An exploration of comparative psychology, human development, psychoanalysis, love, and feeling alive
In a previous post, I explored cowbirds’ notorious reputations as seeming freeloaders who lay eggs in other birds’ nests, offloading parental care to foster families. This evolutionary strategy raises an interesting question. How do cowbirds become cowbirds when they are raised by a family of a different species? Researchers often study cowbirds because of this very question, to understand cowbird learning and avian learning more generally. The experience of a nestling “becoming” a bird is illuminating not only for cowbirds but also for human emotional life, offering poignant metaphors of how we “imprint,” love, and feel alive.
Birds become what they are by imprinting, a type of attachment process wherein species-specific information is encoded in the young chicks.1,2 Imprinting is most often associated with Konrad Lorenz, an ethologist who studied animal instincts and learned behaviors in natural settings.3 Among other topics, Lorenz wrote about his “goose child Martina,” a greylag goose who, having imprinted upon him, slept in his bedroom at night.4
Baby geese are “precocial.” These kind of birds emerge from their eggs covered in downy fluff, and they are ready to leave the nest shortly after hatching. Because they leave the nest so soon, to find food and water, precocial birds need to learn very quickly who their mother is. So they attach to the first large moving object they see.5 The little geese are not very discriminating. They can imprint on other creatures, including humans like Konrad Lorenz. We might call this “filial” imprinting something like “You ARE my mother!”
Martina was able to successfully pair-bond with a goose partner, Martin. They flew off together, into the sunset as it were, two years after Martina first hatched.4 Filial imprinting is not the same as finding a mate. Or rather, it doesn’t have to be. A foster imprinted bird will prefer its foster parents, but, it will mate with its own species IF they are available.6
Imprinting in cowbirds is a bit different than in geese. Cowbirds, like other songbirds, are “altricial,” not precocial. Altricial birds are born blind, naked and tiny. Their parents feed them copious amounts while still in the nest, to plump them up so that they can grow feathers and fly away. These chicks don’t hatch with the same hardwired knowledge as precocial birds. Instead, their parents teach them how to be birds, including bird basics like opening their mouths to get fed.7 These birds learn who their parents are over a relatively long period of time in the nest. This learning allows for successful mating later in life.5
A newly hatched cowbird is spending a good deal of time with its foster parents and not its own parents. It is taking in the adoptive parents’ food. It is exposed to an entirely foreign song language and set of teachings. It does not have other cowbirds available to offset the learning and bonding from its foster parents. But, somehow, a cowbird avoids becoming what it is not…
…Mostly. Cowbirds raised in the lab without other cowbirds become very confused. They don’t learn to sing their own songs. Now, all true songbirds, including the cowbird, instinctually sing “subsongs,” similar to infant babbling.8 But lab-raised cowbirds don’t learn their cowbird songs. Instead, they learn from their foster parents. Cowbirds raised with canaries, for example, try to sing canary songs.9 They pick up canary behaviors and even try to mate with canaries.10 Basically, they don’t learn how to be cowbirds.11 Nor are they very good canaries. As lead researcher Matthew Louder9 noted, in lab studies of the phenomenon, “It doesn’t sound like a canary. No canary would be fooled.”12
In the wild, though, something different happens, although why it happens is a bit of a mystery. Researchers wanted to understand cowbird song development and so they attached radio transmitters to the fledglings. They found something surprising: these young cowbirds leave their nests at night.13 Sometimes they fly solo, sometimes they congregate with other local cowbirds. And they talk to each other.
Adolescent cowbirds develop their identity from these evening excursions and not their foster parents.11 When they hear a special call from female cowbirds, a “password” that all cowbirds instinctively recognize, their brains literally change.1 These changes in brain development unlock the cowbirds’ capacities to learn their native repertoire of cowbird songs and other cowbird behaviors from their peers.14 This learning allows for successful understanding of, in essence, what it means to be a cowbird.15,1 A key takeaway – learning is still crucial. It just needs to happen in the right time and place.
Teenage humans and adolescent cowbirds share a propensity to congregate in groups and sneak out at night to test their emerging sense of self. There are other similarities between humans and birds. Humans are also born altricial. In other words, we are born helpless, and we learn from and are utterly dependent upon our caregivers and our environments. Researchers suggest this initial helplessness is an adaptive human trait, allowing us to excel at learning over long periods of time rather than rely on instinct.7
But, of course, the dependency on our early experience and caregivers leaves us vulnerable. And truly recognizing our own helplessness can feel more fraught than, say, enjoying the seeming innocence of little ducks happily swimming behind their mother. Wilfred Bion, a psychoanalyst who worked with very troubled individuals, understood people’s anxiety about their own states of early dependence and noted:
…It is not going to be popular if we psychoanalysts behave as if we think that the person of forty or fifty or sixty shows vestiges of states of mind that he thought he got rid of years ago. He prides himself on being grown up and on not believing that sort of psychoanalytic rubbish.16
Years ago, I had a therapy colleague who, in graduate school, dreamt of her grandmother’s home in her native country. She had lived there for the first year after her birth and then moved to the US. Upon reporting the adult dream to her mother, she was shocked to find her mother confirming the exact details of the dream-house, a house she’d not been in for over 20 years. She remembered the nest. And she believed the “psychoanalytic rubbish.” She shifted her graduate studies to the exploration of early attachment patterns.
It is not “imprinting,” but humans register very early experience, even if we don’t have words to say it. Sometimes these wordless expectations and proto-experiences — what contemporary psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas terms “the unthought known” — remain nestled inside of us, offering a sense of safety and structure.17 But sometimes our early experiences are problematic. This is also true for young birds, and an exploration of these avian difficulties helps illuminate human struggles with misplaced love.
Laboratory-raised cowbirds are thrown off kilter when they are not able to imprint on the correct species. Imprinting can go wrong in other ways. A white-naped crane named “Walnut,” raised in captivity at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, chose her human zookeeper, Chris Crowe, as her mate. She reportedly killed two male cranes that the zookeepers tried to pair her with. She pair-bonded with Chris and performed mating dances for him. She was never able to raise her own young, out of zookeepers’ fears that she would not recognize them as fellow cranes.18
Conservationists who help rehabilitate young birds are very cautious to ensure that fledglings do not imprint on humans. In caring for these wounded animals, human contact is kept to a minimum. The workers do not talk to the birds. Sometimes, they wear face masks, or even feed the birds using a bird hand puppet.19 People who rear whooping cranes in captivity, to help them get back into the wild, go so far as to wear crane costumes when feeding and raising the chicks.19
The conservationist angle, of caution around vulnerable young creatures to avoid influencing their development, parallels Freud’s paper “Observations on Transference-Love.” Freud wrote this essay in part as an admonition to his colleague Carl Jung, whose affair with his patient Sabina Spielrein seemed to threaten the legitimacy of the psychoanalytic enterprise. Freud’s paper spoke directly to the emergence of loving feelings that can derail therapy if not understood correctly. He instructed fellow analysts to recognize that “falling in love is induced by the analytic situation”20 and is not a reflection of, say, the charm or wit of the analyst. In other words, analysts should not fall prey to their narcissism any more than ethologists should imagine a gosling “chose” them. Freud wrote:
The psycho-analyst knows that he is working with highly explosive forces and that he needs to proceed with as much caution and conscientiousness as a chemist.21
Or, as contemporary psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden noted, “It is always dangerous business to stir up the depths of the unconscious mind.”22
Walnut the crane is perhaps as good an example as Spielrein in illustrating these dangerous and explosive forces, with her determination to kill her fellow cranes and her singular preference for her human “lover.”
Complicated loving and destructive feelings can emerge in depth-oriented therapy. But the struggles of the laboratory-raised cowbird and Walnut the crane are also useful metaphors to understand how one may — or may not — start to feel alive and true to oneself.
Pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote about this idea in his paper “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self.” He introduced the idea of the “true” self, buried or hiding or protected by the false self. He spoke about different degrees of psychological health, with a healthier person able to follow societal conventions when needed while still feeling “real” inside, and a more troubled person being nearly cut off from their internal sense of being alive. The latter case may move through life well enough, and others may think they see the real person, but they see a protective shell of “falseness” that will either continue to harden or eventually fail. Here, we find experiences of feeling like an imposter, or feeling robotic, or not feeling real. A person functioning well enough on the outside but missing some kind of vitality, an inner spark.
Winnicott believed that infants can get seduced into compliance when there is some kind of mis-attunement with the mothering person, whomever this may be. He spoke, as one example, of the infant nursing only when it is supposed to eat and not when it is hungry. This kind of compliance to the external world, over time, plants the seeds of the false self. A protective layer emerges, to offset the overstimulation from environmental demands like, say, eating dutifully on a strict schedule.
Imagine losing touch with whether you are hungry at all, losing an inner yearning or desire for something. Imagine how you might eventually eat only in response to a schedule or diet imposed from the outside. Food for thought has now become a template of how to be, a way to comply with expectations from the outside world. New experience cannot easily be used for nourishment of the self, because the self that spontaneously wanted something went into hiding when the demands of the external world were too loud. Instead, a false self has developed as a way to adapt to and protect against noisy environmental intrusions. But it doesn’t leave room for growth.
The cowbird who tries to be a canary, or the white-naped crane who tries to be a human, are poignant examples of adapting too completely to the external world. We might imagine these creatures as metaphorical examples of a false self. These misguided birds are, in their way, complying to the experience of something they are not, adapting to the wrong species, and they don’t even know it. Their own essential “bird-ness” gets drowned out against the outside pressure of “this is the way to be.” Because that’s the thing about falseness, of life being hijacked. It is not a conscious pretense or awareness of “I am doing this but I don’t want to.” It is a protective but imprisoning structure (in this case, (mis)identification) operating out of awareness, leaving no room for the emergence of one’s true nature.
Now, Winnicott didn’t define a true self beyond something that brings together “the experience of aliveness.”23 But he did advocate quite clearly against the idea of compliance and of the therapist being “imprinted” upon as some sort of guru or idealized font of wisdom. He asked, “Shall we ourselves be recognizable in our patients? We always are. But we deplore it.”24 This is a plea for autonomy, for freedom and not indoctrination by the caregivers and teachers and therapists upon whom we depend.
A wild bird, to me, captures the essence of this vitality and freedom. The grace of soaring through the air, the beauty of unabashed singing in the morning sun, the freedom of swimming along on the water’s edge. Those of us who are lucky will find ways to contact this ineffable feeling. And some of us may get there with the help of a steady therapist who is curious about the wild spark and respectful of the dangerous business of coming alive.
1 Kathleen S. Lynch, Annmarie Gaglio, Elizabeth Tyler, Joseph Coculo, Matthew I. M. Louder, and Mark E. Hauber, “A Neural Basis for Password-Based Species Recognition in an Avian Brood Parasite,” Journal of Experimental Biology 220 (2017): 2540–2353.
2 Patrick Bateson, “Is Imprinting Such a Special Case?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 329 (1990): 125–131.
3 Micah L. Issitt, “Konrad Lorenz,” EBSCO Research Starters, 2024.
4 Tania Munz, “‘My Goose Child Martina’: The Multiple Uses of Geese in the Writings of Konrad Lorenz,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 41, no. 4 (2011): 405–446.
5 Dan Gleason, “Imprinting in Birds,” Dan Gleason’s Blog, November 10, 2010.
6 W. C. Crawford, Jr., “The Theory of Imprinting: Its Implications and Ramifications in Raptors and All Birds,” Watchbird 18, no. 2 (1991): 34–35.
7 Katerina M. Faust, Samantha Carouso-Peck, Mary R. Elson, and Michael H. Goldstein, “The Origins of Social Knowledge in Altricial Species,” Annual Review of Developmental Psychology 2 (2020): 225–246.
8 Chihiro Mori and Kazuhiro Wada, “Songbird: A Unique Animal Model for Studying the Molecular Basis of Disorders of Vocal Development and Communication,” Experimental Animals 64, no. 3 (2015): 221–230.
9 Matthew I. M. Louder, Christopher N. Balakrishnan, Amber A. N. Louder, Robert J. Driver, Sarah E. London, and Mark E. Hauber, “An Acoustic Password Enhances Auditory Learning in Juvenile Brood Parasitic Cowbirds,” Current Biology 29, no. 24 (2019): 4207–4211.
10 Andrew P. King and Meredith J. West, “Species Identification in the North American Cowbird: Appropriate Responses to Abnormal Song,” Science 195, no. 4282 (1977): 1002–1004.
11 Matt Soniak, “How Does a Cowbird Learn to Be a Cowbird?” Audubon, February 25, 2016.
12 Sonam Bhatt, “How These Songbirds Use ‘Passwords’ to Recognize Each Other,” Good Morning America / ABC News, November 18, 2019.
13 Matthew I. M. Louder, Michael P. Ward, Wendy M. Schelsky, Mark E. Hauber, and Jeffrey P. Hoover, “Out on Their Own: A Test of Adult-Assisted Dispersal in Fledgling Brood Parasites Reveals Solitary Departures from Hosts,” Animal Behaviour 110 (2015): 29–37.
14 “How Do Cowbirds Know They Are Cowbirds?” Outside My Window (blog), August 17, 2010.
15 Mark E. Hauber, Sarah A. Russo, and Paul W. Sherman, “A Password for Species Recognition in a Brood-Parasitic Bird,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 268, no. 1471 (2001): 1041–1048.
16 Wilfred R. Bion, “Evidence” (1976), in Four Papers, reprinted in The Complete Works of W. R. Bion, vol. 10 (London: Karnac, 2014), 128–135.
17 Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
18 Whitney Bell, “Imprinting: An Avian Anecdote,” NC DNA Day Blog, October 30, 2021.
19 PBS Nature, “Flight School: The Man Who Walked with Geese,” April 11, 2008.
20 Sigmund Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915), Standard Edition, vol. 12, 161–162.
21 Sigmund Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915), Standard Edition, vol. 12, 169.
22 Thomas H. Ogden, “Comments on Transference and Countertransference in the Initial Analytic Meeting,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 12 (1992): 226.
23 D. W. Winnicott, “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self” (1960), in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, International Psycho-Analytical Library 64 (1965), 147.
24 D. W. Winnicott, “The Depressive Position in Normal Emotional Development” (1954–55), in Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (London: Tavistock, 1958), 262–277, at 275.
Betsy Nettleton, PsyD
Betsy is a psychoanalytic candidate at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis and a licensed psychologist in private practice in Chicago. More about her training and approach.