Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton Page A

late, never crawled but walked at ten months, did not play with dolls or stuffed animals, and was rather aloof. “She now says that she doesn’t like to be hugged. I can understand why,” says Krisann. “You could hold her, but I could feel her pain. I was not the mother holding her. Angie had happy moments, but for the first two years of her life she was not a happy child. I hate to say it, but it’s the truth. I can understand if Angie has abandonment issues, because she was abandoned as a child. Even she doesn’t know why.”
    Certainly the way Angie was raised in the early months of her life raises red flags among clinical psychologists and psychoanalysts. The key to understanding this issue is the fact that babies are born without the capacity to differentiate or articulate their feelings and needs. They are in what is termeda “global undifferentiated state,” their emotions, if not met, lurching from anxiety to panic and finally disassociation. It is the attention and response of the mother or other consistent caregiver that allows infants to develop basic trust, the capacity to regulate their emotional state. In short, a mother turns distress into comfort.
    Babies who do not get this kind of response often develop self-destructive coping mechanisms for the intolerable emotion they feel. This means that a child who has not had a relationship with a mother or an adequate substitute remains in a global undifferentiated state, living without the words, ideas, or capacity to relate to his or her own experience. In later life this angst can be manifested in alcoholism, drug abuse, cutting, and suicidal tendencies.
    As contemporary psychoanalyst Dr. Franziska De George, who has practiced in Beverly Hills for nearly twenty years and never treated Angelina or her family, says: “The child whose mother abandons them at six months not only has severe trauma, but beyond that the child is lacking a relationship with itself. The basic emotional building blocks are missing. It is a house, or personality, built on shifting sands. While the rest of the house may be working beautifully, the emotional part is missing. In later life this is even more confusing.”
    Marche’s own depression and trauma would have communicated themselves to her daughter, further exacerbating the infant’s feelings of alienation. Psychologist and author Iris Martin, who has specialized in working with chief executives and their families for the last twenty-five years but also never treated Angelina or her family, observes: “Angelina Jolie will have experienced profound abandonment, anxiety, and may have experienced depression. Early experience is based on two things: structure and trust. So her early attachment was fragmented, full of painful emotions. Her foundation of who she is is a mess.”
    At some point Marche agreed that her children could start to play with each other rather than be looked after on separate floors of the apartment building by different sets of babysitters. It was an economic as much as an emotional argument that won the day, Marche agreeing to pay her babysitters five dollars an hour to watch both children rather than hire two babysitters at three dollars each. The children played well together, and eventually James kept some of his toys, such as an electric car, in Angie’s room on the fifth floor. As Iris Martin observes: “Jamie was probably a buffer for her. Hecomforted her. She was not getting human contact from anyone but the babysitters.”
    At the same time, Jamie was always the favored child, the one who was the focus of attention, the one expected to succeed in life. He was the monarch of the family, as the beautifully hand-drawn and hand-painted fourth birthday card saying “King James” showed. For that same birthday, Krisann embroidered a number four on his denim dungarees, while Jon’s friend film director Charles Eastman came over to take pictures. Eastman later recalled that Angie was “kind of in