2023-08-03 04:00:03
It is a mini-drama in eight acts, set in a laboratory room. A woman leafs through a magazine. Her baby is playing at her feet. A stranger enters the scene, who starts the conversation, then the mother leaves, entrusting her baby to the newcomer. When she reappears, the unknown disappears in turn, so that a second departure of the mother leaves the baby alone. Finally, the stranger and then the mother return. The entire sequence lasts regarding twenty minutes, during which two psychologists posted behind a two-way mirror whisper observations into a dictaphone, noting all sorts of indications of the child’s behavior.
An unfamiliar place, a new face, separations… With its crescendo of« danger indices » suitable for triggering in a baby from 9 to 18 months the need to get closer to a protective adult, this experimental device evaluates the quality of the bond of attachment of the child to the person who takes care of him. Since the 1970s, the sequence has been played and replayed thousands of times in academic research or early childhood intervention programs. It made it possible to measure the deleterious effects of life in Romanian orphanages. She changed nighttime baby care practices in Israeli kibbutzim. “One of the best studies was done in a poor mountain village in Mexico, where the researchers set up a lab in the school”, says Alan Sroufe, a professor emeritus of child psychology at the University of Minnesota who has trained regarding 900 professionals from six continents in the procedure. According to him, the American psychologist Mary Ainsworth (1913-1999) would have deserved a Nobel Prize for the invention of this universal tool which she had baptized the “strange situation”.
We are then in 1950. At the time, a wife follows her husband, even if she has a doctorate, and that’s how Mary Ainsworth finds herself browsing job advertisements in a London newspaper. The famous Tavistock Clinic, a center for advanced psychoanalytic therapy, is recruiting an assistant for a research project on the consequences of maternal separation in the first years of life. Its director, John Bowlby, has just been entrusted by the World Health Organization (WHO) with a report on the needs of war orphans and displaced children. Raised by governesses, then sent to boarding school at the age of 7, this psychiatrist who lacked nothing except parental affection noticed that babies separated from their mother, even during hospitalization, live deep mourning. With the help of Mary Ainsworth, he delivered a 200-page recommendation to the WHO on the long-term effects of this deficiency, Maternal care and mental health (1951), which will be translated into fourteen languages.
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