sexology

TOUCH AND SEXUALITY

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Touch and Childhood Development
Developmental Neuropsychology of Touch
An Obstacle to Affection

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It has been unusual for the majority of college-level human sexuality texts to discuss the topic of touch, except in the most cursory of descriptions. Most of these texts do not have the word "touch" in their index. Few have more than a page or two on the subject. This is dismaying, for a couple of reasons. The most obvious is that the expression of much of our sexuality occurs through touch and the largest organ of our body, our skin. Also, there is a growing body of writings, theory, and research in the field of touch that is of extreme importance to the studies of human development, health, and sexuality. The contributors to this body of work span the fields of philosophy, medicine, physiology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. This article is a summary and synthesis of this work, with a special emphasis on the findings related to touch and human sexuality.

Touch and Childhood Development

Arguably, it was not until the appearance of the clinical reports by Spitz (in 1945 and 1947) that the seeds of research in the field of touch were sown. Spitz's reports reflect his anguished quest for a solution to the unexplained deaths and pathologies of infants and toddlers in his care. The diagnosis of that era for these terminal children was marasmus, the withering away and dying of no apparent cause. Spitz finally discovered that medicine, good nutrition, and clean surroundings had not the least impact on the tragic outcome. Only what Harlow was to later call contact comfort turned out to be the "cure" for the excruciating deaths of these children. Touch deprivation is probably most damaging to an infant because, unlike the other four senses, the neonate has an extremely small amount of control over somatosensory self-stimulation due to underdeveloped motor control capacities.

In the arena of social behavior and mother-offspring relationships, Harlow could easily and appropriately be called the "father of touch research." His "deprivation and wire mother" primate research remains one of those classic studies in the evolving history of psychology. However, we are only recently discovering just how important Harlow's work was.

Prior to Harlow's research, Freudian thought dominated, even in the informal field of touch. It was generally believed that touch is a somewhat minor component of the more important feeding process provided by a mother to her child. Mother-child attachment (or bonding) was assumed to occur in humans as a primary result of the mother providing food to the infant.

Harlow's studies done between 1962 and 1979 involved taking newborn monkeys from their mothers and raising them in isolation. The young monkeys were deprived of maternal and social touch (i.e., contact comfort). In every other way, the monkeys were very well cared for. They were well fed, their cages kept clean, and their medical needs attended to. They were "merely" isolated from any physical contact with their mother or other monkeys. Even physical contact with the researchers was severely limited.

In his original classic "wire mother" study, Harlow placed the touch-deprived monkeys in a large cage that contained two crude dummy monkeys constructed of wood and chicken wire. One dummy was bare wire with a full baby bottle attached. The monkeys had been regularly nursed from similar bottles. The other dummy was the same as the first, except that it contained no bottle and the chicken wire was wrapped with terry cloth. Placed in this strange environment, the anxious young monkey very quickly attached itself to the cloth-wrapped dummy and continued to cling to it as the hours passed. The infant monkey could easily see the familiar baby bottle no more than a few feet away on the other dummy. Many hours passed. Although growing increasingly distraught and hungry, the infants in these studies would not release their hold on the soft cloth of the foodless dummy. It was soon apparent that the young monkeys would likely dehydrate and starve before abandoning the terry cloth surrogate mother.

As the isolated monkeys grew older, they were observed to display a highly predictable constellation of behavioral symptoms, even when they were later reunited with their mother and social group. They included highly unusual patterns of self-clasping and self-orality; idiosyncratic patterns of repetitive stereotyped activity; an almost total lack of gregariousness or interest in exploring the environment; timidity and withdrawal from virtually all social situations, with concomitant self-directed stereotyped behaviors; obvious aversion to physical contact with others; hyperaggressivity; gross abnormalities in sexual behaviors; and, later in adulthood, the inability to nurture offspring, with failure to nurse, neglect, and abusive behaviors being highly predictable. In addition, negative physical health consequences and hormonal imbalances were noted in these primate studies.

Additional studies by the Harlow team and others clearly demonstrated that the psychoanalytic "wisdom" of the day was incorrect in its assumptions regarding mother-child attachment. At least with infant and young monkeys, there appeared to be a hunger more powerful than the craving for food. It was science's first view of the pervasiveness and intensity of "touch hunger."

Beginning in the same general era as the Harlow investigations was another direction of research in the area of mother-child attachment. These attachment-theory studies were conducted by the British scientist Bowlby and his American colleague, Ainsworth. As a major extension of the work of Lorenz, their investigations focused directly on the ways human mothers and infants succeeded or failed to bond to one another. In general, Bowlby and Ainsworth discovered that there are highly predictable outcomes to the differing styles of early mother-child attachment patterns. More than two decades of scientific research on human parents and their offspring has generated a wealth of vital information regarding essential requirements for normal human development. Affectionate touch versus neglect or punishing touch is a central theme of attachment theory, and much of this work may be viewed as the human research counterpart to the Harlow studies.

Long before infants develop a useful vocabulary, they employ innate and powerful methods to communicate moods, interests, and needs to their caretakers. This is accomplished with a splendid and increasingly sophisticated variety of sounds, movements, and facial expressions. It is a difficult struggle for any infant to teach its parents about himself or herself. However, we know that babies are universally good "teachers." Sadly though, it has been discovered that most parents and caretakers in the United States are less than adequate "students." As with all good teachers, if you have a poor student the teacher must work harder to help the student learn.

Bowlby and Ainsworth learned that, for healthy parent-child attachments, the parent was a good "student." These parents usually noticed, understood, and responded appropriately to the "lessons" offered by the infant or toddler. Almost all the infants' lessons involved touch. They signal to their parents to "pick me up, hold me, feed me, burp me, soothe me, stimulate me, change me, and make the pain or discomfort go away." Of course, occasionally the signal was, "I'm overstimulated, so please leave me alone for a few minutes." These healthy "parent students" and "child teachers" are synchronized to each other, communicating and learning in a rhythm of increasing complexity.

It was found that, for the "inadequately attached" parent and child, there is a great deal of obvious neglect of the offspring by the parent. The parent "students" usually are uninterested in the lessons offered by their daughter or son and generally ignore the signals of the child. When the infant "teacher" tries even harder to interest these parents, the mother or father usually responds with even more neglect or with verbal or physical abuse. These infants rapidly become impatient teachers and the home "classroom" is filled with the turmoil of rapidly escalating frustration of teacher and student. Within the first year or two, these children eventually give up most efforts to "teach," learn to suppress their signals for attention, and are likely to become sullen, chronically miserable, or ill. Whichever child responses occur, the outcome is commonly devastating on many levels for the child, the parent-child attachment, and subsequent relationships as the child grows to adulthood. Grade schools and high schools are filled with severely withdrawn and troublesome, acting-out children and teens who have given up hope of affectionate pleasure and happiness.

Ainsworth's third category of the "anxiously attached" child is not a median category somewhere between the "adequate" and "inadequate" attachment classifications. The parent of the anxiously attached child may sometimes appear to be a "supermom" or "superdad," in that they tend to hold and give just as much, or more, attention to their child than do the parents of the healthy attachment children. The primary difference is that these, like the inadequate attachment parents, are also very poor parent "students." They and their child are, more often than not, out of synchronization with one another. This frequently "overinvolved" parent is not actually responding to the signals of the child, but instead responds to his or her own personal needs and desires. Because these parents are busily working at trying to care for the child, the toss of the dice says that the parent and child will occasionally be in synch and the child's needs will be met. When this occurs, it confuses the child into believing that the parent is finally "getting it," only to be followed by the majority of situations in which the child's signals are unanswered (or incorrectly answered). The randomly reinforced and anxiously attached child usually does not give up, even though it may be in her or his best interest. In a frustrated and disconsolate manner, the child continues to try to get through to the unreceptive parent and will likely continue these patterns into adulthood with poor choices of enabling relationships.

These studies reveal that the potential for a great deal of psychological human damage occurs at a very early age. Essential aspects of development, including, most importantly, sexual-affectional development, is arrested or severely damaged. In the United States, some researchers estimate that only about 25 percent of children come from a functional home in which adequate attachment occurs.

In the early 1970s, Prescott had been engaged in brain research studying the effects of touch deprivation on laboratory animals. He suspected that neurological deterioration, which had been found to be a predictable sequela to touch deprivation, was also a central and etiological agent in the expression of the violent behavior, as noted by Harlow.

Using the Human Relations Area Files, he examined some 400 societies and concluded that those societies that lavish affectionate touch on their infants and children, and also are tolerant or encouraging of adolescent sexual-affectional behaviors, were the least violent societies on earth, with the converse also being true. His findings, however, remain controversial because the data in the files do not usually give the kind of information he sought, and others who examined them did not classify the data the same way. Still, the fact that American society is often violent as well as one of the least openly physically affectionate societies on this planet might give some support to Prescott's ideas. We do not lavish affectionate touch on our infants and children; we push them aside into high chairs, playpens, car seats, baby beds, their rooms, the backyard, and so forth. We throw toys to them, and we expect television and video games to occupy their time. Moreover, in the United States, we have endless proscriptions against adolescent sexual-affectional behaviors. From very early childhood, the parental admonition, "Don't touch!" has been a powerful one. But just when the pubescent child begins the important physiological changes of puberty and the psychological separation-individuation task, our society warns, "Don't touch anyone, don't let anyone touch you, and don't touch yourself."

Since the normally developing adolescent is increasingly less interested in parental touch and more interested in touch and other forms of interaction with his or her peers, the obedient girl or boy is therefore effectively sentenced to several years of extreme touch deprivation and arrested psychological development. That the majority of teenagers eventually, to some degree, ignore these parental and societal warnings actually results in placing today's teens at higher risk for anxiety, depression, unwanted pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases due to "sex guilt." Research by Mosher and his colleagues demonstrates that sex guilt is powerfully related to the avoidance of self-care as well as lower self-esteem. In the United States, we have decided, with no data whatsoever, to support our strongly held beliefs that adolescents are "too immature" to deal with a sexual-affectional relationship. Actual developmental research has largely avoided this topic, although opinions are abundant.

Other researchers have found that the affectional touch climate in the subject's family of origin and parental religiosity are the major psychosocial variables related to a person's current sexual attitudes and behaviors, as well as nongenital affectional behaviors with a partner. Subjects who originated from physically affectionate families were more likely to enjoy more pleasurable, and more frequent, experiences in the sexual-affectional aspects of their adult relationships. These studies clearly demonstrate that adults who experienced rejection and touch deprivation in their childhood tend to treat their adult partners and their own offspring in a similar manner.

The rich findings of the Harlow and Bowlby-Ainsworth research teams, coupled with the reports of Spitz and Prescott, have complemented, and in many ways paralleled, each other. The outcomes of these studies provide clear facts regarding the most central components of human development and relationships. Whether in part or taken as a whole, the results from these findings lead to one inescapable conclusion. That is, the quality of our relationships throughout our lives is massively affected by the quality of our attachments in infancy and early childhood. The quality of these early attachments is primarily influenced by specific aspects of the communication and touch relationship between the child and his or her primary caretakers.

Developmental Neuropsychology of Touch

On the day of our birth, we entered the world with an intense touch hunger. Of all of our neonate senses, neural pathways subserving cutaneous sensation and responses to somasthetic stimulation are the first to develop in the human fetus and infant. Physiological primatologists instruct that the organism's biological systems that are first to develop are those most necessary to survival. A substantial proportion of the central and peripheral nervous systems is dedicated to the reception and processing of somatosensory information and make up what have been labeled "topographic maps" of nervous system utilization. The neonate derives the vast majority of useful information for the first several months of life through his or her skin.

Touch deprivation and somasthetic stress (e.g., pain and "touch trauma") are rapidly followed by dramatic elevations in pituitary-adrenal plasma cortisol levels, while affectionate and soothing touch are associated with low serum plasma cortisol levels. Plasma cortisol levels have been shown to be a reliable physiological indicator of an organism's detection of environmental change or stress. Further, it has been shown that with chronic imbalances of plasma cortisol and other hormones and neurochemicals, there results abnormal brain tissue development as well as the destruction of previously normal brain tissue. In other words, frequent pleasurable touch results in positive changes in brain tissue, and chronic touch deprivation or trauma results in measurably significant brain damage.

Beyond the study of body chemicals and neural tissue, it has been discovered that pleasurable touch is associated with enhanced learning, improved IQ, language acquisition, reading achievement, memory, general neonate development, preterm infant development, reduced self-mutilating behavior in the severely mentally retarded, expanded external awareness in autistic patients, improved geriatric health, decreased childhood clinginess and fears of exploring the environment, elimination of inappropriate self-stimulation and public masturbation behavior in children, and improved visual-spatial problem solving. Hospitalized patients recover more rapidly from injury and physical or psychiatric illness with attention to touch needs. Current thinking defines touch as the primary organizer (or, in the case of neglect and abuse, "disorganizer") of normal human development when viewed at biological, psychological and even social levels. A person's sense of self apparently originates in body awareness, body functions, and body activities that center around the sense of touch.

For this reason, the writer often refers his partnerless and isolated psychotherapy clients to a masseuse or massage therapist whenever appropriate. Couples in treatment are usually instructed and assigned touch and massage homework exercises, even for the non - sex therapy clients. Although Masters and Johnson borrowed extensively from researched therapy techniques developed by others when constructing their broad sex therapy treatment regimen, the unique technique they called sensate focus was one of their most important contributions. Perhaps unknowingly borrowing from the treatment methods of physical therapists and speech therapists who deal with their patient's neurological damage, Masters and Johnson devised a method of graduated, lengthy, and redundant touch exercises for their patients.

The neurological damage discussed in this chapter is, by definition, permanent damage since the brain produces no new nerve cells beyond about age five. Fortunately, if the neurological damage is not too severe, the remaining healthy portions of the brain may be "taught" to recover functioning, given the appropriate treatment method. The highly motivated individual or couple can begin to engage in specific graduated and frequent touch exercises to improve receptivity, sensation, and functioning. Masters and Johnson and the large body of subsequent sex therapy research provides potentially important solutions to a large and multiaxial problem for those individuals and societies that seek answers to repairing the damage. Of course, the most obvious solution would be to change the child-rearing practices of those same individuals and societies. To say, "All we need is to be receptive and affectionate with our children," though correct, may miss the greatest obstacle to this major change. That most parents are not neurologically receptive to reciprocal affectionate touch with their child is only one, though important, dilemma.

An Obstacle to Affection

In its most rigid and fundamentalist form, the Judeo-Christian philosophy is staunchly antitouch, antibody, antipleasure, and antisexual. To our not-so-distant ancestors, the formula touch equals sex equals sin was a bromide to live by. This nonequation is now our cultural heritage in the United States. Some may argue that this is an overstatement of the present-day importance of a dying or changing philosophy. Some may feel a bit smugly insulated because their upbringing did not include a highly fundamentalist or highly orthodox religiosity.

One of the outcomes of prolonged touch deprivation and the resulting neurological deterioration is a hypersensitivity to touch. Some researchers propose that the average person's experience with affectionate touch in the United States and several other countries is so inadequate that it is almost a certainty that the majority of the citizens suffer from some degree of significant neurological impairment. This is especially true if you are male, since males in the United States tend to receive far less affectionate touch from birth than do females. By early adulthood, most of these males have as much or more experience with overstimulating, aversive, painful, and traumatic touch than with soothing and affectionate touch. Even though they move through life with a growing touch hunger, most of these males can tolerate prolonged physical contact with another human only if forced or if they are sexually aroused.

So the cultural philosophy that may have initiated our ancestor's avoidance of touch may not be as important a maintaining factor as some might believe. It is possibly not the direct impact of religious philosophies today that causes a culture to be relatively touch phobic but, rather, a long history of parents who, due to the neurological damage unknowingly inflicted by their parents, were hypersensitive to touch and therefore did not nurture their offspring with the necessary somatosensory stimulation. Highly religious homes tend to provide significantly less affectionate touch (and more punishing touch), beginning in late childhood as the child approaches puberty and more overt sexuality.

For many adults, highly fundamentalist religions probably become an attraction for those who are most touch and sex phobic. The child of the high-religiosity parent or parents will likely experience significantly more difficulty with affectionate touch and sexuality in their adult relationships, even if the offspring no longer subscribe to their parents' beliefs.

We are beginning to understand many more of the developmental issues that impact on our attempts at healthy sexuality and relationships. Touch experiences in childhood appear to be powerful determining influences.

Many people tell of their highly interested and attentive lovers (mostly male) who seem to disappear very soon after orgasm occurs. He or she rolls away, goes to sleep, or gets up, grabs a beer, and goes to the den to watch the ball game—without even saying goodbye. Without the benefit of continuing high levels of sexual arousal, he can no longer tolerate prolonged tactile contact. One report of touch-deprived women revealed that only a tiny percent had ever had an orgasm. A study of touch-deprived men revealed that when given the hypothetical choice between giving up their recreational drugs and alcohol and giving up sex and orgasm, almost all of them said they would give up sex and orgasm. It seems that those who harbor these conflicts between a strong desire for touch and the confusing discomfort with it resolve the conflict by avoiding the difficulties and discomforts associated with touch and finding a replacement in the form of behaviors and chemicals, prescription and nonprescription. Such palliatives ultimately pile brain damage upon brain damage.

Virtually everyone has an intense need to be held and soothed and stimulated, but we find ourselves receptive at relatively brief moments of our lives. If we are not receptive to a given touch, the effect is deleterious rather than beneficial. So it is that we do not hold our partners or our infants for very long or very often.

In addition, the United States culture has created handy myths and philosophical constructs that merely serve our touch discomforts. Most parents are too easily convinced that they will "spoil" the child if they run to her "too quickly" when she cries or hold him "too often" or for "too long." We find a substantial percentage of parents who justify their homophobia by withdrawing meager affectionate touch from their toddlers and young children, stating, "Well, I don't want him to turn out homosexual." Some of our incorrect theories of the past are still with us, perhaps doing more damage than ever. Antitouch and antisexual societies have spawned fathers who panic if they happen to experience sexual arousal with their child squirming on their lap, and essentially punish the child severely by withdrawing physical affection from his daughter or son. Worse still is the father who acts on his sexual arousal, using the child as the defenseless object.