ABSTRACT
Children commonly experience trauma when they are hospitalized for injures or illness or when their parents die, leave, divorce, become ill or depressed, or are chronically self-absorbed. Both the body and mind are built to handle trauma. Even minor trauma poorly tended, like an infected wound, can cause permanent damage and pain. One bad experience, one trauma, changed the dogs’ view of the world; all perceptions were now filtered through fear. Scientists cannot experimentally manipulate people’s lives as they do monkeys, but they can measure the effect of what are commonly called experiments of nature–chance circumstances that seem as if they were designed to test a theory. The Anna Freud group was investigating a central tenet of attachment theory: that based on relationships with caretakers, the child builds an internal “working model” of the social world, which becomes the pattern for future relationships. One way to think about attachment is that each attachment reflects a particular theory of mind.
