I was fortunate to spend the 1984-1985 year at the center. I was just 43 years old and at a very important point in my career. At Minnesota we had started one of the most ambitious longitudinal studies of development ever conducted in 1975. We were following 200 children in great detail from before birth onward (they are now 40 years old and the study continues). The principal goal, and the title of the book we ultimately published in 2005, was to understand the development of the person. When I was young this did not seem immodest, just an important thing to understand. And by the time we started we had attachment theory to guide us.
In the early years this was an overwhelming project because we directly observed each child 11 times in the first 18 months and were scrambling to create assessment tools in advance of each age. We were still seeing them yearly starting at age 5. Moreover, we were about to start a series of summer camps where observations could be very detailed. Someone needed to get out of the fray, to step back and think this through. What a time to come to the center, a perfect place for contemplation. Even more important, the year I was there the cadre of social scientists assembled included some of the most prominent developmental scholars in the country. There were six who studied the developing mind of the child and six of us who were primarily interested in understanding emotional life, especially disorder. Two other prominent scholars joined our study group monthly.
Our group included Thomas Anders, Robert Emde, Herbert Leiderman, Arthur Parmellee, David Reiss, Arnold Sameroff, Daniel Stern, and myself. Stern was just completing his very influential book titled, “The Interpersonal World of the Infant.” In this book he put forward the idea that from the countless interactions between infant and caregiver, the infant abstracts and represents the principal features of relationships. This idea, of course, is quite similar to John Bowlby’s inner working models concept, wherein models of the social world are also said to derive from the history of interaction with the caregiver. Bowlby (who had also been a fellow at the Center a few years earlier) focused on the infant’s representation of self and other in terms of actions and expectable outcomes. If I do X it is expectable that mother will do Y. As one learns that the caregiver will be responsive, one also learns that one can elicit effects. This also converged with ideas we were also developing at Minnesota. My wife, June Sroufe, and I elaborated this idea to include beginning representations of the very nature of relationships. When one is in need the other responds (or the converse). This allowed us to strongly predict empathic responses of preschoolers to peers from attachment history
The convergence of these ideas led to many fruitful discussions in our group. The 8 of us worked hard together to come up with a new formulation of psychological problems, ultimately published in a book called, “Relationship Disorders in Early Childhood.” Our basic idea was quite radical and counter to much psychiatric work then and now. The idea was that in the early years most disorders are actually disorders of relationships and that later individual problems not only are prominently manifest in relationship disturbances but derive from the history of disturbed relationship experiences.
This group work was influenced by our Minnesota project. Likewise, the ideas of these scholars, and the ideas we created together had a major impact on our subsequent work. From this point on there were always two prongs to the Minnesota study. The first was to understand the organization of typical social development, how one phase built upon each previous phase and paved the way for the next. The second prong was to understand the development of disorder. We were part of the unfolding of a major new discipline called “developmental psychopathology,” the study of the origin and course of disorder. An incredible amount of research has been spawned by this new discipline.
The year at the Center undoubtedly had a major impact on the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation and on me personally. It not only provided an opportunity to read and to write but, perhaps most important, an opportunity to think.
Alan Sroufe
Professor Emeritus
Institute of Child Development
University of Minnesota
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