But detachment is never complete, and the infant is dissatisfied with this state. Observation shows that “the search for something to do (seize, touch, handle) is striking”: “the infant could not succeed in maintaining its avoidance of the parent without the aid of the object seized”.11 So there is compulsiveness, even desperation in searching for substitute objects in the absence of desired human responses. When later on the avoidant person creates objects, little wonder if the new objects have negativity and compulsiveness coded into them. Substitute objects are a second best, the products of repeated trials and frustrations in making authentic human contact. They do not fully answer the need for a “secure base” from which to explore the possibilities of life, and they are likely to be “transitional” only to further frustrating attempts to find security in relationships with other persons. Yet local and limited regulation of mood does reward creative efforts.
Unresolved anger contributes strongly to the perils of childhood and adult relationships. Research by Heinecke and Westheimer makes clear how hidden eruptive anger results from avoidant attachment: “over the period of separation and in the separation environment, angry behavior is shown increasingly toward objects, adults, and other children without apparent provocation”. They showed further that after long separations of three to twenty weeks, avoidant children failed to recognize the primary attachment figure mother, but not father who was more readily acknowledged. After an interval, anxious clinging to mother set in, along with “unpredictable or inexplicable bouts of hostility and negativism”.12 Heinecke and Westheimer theorized that the initial avoidant response upon reunion was a defensive attempt to control intense distress and anger that could become eruptive seemingly without cause. Further observations of avoidant children clearly show patterns of unprovoked attacks and threats of attack on mother and on toys. That this is a strategy to maintain maternal contact, and hence self-organization promoting survival, may be hard to credit but there are good reasons to think so. That its maladaptive features may sometimes outweigh survival value should also be considered. We will look at generalized male artists’ anger towards women in these terms, suggesting that it has less to do with emotional limitations in the woman than with the inappropriate carry-over of the male artist’s defensive strategies. The avoidant artist has an unexamined defensive legacy which seems to him perfectly ordinary and justified, because he knows no other.
Strategizing (erotic) approach to females, but unconsciously expecting rebuff, he is defensively ready with angry control. The problem is to convince the reader that biographical evidence actually supports such an interpretation, or at least strongly points in that direction.
A background of scientific findings should be kept in mind. Experimental procedures videotape mothers of avoidant children showing, for example, their aversion to physical contact, speaking sarcastically, mocking, or staring down their offspring. I can offer no such concrete evidence for the subjects studied here but will bring together clusters of impressions from the earliest possible phases of development which the reader, bearing in mind attachment theory, will want to consider. While psychobiography is not exact science, it is the only way of elucidating human behavior which may look arbitrary and inexplicable but follows from the earliest formative experiences. By pointing directions and setting expectations, perhaps the limited data for these explanatory studies of artists will be supplemented by others and, further, these examples will bring forward more fully documented lives where the question of avoidance is still better illuminated.
Further assistance in understanding artists psychobiographically comes from the work of Patricia crittenden and also Kim Bartholomew. This is difficult and demanding theorizing but well worth taking into account in this first attempt to apply attachment theory in discussing male artists’ compromising portrayals of females. Bartholomew’s close look at subjects who avoid intimacy finds the source of this defense “in early attachment experiences in which emotional vulnerability comes to be associated with parental rejection”.13 Avoidance of intimacy is a strategy by which the adult carries forward from childhood the expectation of rejection; he or she guards against this possibility by being emotionally remote. This is a largely unconscious process integral to the personality. Two styles of avoidant personality organization are distinguished: the fearful and the dismissing. While the fearful style arises from actual abuse, as by an alcoholic parent, the dismissing arises from less traumatizing parental rejections characterized by absence of contact rather than unwanted contact. The implication is that the fearful defence (more likely in females) has a more constricting effect on the range of emotional responses available to the child and adult. As Bartholomew puts it, “This distinction is represented by differing models of the self: the fearful view themselves as being undeserving of the love and support of others, and the dismissing possess a positive self-model that minimizes the subjective awareness of distress or social needs that might activate the desire for close attachments”.14 The distinction is useful to bear in mind as the theory invoked here largely, but not exclusively, concerns the dismissing style of avoidance in which the male artist displays a positive self-model, even to the point of narcissism, but is basically cold and unloving, while being erotically driven. At this point we are looking only for the most useful comprehensive attachment theories into which an array of biographical particulars can be placed. Theory helps to make visible what is likely to remain opaque in the common sense assembly of information offered by conventional biography. its application should help the reader to decide whether the most bizarre and challenging artistic imagery may not, after all, have a clear explanation that adds much more to human understanding than do the artistic products themselves.
The most relevant theoretical advance in thinking about creativity follows from the insights of Bowlby, Ainsworth and Main. Patricia Crittenden’s idea of the avoidant/coercive (A/C) personality style is germane to our discussion of the four artists and should be kept in mind throughout. This refinement of attachment theory does more than any other to clarify the artist’s defended insularity and outward self-sufficiency which mask more or less hostile wishes to coerce, control or damage other persons, especially women. We have seen that typically the avoidant child will verbally or physically coerce, or even attack, the mother from whom, paradoxically, he appears to be disconnected. The message is of resentful control to win back her attention while punishing her unavailability. The child needs to preserve a sense of safe contact but cannot admit to feeling fear at its absence, the lashing out admitting that he is at a loss to know how to improve the situation. Thus, an element of irrational disorganization enters, but disorganization is not the defining description of A/C personality as coercive anger may at least secure attention if not win affection.