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To the Editor:

Selma Fraiberg's attempt to explain the “diseases of non-attachment” might easily be questioned by examination of her sources and method of argument [“The Origins of Human Bonds,” December 1967]. But much more serious are the implications she draws, for those quite miss the point as a diagnosis of societal problems.

Suppose we grant that there are diseases of non-attachment and that they do develop from maternal deprivation. That is surely enough. But Professor Fraiberg's desire to move from the scene of family intimacy to the societal scene involves her in a potentially disastrous non sequitur. For she hurries on to draw the implication that many criminals, prostitutes (and even Head Start children), are the way they are through having been infected with the diseases of non-attachment.

Now, to diagnose someone as being “sick” is both to classify him, and to suggest that the only way out for him is to get well; that is, for him to change. But the symptoms Professor Fraiberg identifies are, by another interpretation, symptoms of robust health. Inability to attach oneself to anyone is surely a disease; it is also surely extremely rare. And in any case, to assert “inability” is often but an explanation for the inability of analysts to explain the behavior they see as wholly motivated. More common by far is the lack of willingness to attach oneself to false, inauthentic persons . . . who would lead one to sacrifice one's dignity for a self-destructive end. Such behavior is healthy. “Impairment of intellectual functioning” is so slippery, as, so far, to have defied the attempts of first-rate scientists to devise culture-free tests of it. And impulse control, the third of Professor Fraiberg's symptom indicators, is a name that those who can afford to indulge theirs apply to those who cannot afford to release theirs. . . .(Kinsey reported, long ago, that while members of the, middle class in late adolescence are diddling one another, members of the lowest class are acting in a more mature manner)!. . . .

There is no point, though, in arguing about whether the client is sick or not. Rather it is high time we were done altogether with sickness theories of social behavior. I know we are living at a time when the complexity of the world makes us all long for simplified explanations of behavior. How are we to explain the motives of the terrible Chinese, or all the cruel, violent people on the streets? Since we seem to be unable to do anything about these things, the cause must be something very basic in man's nature—a drive, no less. . . .

The trouble is that what needs explaining about man is not that he attacks other human beings. The point of our times is not aggression. The Bible itself virtually begins with a story of murder. The point is, instead, organized violence, and organized aggression, in which individuals in groups destroy others in groups, not from hatred or hostility, but from compassion and love. The central fact about modern warfare is that men do it in the name of sacred ideologies. . . .

And that . . . is the problem. Not the non-attachment Professor Fraiberg talks about but the super-attachment that says not that all men are brothers, but that all men must become our brothers, even if we have to kill them to make them realize it. . . . Love comes first, and aggressiveness is how we realize it.

Edward Gross
Department of Sociology
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington

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