Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection Immunology and Evolution of Infectious Disease

“You cried and cried and cried, and I wanted so much to comfort you, and I knew that I just mustn’t pick you up and hold you. That’s what they told me, so I believed them.” That was a mother in my own family, apologizing decades later to her adult daughter. The mother still suffered because she had not dared to comfort her baby. In Love at Goon Park, Deborah Blum tells the extraordinary story of Harry Harlow. It is a nuanced and brilliant evocation of a major figure in psychology who dared to challenge the orthodoxy of his time. Harlow said that babies need love, that they are born needing love, and that without contact, comfort and social responsiveness, primates, including humans, grow up as incomplete beings — if they live to grow up at all. But memories are short. Those who remember Harlow now mostly have memories of him as a man who tortured baby monkeys by removing them from their mothers and giving them surrogate wire or cloth dummies with bicyclereflector eyes. Yes, Harlow’s experiments were cruel. Yes, he knew they were cruel; he shoved that in people’s faces. But he did them to show the appalling cruelty of the prevailing dogma on how to treat human children. Blum reminds us of that dogma. John B. Watson, the founder of behaviourism, proclaimed in Psychological Care of Infant and Child, his best-selling childcare book of 1928: “You will soon be ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you have been handling your child.” Behaviourists thought that we are born blank slates, formed only by conditioned reward and punishment. Milk was the reward; the baby simply learned to associate his mother with milk. Overmothering was thought to produce overdependent offspring. With the dawning of an understanding of hygiene, human contact was seen as passing dangerous germs. In families there was usually some compensation, but in hospitals and orphanages, babies could be kept in solitary confinement, away from care-takers and each other. Mysteriously, the infants seemed to lose interest in life, and many died. The remedy prescribed was ever more sterile isolation. In England, the revolt against this view was led in the 1950s by John Bowlby and James Robertson. Many psychologists, though, saw the campaigners as soft, sentimental and unscientific. It was Harlow’s hard science that broke the barriers of doubt. He showed conclusively that baby rhesus monkeys could not be conditioned to love a wire mother, even if she was the one equipped with a milk bottle — they clung to warm cloth instead. They would work to open a window just for a glimpse of their cloth ‘mother’. They ran to the cloth mother if they were terrified by something new, such as a wind-up toy bear banging on a drum, and were comforted by ‘her’ presence. Monkeys raised in isolation, without contact, grew up insane, unable to deal with other monkeys. Some were unable to mate unless fastened in what Harlow, with characteristic bluntness, called a ‘rape rack’, and then they were likely to abuse or murder the resulting child. Of course it is obvious now. It just wasn’t obvious then. Who should read this book? Anyone working with small children, and many who are raising a small child — and anyone interested in authority in science. They should do so not just because it is beautifully and intelligently written, with a journalist’s verve and a professional’s attention to source and detail, but because of the questions it raises. How could the people who preceded Harlow have been so wrong? How could the antidote be a man who drove monkeys insane? Science is often blamed for its service to evil societies, Nazi eugenics or the hydrogen bombs of the Cold War, but this is a story of science unconstrained, creating its own perversions. As Harlow put it in 1953: “It is my belief that if we face our problems honestly and without regard to, or fear of, difficulty, the theoretical psychology of the future will catch up with, and even surpass, common sense.” Let’s hope he was right. ■ Alison Jolly is in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QG, UK.