The Social Animal

CHAPTER 5 ATTACHMENT

ONE DAY, WHEN HAROLD WAS IN SECOND GRADE, JULIA CALLED him from the playroom to the kitchen table. She rallied her energy and told him it was time to do his homework. Harold ran through his normal gospel of homework avoidance. First, he told her he hadn’t been assigned any homework. When that small fib cracked, he told her he’d already done it at school. This was followed by a series of ever less-plausible claims. He had done it on the bus. He had left the assignment at school. It was too hard, and the teacher had told the class they didn’t have to do it. The homework was impossible because the teacher hadn’t covered the material. It was not due for another week, and he would do it tomorrow, and so on and so on.

Having completed his nightly liturgy, he was asked to march to the front hall and retrieve his backpack. He did so with the energy of a convicted killer on his way to the execution chamber.

Harold’s backpack was an encyclopedia of boyhood interests and suggested that Harold was well on his way to a promising career as a homeless person. Inside, if one dug down through the various geological layers, one could find old pretzels, juice boxes, toy cars, Pokemon cards, PSP games, stray drawings, old assignments, worksheets from earlier grades, apples, gravel, newspapers, scissors, and copper piping. The backpack weighed slightly less than a Volkswagen.

Julia pulled Harold’s assignment folder from amid the wreckage. It is said that history moves in cycles, and this is true when it comes to the philosophy of homework-folder organization. In some ages, the three-ring binder is in vogue. In others, the double-sided cardboard folder prevails. The world’s great educators debate the merits of each system, and their preferences seem to alternate according to some astrological cycle.

Julia found his assignment sheet, and realized with a sinking heart that the next sixty-five minutes would be spent completing the ten-minute assignment. The project’s requirements were minimal—Harold would merely need a shoebox, six colored markers, construction paper, a three-foot display board, linseed oil, ebony, the toenail of a three-toed sloth, and some glitter glue.

Julia dimly suspected, and research by Harris Cooper of Duke University confirms, that there is only a tenuous correlation between how much homework elementary students do and how well they do on tests of the material or with other measures of achievement. She also suspected that this nightly homework ordeal served other purposes—to convince parents that their kids are getting a suitably rigorous education; to introduce the children to their future lives as spiritually crushed drones; or, more positively, to introduce children to the study habits they would need later in life.

In any case, Julia, trapped in the overpressured parenting life that everybody in her social class ridicules but few renounce, girded herself for the bribery and cajolery that would follow. She would, over the next few minutes, present Harold with an ever more elaborate series of incentives—gold stars, small pieces of candy, BMWs—all to induce him to do his homework. When these failed, as they inevitably would, she would wheel out the disincentives—threats to cut off TV privileges, to take away all computer games and videos, to write him out of her will, to imprison him in a cardboard box with nothing to eat but bread and water.

Harold would be able to resist all threats and incentives, either because he was not yet capable of calculating long-term pain versus temporary inconvenience, or because he knew his mother had no intention of ever cutting off the TV privileges, and thus putting herself in the position of having to entertain him all week.

In any case, Julia sat Harold down with his homework assignment at the kitchen table. She turned her back to get a glass of water, and 7.82 seconds later Harold handed her a sheet of paper claiming his homework was done. Julia looked down at the homework sheet, which looked like it contained three or four indecipherable markings that seemed to be in early Sanskrit.

This would mark the beginning of the nightly redo phase of the homework, when Julia would explain it was necessary to do his work slowly and carefully and in English if possible. Harold went through his normal protests, fell into another of his cycles of misery and internal chaos, and Julia knew that it would be another fifteen minutes of turmoil and disorder before he was in any mental shape to do the homework. It was as if she and Harold had to endure a phase of internal riot and protest before Harold would capitulate and be in a state capable of steady work.

One modern view of this situation is that Harold’s freedom was being crushed by the absurd strictures of civilization. The innocence and creativity of childhood was being impinged and bound by the conformities of an overwrought society. Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.

But looking at her son, Julia didn’t really get the sense that the unsupervised Harold, the non-homework Harold, the uncontrolled Harold was really free. This Harold, which some philosophers celebrate as the epitome of innocence and delight, was really a prisoner of his impulses. Freedom without structure is its own slavery.

Harold wanted to do his homework. He wanted to be a good student and please his teachers and his mother and father. But he was just unable. He somehow couldn’t help that his backpack was a mess and his life was disorganized. Sitting at the table, he couldn’t control his own attention. Something would happen by the sink and he’d check it out. Some stray thought would drive him toward the refrigerator, or to an envelope that happened to be lying near the coffee machine.

Far from being free, Harold was now a victim of the remnants of his own lantern consciousness, distracted by every stray prompt, unable to regulate his responses. He was smart enough to sense that he was spinning out of control. He could not reverse the turmoil welling up inside. So he would get frustrated and think he was bad.

Some evenings, to be honest, Julia made these moments worse by losing patience. At these tired, frustrated moments, she just told Harold to buckle down and get it over with. Why couldn’t he complete these simple assignments, which he knew how to do, which should have been so easy for him?

That never worked.

But Julia had other resources. When Julia was young, her family moved around a lot. She switched schools and sometimes had trouble making new friends. At those times, she threw herself at her own mother, and relied on her company. They would take long walks together, and go out for tea together, and her mother, who was lonely, too, in the new neighborhood and had nobody she could talk to, would open up. She would tell young Julia about her nervousness in the new place, what she liked about it and what she didn’t, what she missed and what she looked forward to. Julia felt privileged when her mother opened up in this manner. She was just a little girl at the time, but she had access to an adult viewpoint. She felt she was being admitted into a special realm.

Julia lived a very different life than the one her mother did. It was much easier in many respects. She spent an insane amount of time on superficialities—shopping for the right guest-room hand towels, following celebrity gossip. But she still had some of those internal working models in her head. Without thinking about it, without even realizing that she was replicating her mother’s behavior, Julia sometimes would share her own special experiences with Harold. She wouldn’t really think about it, but often when they were both on edge, when times were hard, she would just find herself talking about some adventure she’d had when she was young. She would give him privileged access into her life.

This particular evening, Julia saw Harold strangely alone, struggling with the stimuli and the random impulses within. She instinctively pulled him in, and brought him a bit inside her own life.

She told him a story. She told him, of all things, about a drive she had taken across the country with some friends after college. She described the rhythms of that drive, where they had stayed night after night, how the Appalachians had given way to the plains and then the Rockies. She described what it was like to wake up in the morning and see mountains in the distance and then drive for hours and still not reach them. She described the string of Cadillacs she had seen planted upright along the highway.

As she did this, his eyes were rapt upon her. She was treating him with respect and letting him into that most mysterious region—the hidden zone of his mother’s life that had existed before his birth. His time horizon subtly widened. He got subtle intimations of his mother’s girlhood, her maturity, his arrival, his growth, this moment now, and the adventures he would someday have.

And as Julia talked, she was tidying up. She was clearing space on the counters, removing the boxes and stray letters that had piled up during the day. Harold leaned in toward her, as if she were offering him water after a thirsty walk. Over the years, Harold had learned how to use her as a tool to organize himself, and during their little random conversation he started to do just that.

Julia looked over at Harold and noticed he had his pencil dangling from his mouth. He wasn’t really chewing on it, just letting it hang softly between his teeth in the way he automatically did when he was thinking about something. He suddenly looked happier and more collected. With her story, Julia had triggered something—an implicit memory of what it was like to be calm and in control. She’d engaged him in the sort of extended conversation that he was still incapable of performing on his own. It was like a miracle, and Harold soon got his homework smoothly done.

But of course it wasn’t a miracle. If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.

Firmly Attached

Social scientists do their best to arrive at some limited understanding of human development. In 1944 the British psychologist John Bowlby did a study called Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves on a group of young delinquents. He noticed that a high percentage of the boys had been abandoned when they were young, and suffered from feelings of anger, humiliation, and worthlessness. “She left because I’m no good,” they’d explain.

Bowlby noticed that the boys withheld affections and developed other strategies to cope with the sense of abandonment that plagued them. He theorized that what kids need most are safety and exploration. They need to feel loved by those who care for them, but they also need to go out into the world and to take care of themselves. Bowlby argued that these two needs, while sometimes in conflict, are also connected. The more secure a person feels at home, the more likely he or she is to venture out boldly to explore new things. Or as Bowlby himself put it, “All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”

Bowlby’s work helped shift thinking about childhood, and about human nature. Up until his day, psychologists tended to study individual behavior, not relationships. Bowlby’s work emphasized that the relationship between a child and a mother or primary caregiver powerfully molds how that child will see herself and the world.

Before Bowlby’s era, and even in the years beyond, many people focused on the conscious choices people made. The assumption was that people look at the world, which is simple, and then make decisions about it, which are complicated and hard. Bowlby focused on the unconscious models we carry around in our heads, which organize perception in the first place.

For example, a baby is born with a certain inborn trait, like irritability. But he is lucky enough to have a mother who can read his moods. She hugs him when he wants hugs and puts him down when he wants to be put down. She stimulates him when he wants stimulation and holds back when he needs tranquility. The baby learns that he is a creature who exists in dialogue with others. He comes to see the world as a collection of coherent dialogues. He also learns that if he sends signals, they will probably be received. He will learn to get help when he is in trouble. He will develop a whole series of suppositions about how the world works, and he’ll rely on these suppositions as he ventures forth and meets other people (where these suppositions will either be validated or violated).

Children born into a web of attuned relationships know how to join in conversations with new people and read social signals. They see the world as a welcoming place. Children born into a web of threatening relationships can be fearful, withdrawn, or overaggressive. They often perceive threats, even when none exist. They may not be able to read signals or have a sense of themselves as someone worth listening to. This act of unconscious reality construction powerfully determines what we see and what we pay attention to. It powerfully shapes what we will end up doing.

There are many ways to define parental relationships, but Bowlby’s protégé, Mary Ainsworth, figured that a crucial moment came when a child was separated from her attachment figure and compelled, even for a few minutes, to explore the world on her own. Ainsworth devised the Strange Situation Test to examine these transition moments between safety and exploration. In a typical permutation of the test, Ainsworth put a young child (usually between nine and eighteen months) and her mother in a room filled with toys that invite exploration. Then a stranger would enter the room. Then the mother would leave the baby with the stranger. Then the mother would return. Then the mother and the stranger would leave the baby alone. Then the stranger would return. Ainsworth and her colleagues closely observed the child at each of these transitions: How much did she protest when the mother left? How did she react when Mom returned? How did she react to the stranger?

Over the subsequent decades, the Strange Situation Test has been applied to thousands and thousands of children all around the world. About two-thirds of the children cry a bit when their mother leaves them in this test and then rush to her when she returns to the room. These children are said to be securely attached. About a fifth of the children don’t make any outward display when their mother leaves, nor do they hurry over to her when she returns. These children are said to be avoidantly attached. The final group doesn’t display coherent responses. They may rush back to Mom as she returns but also punch her in anger when she gets close. These children are said to have ambivalent or disorganized attachment styles.

These categories have the same flaws as all attempts to categorize human beings. Nonetheless, there is a mountain of research, known as attachment theory, which explores how different types of attachment are related to different parenting styles, and how strongly childhood attachments shape relationships and accomplishments over the course of a lifetime. It turns out that attachment, even at age one, correlates reasonably well with how people will do in school, how they will fare in life and how they will develop relationships later in life. The results of one test in infancy don’t determine a life course. No one is locked into any destiny during childhood. But they give an insight into the internal working models that have been created by the relationship between parents and child, models that will then be used to navigate the world beyond.

Securely attached children have parents that are attuned to their desires and mirror their moods. Their mothers soothe them when they are alarmed and play happily with them when they are gleeful. These children do not have perfect parents or perfect relationships. Children are not fragile. Their parents can screw up, lose their tempers, and sometimes ignore their children’s needs, and yet if the overall pattern of care is reliable, then their kids still feel secure in their presence. Another lesson is that there is no one right parenting style. Parents can deliver stern punishments, and as long as the child thinks the conversation is coherent and predictable, then the attachment will probably still be secure.

When parents do achieve this attunement with their kids, then a rush of oxytocin floods through their brains. Some scientists, with that special way of theirs, call oxytocin the “affiliative neuropeptide.” It surges when people are enjoying close social bonds; when a mother is giving birth or suckling her child; after an orgasm, when two people in love gaze into each other’s eyes; when friends or relatives hug. Oxytocin gives people a powerful feeling of contentment. In other words, oxytocin is nature’s way of weaving people together.

Securely attached children tend to cope with stressful situations well. A study by Megan Gunnar of the University of Minnesota found that when you give a shot to a fifteen-month-old who is securely attached, he will cry at the pain, but the level of cortisol in his body will not rise. Insecurely attached children may cry just as loud, but they may not reach for their caregiver and their cortisol levels are more likely to shoot up, because they are accustomed to feeling more existential stress. Securely attached children tend to have more friends at school and at summer camp. In school, they know how to use teachers and other adults to succeed. They don’t feel compelled to lean against and be near the teachers at all times. Neither do they hold themselves aloof from teachers. They come and go—establishing contact and breaking away. They also tend to be more truthful through life, feeling less of a need to lie to puff themselves up in other’s eyes.

Avoidantly attached children tend to have parents who are emotionally withdrawn and psychologically unavailable. They don’t communicate well with their children or establish emotional rapport. Sometimes they will say the right things, but their words are not accompanied by any physical gestures that communicate affection. In response, their children develop an internal working model in which they figure they have to take care of themselves. They learn not to rely on others and preemptively withdraw. In the Strange Situation Tests, they don’t protest (at least on the outside) when their mothers leave the room, even though their heart rate goes up and internally they are all worked up. When left alone, they tend not to cry, but continue with their solitary play and exploration.

As they get older, these children seem, at first blush, astonishingly independent and mature. During the first weeks of school, their teachers rate them highly. But gradually it becomes clear that they are not developing close relationships with friends and adults. They suffer from higher levels of chronic anxiety and are unsure in social situations. In the book The Development of the Person by L. Alan Sroufe, Byron Egeland, Elizabeth A. Carlson and W. Andrew Collins, there is a description of an avoidantly attached child as he walks into a classroom: “He walked in a series of angles, like a sailboat tacking into the wind. By approximation, he eventually wound up near the teacher; then, turning his back toward her, he would wait for her to contact him.”

Adults who are avoidantly attached tend not to remember much about their childhoods. They may describe their childhoods in generalities, but there was little that was emotionally powerful enough to lodge into recall. Often they have trouble developing intimate commitments. They may excel at logical discussion but react with deep unease when conversation turns to the emotions, or when asked to reveal themselves. They go through their days within a narrow emotional range, and are most at ease when alone. According to work done by Pascal Vrticka of the University of Geneva, adults who were avoidantly attached show less activation in the reward areas of the brain during social interaction. They are three times more likely to be solitary at age seventy.

Children with ambivalent or disorganized attachment patterns tend to have parents who are inconstant. They are there one minute, gone the next. They may be overly intrusive one hour, and then coldly aloof. The children have trouble developing consistent working models. They feel a simultaneous urge to run toward Mom and Dad and run away. When they are placed on the edge of a scary incline, even as early as twelve months, they don’t look toward their mothers for help, the way secure babies do. They look away from their mothers.

Later in life, these children are more fearful than other children. They are more likely to perceive threats, and to have trouble controlling their impulses. These kinds of stresses can have long-term influences. Girls who grow up in homes without a father tend to have their periods at earlier ages, even after controlling for other factors. They tend, in general, to be more promiscuous in adolescence. Children with disorganized attachment patterns tend to have higher rates of psychopathology at age seventeen. Children from disorganized homes have smaller, less densely connected brains because the traumatic shocks of their childhood have retarded synaptic development.

Again, all this is not to say that early attachment determines a life course. Adult outcomes do not rigidly follow attachment patterns. That’s in part because some people seem to have tremendously resilient temperaments that allow them to overcome early disadvantages. (Even among people who are sexually abused as children, roughly a third show few serious aftereffects in adulthood.) And it’s in part because life is complicated. A child with a poor attachment pattern with his mother might meet a mentor or an aunt who will teach him how to relate. Some children have the ability to “use” other people, to attract attachment figures even if their parents are not doing the job. But these early parental attachments do open up a pathway; they foster an unconscious working model of how the world works.

Many studies have traced how early attachment patterns influence people over the course of their lives. They’ve found, for example, that Germany has more avoidant babies than the United States, and Japan has more anxious ones. One of the most impressive studies is based in Minnesota and summarized in The Development of the Person by Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson and Collins.

Sroufe and his team have followed 180 children and their families for over three decades. They began testing about three months before the children were born (to evaluate the personalities of the parents), and they have observed, measured, and tested them in myriad ways since, in all aspects of their lives, and always with multiple rigorous independent observers.

The results of this study do not overturn common sense, but they do reinforce it in impressive ways. The first striking finding is most of the causal arrows flow from parent to child. It’s obviously true that irritable or colicky children are harder to attach to and calm and sunny children are easier to attach to. Nonetheless, the key factor is parental sensitivity. Parents with communicative, interacting personalities tended to produce securely attached children. Parents with memories of good relationships with their own parents also tend to produce securely attached children. Sensitive parents can securely attach to difficult children and overcome genetic disadvantages.

Another striking finding is that people develop coherently. Children who were rated securely attached at one age, tended to get the same rating at another age, unless some horrible event intervened, like the death of a parent or abuse at home. “In general, our study strongly supported the predictive power of childhood experience,” the authors write. Sensitive early care predicted competence at every subsequent age.

Third, attachment patterns correlated well with school performance. Some researchers think that, if they measure a kid’s IQ, they can easily predict how well the kid will fare academically. The Sroufe study suggests that social and emotional factors are also incredibly powerful. Attachment-security and caregiver-sensitivity ratings were related to reading and math scores throughout the school years. Children with insecure or avoidant attachments were much more likely to develop behavior problems at school. Kids who had dominating, intrusive, and unpredictable caregivers at six months were much more likely to be inattentive and hyperactive by school age.

By observing quality of care measures at forty-two months, the Sroufe researchers could predict with 77 percent accuracy who would drop out of high school. Throwing in IQ and test-achievement data did not allow researchers to improve on that prediction’s accuracy. The children who remained in school generally knew how to build relationships with their teachers and peers. At age nineteen, they reported having at least one “special” teacher who was “in their corner.” Those who dropped out didn’t know how to build relationships with adults. Most reported having no special teachers and “many of them looked at the interviewer as if an unfathomable question had been asked.”

Attachment patterns in early childhood also helped predict the quality (though not the quantity) of other relationships later in life, especially romantic relationships. They strongly predict whether a child will go on to become a leader at school. They predict teenage self-confidence levels, social involvement, and social competence.

Children also tend to replicate their parent’s behavior when they themselves have kids. Forty percent of the parents who had suffered from abuse while young went on to abuse their own children, while all but one of the mothers with a history of supportive care went on to provide adequate care for their own kids.

Sroufe and his team observed children with their parents as they played games and tried to solve certain puzzles. Then, twenty years later, they observed their subjects, now parents, play the same games with their own kids. Sometimes the results were eerily alike, as they describe in one case:

When Ellis seeks help from his mother as he struggles with a problem, she rolls her eyes at the ceiling and laughs. When he finally manages to solve the problem, his mother says, “Now see how stubborn you were.” Two decades later, as Ellis watches his son Carl struggle with the same problem, he leans away from the child, laughing and shaking his head. Later he taunts the child by pretending to raise the candy out of the box, then dropping it as the child rushes to try to get it. In the end he has to solve the problem for Carl and says, “You didn’t do that, I did. You’re not as smart as me.”

The Complexity of Life

If you had asked Harold as an adult which sort of attachment style his parents had established, he would have told you he was securely attached. He remembered the happy holidays and the bonds with Mom and Dad. And it’s true; most of the time his parents were attuned to his needs and Harold developed secure models. Harold grew into an open and trusting boy. Knowing that he’d been loved in the past, he assumed he’d be loved in the future. He had a tremendous hunger for social interaction. When things went wrong, when he fell into one of his self-hating moods, he didn’t withdraw (much) or lash out (much). He threw himself at other people and expected that they would welcome him into their lives and help him solve his problems. He talked to others and asked for their help. He entered new environments, confident that he could make friends there.

But real life can never be completely reduced to a typology. Harold also suffered from certain terrors and felt certain needs that his parents could never comprehend. They simply had no experience with some of the things he was going through. It was as if he had a hidden spiritual layer that they lacked, terrors they could not understand, and aspirations they could not share.

When Harold was seven, he came to dread Saturdays. He would wake up in the morning, aware that his parents were going to go out that evening, as they almost always did. As the hours stretched by, he would tell himself that he must not cry when they left. He would pray to God during the afternoon, “Please, God, don’t let me cry. Please don’t let me cry.”

He would be out in the backyard, looking at ants, or up in his room, playing with his toys, but thoughts of doom were never far away. He knew that parents were supposed to go out at night and boys were supposed to accept this bravely and without crying. But he knew this was a rule he could not follow, no matter how desperately he tried. Week after week, he dissolved into tears and scrambled toward them as they closed the door and left. For years, babysitters had clawed and wrestled and strained to hold him back.

His parents told him to be brave and to be a big boy. He knew and accepted the code he was supposed to follow, and he had a thorough knowledge of his own disgrace. The world was divided between boys who did not cry when their parents went out and him, alone—who could not do what he was supposed to do.

Rob and Julia tried various strategies to avoid these collapses. They reminded him that he went away to school every weekday without any fear or anxiety. But this didn’t allay Harold’s absolute certainty that he would cry and do wrong even though he desperately wanted to do right.

One afternoon, Rob caught Harold furtively sneaking around the house, turning on every light and closing every closet door. “Are you scared when we leave?” he asked. Of course Harold said no, meaning yes. Rob decided to take him on a little tour of the house to show him that there was nothing to be afraid of. They walked into every room, and Rob showed him how empty each was. Rob looked at the small empty rooms as incontrovertible proof that everything was safe. Harold looked into the vast empty chambers as incontrovertible proof that some formless evil was lurking there. “See? There’s nothing to worry about,” Rob said. Harold understood that this was the sort of thing adults said when they looked at something truly terrifying. He nodded glumly.

Julia sat him down for a conversation and she told him she wanted him to be brave. His Saturday-evening scenes were getting out of hand, she said. And this led to one of those comic misunderstandings that are woven into the fabric of childhood. Harold had never heard the expression “out of hand” before, and for some reason he imagined his punishment for crying would be that they would chop off his hands. He imagined some tall thin man in a long coat and long scraggly hair with stiltlike legs sweeping in with great scissors. A few weeks ago, he had decided—again, for confused reasons only a child can really follow—that he cried when his parents left because he ate his food too fast. And now he was going to lose his hands. He thought about blood spurting out from his wrists. He thought about trying to eat dinner with two stumps and whether he would still be able to eat too fast. All this was going through his head as Julia patiently talked to him, and he assured her he would not cry. Like a press secretary, there was an official position he knew he must repeat in public. Inside, he knew he would definitely cry.

Toward evening, he could hear his mother’s hair dryer—a sign that the end was near. A solitary pot of water was boiling on the stove, for the macaroni and cheese he would eat alone. The babysitter arrived.

Rob and Julia put on their coats and headed for the door. Harold stood in the hall. The crying itself began as a series of slight tremors in his chest and stomach. Then he felt his torso heaving as he tried to hold it still. The pressure of tears welled up in his eyes, and he pretended they were not visible as he began to feel his nose tickle and his jaw tremble. Then his innards broke loose. He was convulsed by sobs, tears splashing down on the floor, making no attempt to hide them or wipe them away. This time he didn’t move his feet or scramble to them. He just stood there alone in the hallway, with his parents at the door and the babysitter behind him, quaking in on himself.

“I’m bad. I’m bad,” he thought. His shame welled up and swept over him. He was the boy who cries. And in the turmoil he got the causation wrong. It seemed that his parents were leaving because he was crying.

A few minutes after they left, Harold brought the blanket from his bed, surrounded himself with his stuffed-toy animals, and built a fort out of them. Children project souls into their favorite stuffed animals and commune with them in the way adults commune with religious icons. Years later he would remember a happy childhood, but it was interwoven with painful separations, confusions, misapprehensions, traumas, and mysteries. This is why all biographies are inadequate; they can never capture the inner currents. This is why self-knowledge is limited. Only a few remarkable people can sense the way early experience has built models in the brain. Later in life we build fictions and theories to paper over the mystery of what is happening deep inside, but in childhood, the inexplicableness of the world is still vivid and fresh, and sometimes hits with terrifying force.