1.
Goddesses as
Inner Images
A fragile baby girl was put in my friend Ann’s arms, a “blue baby”
with a congenital heart defect. Ann was emotionally moved as she
held the small infant and looked at her face. She also felt a deep ache
in the center of her chest under her breast bone (or sternum). Within
moments, she and that baby had forged a bond. After that, Ann
visited the child regularly, maintaining contact as long as it was
possible. The infant did not survive open-heart surgery. She lived
for only a few months, yet she made a profound impression on Ann.
At that first meeting, she touched an inner image imbued with
emotion that lay deep within Ann’s psyche.
In 1966, Anthony Stevens, a psychiatrist and author, studied at-
tachment bonds in infancy at the Metera Babies Centre, near Athens,
Greece. What he observed happening between nurses and these
orphaned infants paralleled Ann’s experience. He found that a special
bond was formed between a baby and a specific nurse through
mutual delight and attraction, a process that was like falling in love.
Stevens’s observations belie the “cupboard love theory,” which
postulates that bonds gradually form between a mother and a child
through caretaking and feeding. He found that no less than a third
of the infants became attached to nurses who had done little or no
routine caretaking of the child before the bond formed. Afterward,
the nurse invariably did much more for the child, usually because
she came to reciprocate the attachment but also because the child
would often refuse to be tended