Love at Goon Park

"This is one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. Like most great biographies, it’s about a lot more than just the person at the center of it, and it’s beautifully written. It’s a book about Harry Harlow, a primatologist, a psychologist who worked mostly with rhesus macaques. He became a giant in the field of behavioral science through his work on attachment. Blum gives a great historical perspective on how psychologists thought about interpersonal attachment for most of our history and how Harry Harlow changed that. Harlow introduced the concept of love to the field. Before his work on the attachment of macaques to mother figures, psychologists thought of people the way traditional economists have—as utility maximizers for our own vested self-interest. The presumption was that animalistic drives for food, drink and sex were the only true motivators. And that the love, care and desire for connection were really epiphenomena, byproducts of these other things. So we love our mothers because they provide us food. Harry Harlow’s research blew that right out of the water. He identified the need for connection and belonging as a fundamental human need. Deborah’s book does a really great job of describing that whole history of the field and Harry’s place in it. It’s hard to even imagine thinking about human beings the way that psychologists did in the 1920s and 1930s. Before Harlow, behavioral psychologists such as Watson and Skinner were telling parents that human contact spoiled, weakened and endangered children, subjecting them to germs. Harry Harlow’s work was a total sea change. She also gives a really great description of Harry himself. It turned out that Harry, for all the work he did to bring love into the field, was not himself a particularly lovable character. Lots of psychologists work with animal models. There is not a big distinction between the basic biological processes of human beings and non-humans, particularly not between us and rhesus macaques. Harry’s work sparked generations of research that validated his findings with human beings. Harry raised rhesus macaques with two different attachment figures. One was a terry cloth mother that had a light bulb inside it, which emitted warmth, and a face with eyes. The other mother had a nipple, which delivered food to the baby macaque, but was made out of wire mesh. Psychologists at the time presumed that a monkey would only become attached to the mother that provided sustenance. Harry found that the monkeys quickly fed from the wire mother but clung to the cloth mother. He also found that macaques raised only with wire mothers had difficulty interacting with other macaques and they would self-harm."

"This centres round the work of Harry Harlow who worked with monkeys and needed to breed more of them. He isolated them very early and took them away from their mothers and kept them clean and well-fed. They were fat and appeared healthy but they were miserable and rocked backwards and forwards. He started to understand that what was missing was maternal affection. This was very out of the current climate of the time. For example, Blum describes an American pamphlet distributed widely between 1914 and 1925 called Raising a baby the Government Way. It included the advice “never kiss a baby” and “parents should not play with the baby”. The influential psychologist Watson stated “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument”. This is a good description of how attitudes have changed and I was stimulated by someone working in the same lab, Mary Schneider, who noticed that if you stress pregnant monkeys the babies are more anxious. This is a beautiful model of the effects of pre-natal stress. The book describes how Harlow, in his studies of monkeys, helped to change attitudes to child care. He found how baby monkeys clung to a cloth model monkey rather than a wire one, and then went on the develop a scientific study of mothering and affection, and how important this is for the development of the child. The book also explains some of the more recent work that has arisen out of all this, and how we are now starting to understand how more sensitive mothering can affect the structure of the baby’s brain for life, and have long tem effects on behaviour."