At its core, attachment theory is about detachment and how we tolerate it — or don’t. Most people are familiar with the theory from popular culture, where it’s used to talk about how our early experiences with attachment and security might shape our relationships later in life. And for billions of people, one of our most significant and continuous relationships we have is with our phones. We relate to our devices with a wide spectrum of feelings and attitudes: ambivalence, need, hate, frustration, exhaustion, suspicion, dependence.
As a member of the hinge generation — the last to not be digitally tagged and monitored from birth — becoming a parent opened up another track on which these feelings live. There is the judgment and shaming of parents for relying on screens to distract kids, or to “stand in” for a parent, or for not using screens the “right” way (creatively, educationally, etc.). There are also enormous panics about social media and phones and the kids’ brains and their personalities — but also our own. The unignorable factor is the power that parents have: I control how much and in what ways my kids relate to these technologies, at least when they are with me. I grimace at the computer-generated animated series they ask to watch and I often feel guilty when I indulge their requests because I need an hour to finish a piece of work or just to relax — or to look at my phone, an activity that usually ends with feelings of frustration, emptiness, stress, or depression. When we agonize over kids and technology, how much are we projecting our own fears and anxieties about connection and disconnection onto them?
ATTACHMENT THEORY EMERGED FROM RESEARCH IN PRISONS AND PRISON NURSERIES.
When I put this question to Hannah Zeavin, intellectual historian at Berkeley and author of the new book Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century, she turned to the work of Wilfred Bion, a British psychoanalyst known for his theory of “the container and the contained” and the origins of thought. Bion says that “being able to tolerate frustration is where thinking is born,” Zeavin explained. An infant’s first “thoughts” lie in external emotional and sensory forces, many of which cause them discomfort (such as hunger, for example). Such feelings are, for the baby, unthinkable. Ideally, somebody (the mother) steps in and thinks for them, attending to their needs. We have to learn to tolerate discomfort and frustration in order to be able to think in a meaningful way. “And if we can’t tolerate frustration,” Zeavin says, “we might turn to material culture, to the world of things,” as a way of avoidance.
Mother Media shows that our intertwined anxieties about our screens and our children are nothing new — that the ur-example of anxiety about transmission is the mother-baby bond. The book is a history of how ideas about motherhood and about media technology shape one another. Across a century in which the family was left on its own to reproduce itself with ever-decreasing social support, just as media studies was emerging, the figure of the mother became abstracted to the point of becoming a medium herself, a zone of transmission onto the child. Motherhood and media are also sites of social panics that often mirror one another: Good or bad mothers make good or bad children, societies, and nations, as do good or bad tech and screen habits.
Mother Media traces the ways different human sciences produced ideas, products, and attitudes that traveled across race and class structures, all while reinforcing the myth of an ideal white, nuclear, hetero family unit. The book also demonstrates that the ideas that underwrite some of our most common-place attitudes and practices related to care, attachment, and technology are politically flexible, showing how theories and practices have been used both to reinforce and to fight against systems of incarceration, racism, and sexism.
Zeavin and I talked about Mother Media on Zoom between London and Oakland in March, a few weeks before the book was published. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
YASMIN EL-RIFAE You have said that people often assume that you’re a psychoanalyst, which perhaps isn’t surprising given the work you’ve done with The Psychosocial Foundation and Parapraxis magazine [Zeavin co-founded both projects, which have channeled psychoanalysis’s revived popularity among the left.] Your first book, The Distance Cure, was about teletherapy and how therapy has always been mediated across distance in some ways — letters, telephones, now Zoom. Where does this new book fit in relation to your previous work?
HANNAH ZEAVIN In that book, I offered this idea of the medium inside, and at the end of it, I was really interested in what happens when the call drops. Does every patient tolerate it the same? I don’t think so. For some people, it flies them into a rage; for other people, it will make them withdrawn, and other people don’t really care. I wanted to think about why that might be and why some people might be really comfortable presencing across distance when for others, it’s super dysregulating. And being someone really indebted to psychoanalysis, thought, Well, this must come from somewhere really early. I had written a book on the media-analytic-patient triad, and I wondered what would it be like to bring that backward in time — not in historical but in personal time, to the mother-media-children as a triad.
YER In Mother Media, you chart this incessant circling and intense interest in the mother by all these psychoanalysts and entrepreneurs and researchers. As I was reading, I felt this build-up of a feeling of “back the fuck off.” Because it’s clear that though they’re obsessed with the primacy of the mother, it’s the mother as a hollowed-out figure that we can transmit through. If we think of motherhood as a site of subjectivity, an experience that changes us and makes and remakes us, where is she?
HZ It turns out that at the moment of automating child care, human researchers — mostly psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and pediatricians — who otherwise would fight to the death, intellectually all agreed on one thing, which is that the mother was prime and that she was transmitting. They’re all saying that is what is happening in the dyad: The mother is a medium of care and of instruction to the child. And then in these new fields of media psychology and media studies, media gurus are all like, “Oh my god, we can use media to stand in for mother.” And this is a very U.S. and U.S. empire story that I try to tell. There’s a chapter on Sesame Street, which [has become] a truly international corporation. Sesame Street was developed to do the work of standing in for mother. So was the baby monitor. These things are totally normalized in contemporary parenting. I wanted to look at those stories and see how on the one hand, we have a media theory of mothering, evinced by psychologists and psychoanalysts, and on the other, a parenting theory of media across the same period.
Ruth Cowan, an early feminist historian of technology, wrote a book that sold zillions of copies way beyond the academy, called More Work for Mother. The argument of that title is: You think the dishwasher helps mother? You’re bonkers. What’s happening is the contraction of labor to mother because kids aren’t helping and husband isn’t helping; he’s now doing only waged labor. These automated processes look nice, but by the gesture, by the hour, they don’t help. I love this book, but it’s also a product of its 1980s time. The kids fall out a bit when they’re no longer helping out in the home … the labor of childminding is absent in the book. It could be called More Work for Wife. So I thought I could offer a sort of supplementary history about the childminding part.
YER You trace how attachment theory emerged from research in prisons and prison nurseries. And you write about how the theory was then used in prisons to transfer the environment for secure attachment to someplace else when the mother is unavailable — that is, incarcerated. But you also write about incarcerated mothers and their lawyers using attachment theory to try to argue for their maternal rights and winning in some cases — using the theory that was in some sense extracted from them as a social group, or at least from the site to which they are confined.
HZ One thing I try to show in all of my work is that so much of the psy-ences are really flexible politically. They can be marshaled to do all kinds of work. The language of attachment has bled into the culture from therapeutic culture, but not only does it come from the prison, but it has been used flexibly there. The very tool that suggests that it is the stable mother (i.e., the non-incarcerated mother), regardless of biological ties, that should be with the baby can also be used by the biological incarcerated mother to say, “No, the problem is the prison.” In both cases, the prison becomes this problem, one of either separation or of containment, and attachment theory can be called on to say, “No, the problem is the prison, and the family should be together,” or, as in traditional U.S. practice since from the plantation onward, to say, “No, that mother and child deserve to be separated.”
YER Attachment theory seems very connected to the ideas you talk about in relation to your first book and the question of re-finding the mediatic environment — the thing that allows us to connect. I’m thinking about what you said about people tolerating the drop in the call — what about tolerating the idea of going offline? When we talk about unplugging, going offline, it carries the idea that we will lose something, some connection, and we’re afraid of that. At the same time, we’re also afraid of overusing our devices, becoming subsumed, overwhelmed, etc. There’s a terrible imbalance for most people between their capacities as transmitters and the amount being transmitted onto them.
HZ [It’s also] a political problem. The classic example of our time, on the left, is what do we do about Twitter? On the one hand, we wouldn’t know at all about Gaza if it wasn’t for Twitter and Instagram, but on the other hand, of course those corporations are feeding us algorithmic politics. Those kinds of double binds, I think, are inherent to late-stage capitalism, but I do think the psychical undertone is exactly what you point to, both in terms of being transmitted onto and transmitting out, and I think that a very ur-example is the mother-baby bond and mother-baby interaction.
YER You’re right — we wouldn’t know about Gaza if it wasn’t for these companies, but those companies are also part of the world and politics and mass consciousnesses that have contributed to the enablement of the genocide and of the impunity for this violence. My point is not to be puritanical or defeatist, but there is some work that we need to do to find routes of, well, mediating our use and interaction with screens, and I don’t think we’re there. I think we are also entering a moment where the ways that we are tracked through our phones are going to be used more explicitly against students and activists in a U.S. context, toward deportations and other punishments for political expression or organizing. The phones really do mirror that ur-relationship, an extremely heightened ambivalent or contradictory relationship: We “need” them, and they can make us feel “love,” but we are also going to be destroyed by them. I want to talk about the book’s coda, which is about Waldorf schools and their fascist history. It made me remember looking for nurseries for my son in Cairo a few years ago and visiting a German nursery that was much coveted, with enormous waiting lists and so on, and walking away thinking, These people are going to try to civilize me, as an Egyptian. The way they talked about teaching the kids table manners, but particularly the way they emphasized that they would lock the gates at 9 a.m. on the dot and that kids couldn’t be dropped off after that … how does that fit into anyone’s life? The parents’, the small child’s? It made me want to withdraw, to protect my kid from this influence. It resonated with the anxieties that you describe in the book about schools, nurseries, nannies, technologies, and, ultimately, motherhood as medium — all of these mediatic forces and what influences they have.
HZ One of the overarching questions in the book is: Is the panic around motherized media about purity? And I argue that it is. It’s about purity in a post-World War II, Cold War context: the story of domestic containment, of the mother being the one who secures us both against fascism and communism, keeps the kids on the “straight” and narrow. [It’s about] the huge pathologizing of queer children, of “delinquent” children, of the Black family. But I wanted to return to this idea of purity and fascism at the end. I wanted to argue from my perspective and my training, that now, even a vaccine is a medium: We’re seeing the trad wife being like, “I’m not vaccinated so my womb is pure and ready to bear the next generation” or whatever. All this really ill stuff. I do take aim at [Rudolf] Steiner and Waldorf schools, which have a very particular quasi-fascist history that I detail in the book; it is very focused on anti-mediation. I tell a story about a Waldorf middle schooler in the hospital after tonsil surgery in the 1970s. The hospital wheeled a TV into the room to distract him from the pain, and he screamed, despite just having had throat surgery, because the TV was considered to be such a pernicious interlocutor. So yes, it’s very disciplining of families. To be a Waldorf family is to hand your family over to it. I also wanted to think about families that are anti-mediation on the left. I look at the MOVE family [MOVE was a Philadelphia- based movement of Black radicals; in 1985, police bombed the group’s home, killing 11 people]. These two very different U.S. cases effervesce at the same time. There’s this new-age 1970s moment where Waldorf schooling really popularized in the U.S. and also these really left experiments in family life on the commune. That’s where the book ends — in thinking about this purity panic but also its really different political purchases.
YER It’s super early Saturday morning for you. We’re here talking, and I know you’re also at home with Mally. You don’t reference your own mother-ing in the book at all, which is something I think I’ve learned to expect from a lot of literature. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, but I think we all feel a pressure to be reflexive in this very direct way.
HZ So there was a wish to have me and my five-year-old in the book.
YER Your editor wanted you to do that? Or someone else did?
“IS THE PANIC AROUND MOTHERIZED MEDIA ABOUT PURITY?”
HZ Let’s just say that there’s this expectation that if you’re gonna write about motherhood, then your matresence is there. But I just didn’t want to do that, mainly because I didn’t want to give advice. That’s also part of my psychoanalytic heritage — I’m really allergic to advice. Most people are really allergic to advice. Some people give it beautifully, and sometimes, I follow it. But this book is so much about the violence of expertise, so for me to give advice? No thank you. And I’m not an expert at mothering. I’ve mothered one child. I started working on the book before becoming a mother. It influenced things on the level of beta testing — what was intellectual became libidinal, in my body. The writing was of course shaped around his reproductive rhythms and my rhythms with him. Shout out to friends who will come over and do endless geography quizzes with Mal and cheer him on. The people who did watch Mal and helped reproduce my son — and then their absence —really do shape the text. The book is dedicated to both my mother and my son — I was also raised by someone. And the real joke there is that if the first book is about working out my psychoanalytic inheritance and distance and intimacy as a child of divorce, the second book is very much about my father, who did raise me quite a bit in front of a screen because he’s a filmmaker, and so much of my childhood environment was the movies. I could lecture Intro to Film right now because it’s my childhood. So also all the ways that that’s thought about and not thought about once it’s in a father’s hands rather than the mother’s. We all have these personal things that drive us to particular projects, and some people don’t avow them, but I’m all for avowing them.
Yasmin El-Rifae is the author of Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution (Verso, 2022). She is a co-organizer of The Palestine Festival of Literature.
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