Cerebralizing Attachment: How Have Parent-Child Relationships Come to be Explained as Brain Facts?

• In Event: Neurosocieties: Interdisciplinary Explorations of the Brain, Culture and Ethics 1

Abstract

With advances in neuroscience, we have come to observe the ascendancy of a certain view of the human, which equates our condition of being minded with having brain states. As the proponents of biomedical psychiatry have embraced this cerebralizing agenda to construct etiological models, the neurobiology of attachment has emerged as a prominent subfield based on the research activity of a network of laboratories in North America. From the 1980s onwards, the knowledge output of these laboratories has led to the identification of certain interactional states in caregiving relationships that contribute to early brain maturation. This investigative paradigm has thus brought to the fore notions such as neuroplasticity and resilience while also shaping popular discourse on parenting and interpersonal intimacy. As neurobiological knowledge on presumably stable cerebro-substrates (e.g., oxytocin, the "cuddle hormone") acquires extra-scientific gloss, a question remains concerning the social processes in which its objects have come to be declared natural. How is the lived complexity of caregiving constituted as an object of naturalistic inquiry? In what ways do the intimate features of interpersonal relationships come to be parsed into measurable biological processes? This paper provides a contextual analysis of the research activity of two neuroscience laboratories that have played a key role in the construction of "attachment" as a natural kind. Drawing on both historical and ethnographic evidence, I explore the investigative practices of an experimental system that have led to the characterizations of early emotional relationships as "brain facts," which travel across various medico-scientific and social worlds.

Author

• Bican Polat, Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows