In the early 20^th
century, infants in foundling homes died at an alarming rate. Doctors
recommended sterility and isolation, keeping children separated and contact to
the minimum. Contact spread pathogens which spread disease which killed. Besides,
affection and contact were unscientific, unnecessary, a sign of feminine
weakness which, if anything, damaged the child. It never occurred to them that
infants were dying from a lack of love.

Harry Harlow, a psychologist
trained in the behaviorist tradition and a man who claimed that he didn’t like
monkeys, helped change this. As we know now, holding, stroking, and cuddling,
beyond being necessary for normal social development, contribute to normal
growth and boost the immune system. We accept that abuse can be emotional and
that neglect can hurt a child more than physical abuse. While the psychoanalyst
John Bowlby and others provided important research about the devastating effects
orphanages had on children, their insights were proved beyond a doubt by
Harlow, who used rhesus monkeys for a seminal group of experiments which
clearly established the role of contact as a fundamental need.

Harlow made an earlier appearance
in Blum’s book The Monkey Wars, which reports on the animal rights
movement and the often horrific research carried out on non-human primates.
Harlow was condemned for his experiments studying the effects of isolation, which
created monkeys who mutilated themselves and mothers — when forced to have
children, employing a restraining device with Harlow dubbed a ‘rape rack’ —
who neglected, abused or even killed their children.  Love at Goon Park
is a more sympathetic look at her subject, exploring a wide range of subjects,
including Harlow’s early work on intelligence, psychology in the mid-twentieth
century, behaviorism and psychoanalysis, attachment theory, feminism and animal
rights.

Harlow stumbled on his area of
research largely by chance. A newly minted Ph.D. recruited  by the University
of Wisconsin, he found that the substandard  research facilities made it
impossible to carry out research with rats — what Harlow came to call "rodentology"
— driving him to create his own lab and stumble onto primates as a more appropriate
research subject for intelligence tests.

At the time, behaviorists like
John Watson and B.F. Skinner reduced humans to rats (whose capacities were also
generally underestimated) admitting only stimuli and responses as respectable
scientific entities. Attachment, affection, and the emotions in general, were
deemed unscientific and irrelevant to scientific study. True to the
intellectual milieu of his time, and for sanitary reasons, Harlow made the
mistake of keeping his monkeys in separate cages. But for social animals like
primates, isolation had the effect of causing a kind of monkey psychosis.
Monkeys would huddle in corners, rocking back and forth, be unable to
relate socially to other animals or reproduce.

Harlow’s genius was to exploit
this situation and construct well-controlled experiments that showed the bond
between mother and child, and the desperate need rhesus monkeys have — and by
analogy, humans and other primates — for a social support network. His most
famous experiments involved two surrogate ‘mothers’, a cloth mother and a wire
mother. Following the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, most psychologists
considered breast feeding the primary impulse. The bond between mother and
child were derived from the baby meeting its physical needs. Harlow showed that
this is wrong, since even when only the wire mother lactated, baby monkeys
would cling to the cloth mother, approaching the other only to suckle. When
threatened, they would leap onto the cloth mother, seeking comfort. It was a
stark snapshot of the bond between mother and child, a step forward in the
scientific study of an aspect of love.

Blum’s book is generally
admirable, providing a well-written introduction to Harlow and his research.
One criticism is that the references at the back of the book are given by
chapter, not page, making it difficult to determine their relevance. Another
drawback is that Blum seems less interested in Harlow’s scientific research
than in more general questions about psychology in the 20^th century.
This tendency to ask large questions made The Monkey Wars effective, but
the lack of detail fails to capture Harlow, the working scientist. We hear
about his battles with the psychological establishment, but don’t learn when,
where and how they took place. Blum tells us that Harry was a workaholic, whose
extended family was his laboratory of researchers, but we rarely get a sense of
its everyday workings. Harlow himself remains somewhat of a mystery, hidden
behind a series of quips and limericks (he was given to leaving quirky poems on
graduate students’ desks). What was he aiming at? What did he expect? What
obstacles did he encounter? What refinements were necessary?

These are minor criticisms, since
the book aims only at presenting an overview of the science of affection and
Harry Harlow’s contribution. Still, it is useful to read Blum’s biography along
with Harlow’s own The Human Model: Primate Perspectives, where he
lucidly presents his life’s research. Together, they provide a fascinating
glance into the role of love in monkey and human nature.

Alex Sager
writes about himself:

I’m a
philosopher and writer, married to a Mexican lawyer.I am currently doing a
Ph.D. in philosophy at L’Université de Montréal. In my thesis I am proposing a
model of our moral psychology combining the insights of cognitive science,
developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology and other disciplines. I
believe that most philosophers are still using psychology from the 18th
century, ignoring many of the recent scientific advances, and suggest that
there is evidence our minds contain a number of innate, distinct faculties that
allow us to make moral judgments in different domains.

Categories: Psychology