Marga Vicedo, The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America

Abstract

Vicedo poses a fascinating and provocative question—how did mother love gain such a central role in popular views of normal childhood development? Focusing on the period between the Second World War and the 1970s, Vicedo compellingly demonstrates that this emphasis was not a result of robust scientific evidence. She follows how British psychoanalyst John Bowlby and his colleagues harnessed findings from animal experiments to argue for the necessity of maternal care. Vicedo painstakingly analyses the science behind theories of the necessity of mother love, ultimately arguing that Bowlby's attachment theory, which ‘put forth maternal care and love as the cradle of the emotional self’ (p. 2), was not supported by scientific evidence. This is a bold claim for a historian of science to make; most historians leave the ‘science for the scientists’ and focus their analyses on the making and utilisation of prevailing theories. Yet Vicedo's work is profoundly historical. She examines how Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz, and to some extent, his Dutch colleague, Niko Tinbergen, and psychologists Bowlby and his American collaborator Mary Ainsworth, designed studies, interpreted evidence, and interacted with their colleagues, in order to develop, promote and perpetuate theories of the biologically-determined psychological centrality of motherhood.