Psychology and Inscape

Louise Carey is author of the science fiction thriller Inscape. she has co-written two novels for Gollancz, The City of Silk and Steel and The House of War and Witness, as well as a graphic novel, Confessions of a Blabbermouth for DC Comics. She co-runs the Dungeons and Dragons blog Tabletop Tales. Louise lives in Welwyn Garden City with her partner.

When I started writing Inscape, I was studying Psychology at Oxford Brookes University. Some of the theories I was learning about—especially theories about child development and the bond between parent and child—made their way into the book in various shapes and forms.

Attachment Theory and Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis

Attachment theory is an area of psychology that focuses on infant development, and what young children need in order to grow up into emotionally and psychologically healthy adults. Attachment theory holds that children develop best when they have a secure, stable attachment to their caregiver/s. An attachment is a deep bond between caregiver and child, formed through the caregiver meeting the child’s needs, both physical and emotional, and making them feel safe. You can find more information on attachment theory here.

There is also some evidence that the reverse is true: children who grow up without a secure, stable attachment to their caregiver are more likely (though by no means certain!) to develop various psychological disorders and antisocial behaviour. This is Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis: being deprived of a maternal (or parental) figure in infancy can negatively impact a child’s development for the rest of their life. There has been a lot of research done on the effects of maternal deprivation in orphanages and other institutional settings where children are raised without parents. There’s more on Bowlby’s theories and research here.

Attachment theory and the maternal deprivation hypothesis were very much in my mind when I came up with the characters of Tanta and Cole. Both Tanta and Cole grow up in the institutional setting of the Ward House, a ‘factory farm orphanage’ where they are deprived of a parental figure to foster their psychological development. I was interested in what growing up in this setting would be like for them, and also what InTech, an immensely powerful corporation, might do to try and counteract the negative effects of such an upbringing.

Comments

Govert Schilling - Five Way Interview

Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines, but he also has written for New Scientist, Science and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and he is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope. He wrote dozens of books (including a couple of children’s books) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, many of which have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 10986 Govert after him, and in 2014, he received the David N. Schramm Award for high-energy astrophysics science journalism from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.His latest book is Target Earth . Why science? We live in troubling times. Fake news and conspiracy theories abound, and trust in science is diminishing. Many adults don't seem to realize that almost everythi...

The Infinite Book – John D. Barrow ****

Authors are often asked to review books on a topic they’ve written on themselves. The reasoning is sensible – they ought to know something about the subject – but there’s always that uneasy suspicion that there’s going to be a bit of bias creeping in. So I think it’s only fair to admit up front that I have written a book on infinity (of which more later). Infinity is a wonderful subject, because it’s intimately mind-bending (if the combination sounds paradoxical, that’s what infinity is all about) and gives you the chance to pull in all sorts of different concepts and assocations along the way, something Barrow does with great gusto. There’s a surprisingly large amount of coverage here for God, and for the universe, and the book jumps around from Aristotle to Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (explained at great length), from the paradoxes of infinite sets to the paradoxes of time travel. Overall it’s an enjoyable journey that gives plenty of opportunity to be amazed and surprised. The...

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Search This Blog