FEST Writing Group

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy was the guest scientist at Center for Family Consultation’s Midwest Symposium.

Her concept of cooperative breeding enlarged my understanding of the human capacity for understanding and nurturing one another. I found it encouraging, at this time of worries about our country and the world, to think about the evolutionary roots of our ability to cooperate. I am attaching a brief essay that was published on the CFC substack.

The extraordinary human capacity for nurturance

Stephanie Ferrera

I named this essay “the extraordinary human capacity for nurturance,” because that idea was such an important takeaway for me from listening to Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the guest scientist at the Center for Family Consultation’s 43^rd Annual Midwest Symposium.  Dr. Hrdy is known for her original work as a primatologist and evolutionary anthropologist. In 1999 she published Mother Nature, a comprehensive study of motherhood in humans and other species. She followed this in 2009 with Mothers and Others, in which she traces the deep biological roots of cooperative breeding and how it has led to our capacity for empathy and mutual understanding.  New research on the nurturing potential of fathers inspired Dr. Hrdy to write Father Time, a Natural History of Men and Babies, published in 2024. 

Dr. Hrdy finds the key to cooperative breeding in the “primatologicaly unique length of human childhood.”  The idea that babies, with their appearance of helplessness and total dependency, are not passive recipients but active agents in the process of eliciting care is new to me and quite astounding.  It is their very fragility that makes human infants so powerful.  Hrdy writes: “The infant would need to be able to monitor and assess the intentions of both the mother and these others and elicit their assistance in ways no other ape ever needed to do before.”  (Mothers and Others, 31) From birth, infants begin to engage in face-to-face gazing and reciprocal signaling with a caregiver. This is a step toward mind-reading and the ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of others, to have empathy toward others.  As familiar as I am with babies, I had not considered how much is actually going on in those captivating little humans.

The concept of cooperative breeding, found in quite a few species but far more advanced in our ancestral hominins and our own species, is the defining mission of our families. Babies need more care than mother alone can give.  An alloparent is an individual other than mother who cares for children. Along with fathers, grandmothers are often the first in line to help. Many members of the family are fascinated by a newborn, and in the course of childhood there will be a host of people contributing to the child’s care. Parents, and especially mothers, find themselves in the position of gatekeepers, evaluating the competence and quality of help that others have to offer.  The level of maturity shapes the trust and cooperation between mother and father, and between parents and alloparents. Both Dr. Hrdy’s concept of cooperative breeding and Dr. Bowen’s concept of the family as an emotional unit highlight the importance of sustaining strong emotional connections within and across generations. The most vulnerable mother is one who is on her own, lacking family support.

How and when did cooperative breeding evolve?  To find the origin of the conditions that would pressure creatures into evolving this unusual mode of keeping offspring alive, Dr. Hrdy goes back to “the Pleistocene crucible” with its harsh and unpredictable climate, predation risks, recurring food shortages and other dangers.  She looks at the long line of hominins that precededmodern humans, identifying Homo erectus as one who managed to survive for 1.6 million years.  “These large-brained African hominins were our ancestors, giving rise around 200,000 years ago to even larger-brained Homo sapiens.  Sometime afterward, between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, these anatomically modern humans spread out of Africa, and Homo sapiens began its extraordinary expansion around the world.”  (Mothers and Others, 18)

Humankind is now at a population of more than eight billion people living on a crowded planet. We live in hyperconnected societies with an almost unfathomable degree of social and economic interdependence.  

As we grapple with twenty-first century crises, we would do well to remember the deeply rooted, uniquely human capacity for cooperation, empathy and nurturing that we have inherited from ancestors who faced even greater dangers than ours.  Dr. Hrdy describes the expression of this capacity at its best: “To care about others requires a sense of self along with the capacity to conceptualize others as separate selves with their own mental states and feelings.” (Mothers and Others, 135) In Bowen theory, this describes a person at a high level of differentiation.  Individuals and families vary in the degree to which they attain a clear definition of self and the ability to understand and relate to others as separate selves.  If indeed the capacity to understand, cooperate, and care for one another have been key to our survival as a species, then it will be those qualities that we most need in a world that is becoming increasingly governed by AI.

From the fall of 1986 to the fall of 1990 when Dr. Bowen died, I consulted with him about myself and my own family in an effort to increase my differentiation of self. I think I was in two ways an ideal client for him: I was fairly low on the scale and, at the same time, I was highly motivated. He said he found that more could be learned from those families with greater intensity of emotional process, as things were more obvious. Then he could look for the same kinds of processes that were occurring on a subtler level in his own and others’ families.

Beginning with the second meeting with him, I recorded the sessions on a little cassette player. When I asked him if I could record the sessions, he replied “Yes,” which was all he ever said about the tapes. He did not suggest any limitations on my use of the tapes or express any ideas of how they might eventually be used. At one point, he did say he thought the material in them would be interesting to people, if it could be communicated anonymously.

I spent years considering how I might make the tapes accessible to others. I considered ways to hide my identity. I also experimented with presenting short excerpts, but I later decided it was a mistake to present his coaching out of context and stopped presenting them. 

Over the years, I delayed making the tapes into a book out of concern for my privacy and how I would be perceived if the tapes were published. In addition, I also wondered about how people would react to Bowen’s coaching. I could easily imagine, especially in the age of social media, that his coaching would be criticized and blamed. I believe he was willing to take risks in the coaching he did that was also a form of research for him. By being guided by his own judgment and curiosity, he left himself open to criticism. His coaching methods were at times creative and unconventional.

Over the years, I have been reading and learning about Bowen’s increasing openness, how he would hold meeting with patients and staff together, how patients could read the reports written about them, and of course his well-known Anonymous paper published in his book where he described his efforts in his own family.

I have decided to go ahead with editing transcripts for a book based on the 30 hours of tapes and in addition include some statements from me. For many years I looked for a way to communicate the tapes that would highlight Bowen’s coaching, but minimize myself and my family. In the end, I think that is not possible. My family and I, including our reactivity to the process, were a big part of the consults with him and their results. 

As I have been reviewing the tapes, I have realized that what is in the audio version is not fully communicated in the written transcripts, for instance, how emotionally present Dr. Bowen is in his use of humor and expressions of outrage or indignation in response to the reported change-back messages. I would like to find an opportunity to show the tapes in simultaneous audio and written form (necessary as some of the audio is hard to hear) in presentations of one hour at a time, followed by statements by me, then opening up to questions and discussion. I would like to offer them, presented as research, in 4-part monthly series of 3-hour conference meetings.

I believe that enough time has passed since Dr. Bowen’s death, that people have gained perspective and have a more realistic assessment of his contribution. As a result, I think there is less of a tendency to idealize him or to assume he was right about everything. I think people are less likely to copy his coaching or to think that his coaching is the right way to do coaching just because he is doing it. Presenting the tapes as a research project that people can learn from rather than imitate leaves it open for people to have individual reactions to the material. Bowen was a human being with the limitations that go with that, and he himself often said that his theory was incomplete.  The tapes are offered as a research opportunity, something to learn from, with mistakes, surprises, examples of the theory.