Look Who's Coming: Dr. Peter Fonagy

AT A GLANCE

KNOWN FOR | Fonagy is an internationally known scholar, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who focuses on early attachment relationships.

LAST SEEN IN THE U.S. | He was a panelist on part one of the 12-part "Charlie Rose Science Series" on PBS.

Fonagy, 54, spoke from his home in London, England, to staff writer Danny Hooley in advance of his Feb. 24 lecture and workshops at The Friday Center in Chapel Hill.

Q - What steered you toward this particular area of psychology?

A - That's a good question -- it's been so long ago, I don't quite remember. I have always worked with children. I gradually became interested in how early relationships affected a child's development later on.

Q - What kind of adult behaviors -- outside of outright abuse, obviously -- are most damaging to a child's psyche during the early years?

A - That's a very negative way of looking at it. I'd much rather look at it in a far more positive way. It is: What can we do with kids that will make them into happier adults? I believe quite strongly, although it is a little bit speculative, that human beings are immensely flexible. One reason they are so successful is because we have a capacity to adapt to very, very different types of environments. What I have come to believe is that parenting behavior is there to tell the child, to warn the child about the kind of environment they're likely to find themselves in.

Q - For example?

A - If it's a resource-rich environment -- the parents have lots of time to spend with their kids -- then the kid is brought up in a way that emphasizes their capacity to relate to others. In other environments that are very resource-poor, in whatever way, the kid needs to learn ... to cope on their own, and the parenting behavior that may appear to neglect or ignore the child is actually serving an evolutionary function of preparing the child for an environment where they're left to struggle on their own and make sure that they have enough to survive.

Q - That's OK, then?

A - I'm very much of the view that the range of different ways that we can behave toward our kids all have some adaptive value. But sometimes, given the society that we live in -- for example, because we are too busy, because both parents work, and they have many, many preoccupations -- they send an evolutionary message to their child that's the wrong one, that's telling them 'Look, I don't have enough time for you, this is a resource-poor environment, you'd better manage on your own.' That was probably a very useful message when there was not much food about, and the parents had to struggle very hard to find enough food for themselves and the child. In those situations, it was very good for the infant to learn, very early on, the lesson of managing independently. But that's not the same message that we necessarily want to give when both parents come home very late, and they don't pay that much attention to the kid because they are too preoccupied with their work.

Q - What can parents in that situation do?

A - What I'm interested in, is, how we can do things in an intelligent and clever way that doesn't mean changing our lifestyle or doing things very differently, but actually uses science to help us develop easy and effective ways of teaching parents to spend time with their child without modifying the way that they need to live, but to know what is important to do in the time that they have with the child.

Q - For example?

A - Guilty parents come home, having worked really hard, and they feel that the most important thing to do is to really focus on the child and do homework with the child, and so on. Actually the most important thing might be to relax with the child -- to spend time not feeling under pressure. Just play.