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One fine spring day when I was a child of about six, I discovered a newborn kitten under the bushes in our yard. The kitten was nearly bald. Its eyes were squeezed shut, and there was something terribly wrong with the shape of its head. I ran to find a blanket to wrap it and carry the struggling newborn into our house, but my mother stood in the doorway, forbidding me to enter. “Something is wrong with it, and that’s why its mother left it to die,” she said.

My mother’s words struck a chord of terror. How could a mother abandon its sickly offspring? Too young to understand Darwinian theory—the survival of the fittest—I absorbed the cat’s abandonment of its kitten as an epic lesson in the cruelties of nature—and of my helplessness to provide protection.

This is my first memory of a core human fear: abandonment. Fears of abandonment ignite our most primal horror of being alone in a hostile world without the means to survive and thrive. Compared to other mammalian species, human newborns are extremely helpless at birth and for years after. Unlike horses, giraffes, whales, and other mammals that can run, swim, and find food days after birth, humans are neither sighted nor mobile at birth and are entirely dependent on an adult for basic survival.1

Our fear of abandonment lurks in the hidden recesses of our unconscious mind. Images of abandoned children that come to us in dreams indicate the repressed inner child and........

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