child to a state of infantile skeletal development, and to cause new growth and bone maturation that will create a more typical body? The answer is NO, of course, and I would point out that all the present emphasis on brain development as the basis of emotional development should be considered analogously; no experience can undo the existing synapses or change the history of migration of neurons to different parts of the brain, any more than diet can alter salient characteristics of bones that have already formed.

Third, let’s consider Greene’s statement that Peter’s behavior was designed “to inoculate himself against the dangers of love and intimacy”. This is one of the mantras of attachment therapy/holding therapy, and has been repeated in woozle-like fashion for many years now. No doubt this is what Greene was told before the adoption occurred, and what she heard on many occasions afterward. However, this belief is based not on evidence from child behavior, but on an analogy to the feelings of adults whose companions have chosen to leave them--  post-divorce, for example. These people are often irritable with others and may be preoccupied with the dangers of intimacy, sometimes rejecting possible new mates on the grounds that “women/men are all alike and you can’t trust them”. But is it possible for a young child to do the same?

In the 1940s, Bowlby and Spitz put great emphasis on the idea that young children separated from familiar caregivers would become depressed, eat and sleep poorly, and be unable to accept care from other adults. Bowlby’s film “Nine days in a residential nursery” showed the physical illness and emotional distress of a two-year-old left in a nursery while his mother had a baby; the child rejected his mother when she came back to pick him up. But that film showed that the child received little attention from caregivers (or from his father, who dropped in briefly every day) and was overwhelmed by other children in the nursery. Bowlby’s colleague James Robertson later showed that young children separated from familiar people but given plenty of sensitive, responsive care did not in fact seem nearly as badly affected as the child in Bowlby’s film.

The belief that adopted children intentionally reject love is one that assumes that the adopted child is adult-like in abilities and reactions—indeed, that he is more capable than an adult of controlling his own behavior. Curiously, that school of thought does not assume that nonadopted infants are rejecting love when they cry nerve-wrackingly, have tantrums, or do that trick that enables them to weigh 40 pounds extra when they do not want to be picked up.  Somehow, the adopted child is considered to do on purpose all sorts of things that in other children would be thought to be outside their control. She is also said to do these things because she does not want to be loved, on account of the losses or disappointments she has already experienced. These ideas are simply assertions, because there is no evidence to suggest that a child does not want affection, and it is more likely that he or she has no experience of the codes adults use to signal the giving or receiving of love.

I am not one to quote Freud frequently, but there was a term he used about implausible treatments of these kinds. He referred to their proponents as having a furor sanandi—a frenzied wish to heal. Unfortunately, unless that furor is turned to methods that are at least plausible, and better yet evidence-based, the wish to heal may well culminate in the fact of harm.