Love at Goon Park

by Deborah Blum

  Peggy was still reserved enough, brisk and cool enough, that many of Harry’s graduate students didn’t see that human aspect. She was shy enough that she rarely shared such motherly advice. Ruppenthal knows that she was more widely disliked than not, that most students thought of her as cold to the heart. Ruppenthal doesn’t care: “She was, absolutely, a wonderful person.” And he still admires her research. “I think her hopes were that creating a stable compound environment would bring out the best in the animals. It showed that you can become a very sophisticated animal in a warm environment,” he says. “It was far greater than she expected; it blew her away and it blew me away.”

  One can wonder where her fascination with family would have taken Peggy Harlow, whether she might, herself, have become a psychology star at the University of Wisconsin if she had had a little more time. But she didn’t have the time, not enough of it, anyway. In 1967, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, already spread just beyond the bounds of control. Her illness would slowly, but relentlessly, help push Harry closer to his questions about the risky side of love. It would make real all those troubling questions of fear and loss and vulnerability that hovered around edges of relationship research. Harry would consider, once again, the dark places that love can lead you.

  Peggy was still working like a foot soldier; if she was well enough to stand, she was at the lab, fussing over her monkeys, taking conscientious notes. Harry was still soldiering on, too, but he was desperately worried and was stretching to snap point. He was so exhausted and distracted that he could sometimes hardly remember why he was there, much less anyone else. “I saw him in the lab one Saturday morning,” Ruppenthal says, “and he said, ‘Who the hell do you work for?’”

  Harry was traveling constantly, having confounded another of Terman’s expectations and become a nationally sought-after speaker. In the main psychology department, his reputation as the least visible member of the Goon Park community continued. “The comment was, there’s the East Coast Harlow, who lives at Kennedy Airport, and the Washington Harlow, who lives at NIH [National Institutes of Health] getting money, and there’s the Wisconsin Harlow, who’s never there,” recalls Gerald Wasserman, a UW psychologist at the time.

  Harry was no longer responsible only for the primate lab. The NIH had decided that since primate research was so promising, it would create a series of centers, spread across the country, to explore the scientific possibilities raised by our primate cousins. Harry Harlow was among the psychologists and physicians and primatologists who helped persuade NIH to invest in primate research. He also convinced the agency to name Wisconsin one of its seven regional primate research centers. Madison thus became the home of the only NIH primate center in the Midwest. It was an enormous honor—and an enormous added responsibility. Harry was directing the center, running his own lab, attending assorted committee meetings, and, when he could, pursuing research. Wasserman, now a behavioral science researcher at Purdue University, still remembers the passing blur of Harry Harlow in action: “He’d be at his desk and it would be piled high and he’d be carrying on a coherent conversation while he was opening envelopes and reading things and grabbing things. It was as if he could operate with two different minds at the same time.”

  Of course, no one maintains the two-brain illusion forever. Harry was stretching thinner, the proverbial rubber band, pulled by guilt and worry in one direction and by his need to prove himself, always, in the other.

  What snapped him was another success. He’d always struggled with achievements, always worried that they signaled the last peak moment in his career. It used to confound his friends how much an honor would trigger Harry’s insecurities. Gig Levine was among those who joined Harry in celebrating after the famed “Nature of Love” talk. Levine’s strongest memory of that party, though, is not a jubilant one. It’s of Harry Harlow huddled in the corner of a bar, sliding down into bourbon and self-doubt. The evening had begun joyously enough with celebratory drinks, and then more drinks, and then more. “And it wasn’t just a drunk but a really black drunk,” Levine says. “His mood just got blacker and blacker and he said to me, ‘What am I going to do next?’”

  In 1967, Harry Harlow became the first (and only) primatologist to win the National Medal of Science. He was called to the White House for a ceremony presided over by President Lyndon Johnson. It seemed to give him no pleasure at all; he told friends only about Johnson’s impatience with the whole affair. Harry came home convinced that this time indeed there was no next, that with the medal he had topped out professionally. And in his personal life, although he wrote to friends about the promise of chemotherapy and about doing the best they could, Harry was preparing to lose his wife.

  Steve Suomi, who now heads NIH’s Laboratory of Comparative Ethology, remembers his arrival at Wisconsin for graduate school in the winter of 1968. Suomi showed up at the lab expecting to pursue primate research with the most famous psychologist in the department. Within two weeks, Harry had said to him, “I’m not doing well,” and left for the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota, where he sought treatment of a paralyzing clinical depression. He would stay there for two months. The depression proved stubborn enough that doctors would move from drugs to electroshock therapy in trying to control the illness. The depression would moderate, but it would linger long after he came back.

  Harry returned to Wisconsin a quiet man. He was silent about the time in Minnesota, withdrawn from the lab for one of the few times in his life, preoccupied just with making it through the days. He seemed to be a man worn out with research, a man who had finally given up on the next big project. “People would talk about what he used to be like,” says one former graduate student. But, in reality, he was also considering a new research direction, a next challenge. And this one, finally, would move him over the line. He was thinking now about the darkest side of love, not what it gives but what it takes away. He wanted to create a monkey model of depression. He wanted to explore the biochemistry of this particular wasteland. If they could find a good way to study it, he was sure there were better ways of helping people lost in the Arctic zone of depression. He could serve as a personal witness to how much that work was needed.

  Harry had a clear image of what that model of depression would be. It would be complete and utter aloneness; isolation taken to the icy extreme. Years later, he would look back on those experiments and group them together in a book chapter titled “The Hell of Loneliness.” We all live, Harry wrote, with periods of social isolation: illness in the family, leaving familiar friends and family, business trips, going to college, divorce, the death of someone we love. “The extremes of human social isolation might be, at one extreme, a child’s first day at school and, at the other, the solitary confinement of a criminal offender. The strangeness of a child’s first day at nursery school, kindergarten or first grade, after mother leaves, will usually dissipate after the first few days among socially raised tots.”

  But if it doesn’t fade away, if we don’t connect, if we feel trapped in solitude, well, all of us know just how painful that really is. “The total social isolation of solitary incarceration is considered so drastic that Americans pride themselves on reserving it for the most pernicious prisoners,” Harry wrote.

  That knowledge had been simmering at the Wisconsin lab for years. Shortly after the first cloth mother studies, John Bowlby had come to meet with Harry and tour the facility. The rejecting surrogate studies were underway then, the monster mothers designed to push the babies away. The point of those experiments was to see if rejection induced psychopathic behavior. And it hadn’t, the baby monkeys just kept coming back, trying to tighten the relationship, make it better.

  Bowlby had been consoling about the apparent failure of the rejection study. No one has a winner every time, he reminded Harry. And then Bowlby went on his tour of the laboratory, where most of the animals were caged alone, according to the practice of the time. As Harry’s students remember it, John Bowlby came back shaki
ng his head. “Harry, I don’t know what your problem is,” he said. “I’ve seen more psychopathy in those single cages than I’ve seen anywhere else on the face of the earth.” The monkeys were sucking themselves, rocking back and forth, cuddling their own bodies. “You’ve got some crazy animals,” Bowlby said. In later years, Harry would laugh about Bowlby’s ability to see what he himself had been blind to. “It takes a psychiatrist to have a psychosis,” he said.

  The first paper, focusing on the effects of isolation, was published out of Harry’s lab in 1960. Bill Mason was the primary investigator on that study. In the same way that they had tried to take apart the mechanics of mothering, the Wisconsin researchers tried to explore exactly what made isolation so destructive. Was it the loss of physical contact only? What if the monkeys also couldn’t hear any other animals? What if they couldn’t see a single companion? They tried soundproofed cages, cages with solid walls that allowed no view of another animal. But it was difficult, maybe impossible, to filter out those separate effects. Because isolation just hammered the monkeys, flattened them out.

  A rhesus macaque could make it with one relationship, even a swinging surrogate, a dog. But he could not make it alone. The effects of isolation—the despairing huddling—could look a lot like depression. Both Rene Spitz and John Bowlby had written about the way infants seemed to tumble down psychologically when they were separated from their mothers. Spitz called the numbed apathy that he observed an “anaclitic depression.” He charted its progress like this: first, protest (symptoms: screaming, tantrums, weeping); and then depression (symptoms: withdrawal, slowness of movement, stupor).

  The unanswered scientific question was whether this response to separation was true depression. Not every baby tumbled so simply into apathy. If the child had a restrictive mother—one who was continually confining her, like David Levy’s overprotective moms—then, maybe not surprisingly, the child didn’t seem to miss her mother quite so severely.

  What Harry and his students worked out, then, might strike you as pure common sense. But, again, that was always Harry’s measure of good science. The children who really suffered, the little monkeys who wholly grieved, were the ones who felt that they had genuinely lost something. “In other words,” Harry wrote, “depression results from social separation when the subject loses something of significance, has nothing with which to replace that loss, and is incapable of altering this predicament by its own actions.”

  So what if you created just that scenario—total loss, total isolation, and total helplessness? If love is necessary to health and happiness, what happens if you strip a life completely bare of affection and connection? Wouldn’t you then expect the kind of crippling despair that sends grown men off to clinics to be shocked and shaken back into a functional existence? What are the costs of belonging to a species that can never quite go it alone? How much can we actually bear? Everyone can take some loss and some loneliness, but there seems to be a point, different for each, when the burden becomes too much. One of the hallmarks of depression seems to be the crossing into that place where helplessness overwhelms almost every other sensation. If you want to accomplish despair in a laboratory, then, where do you begin to find that point of no return?

  The first isolation experiments, of course, weren’t looking for depression as an end point. They were pure explorations into the power of loneliness. The closed-off cage was an example. It was a blank space, equipped with a one-way mirror. The scientists could look in but the monkey inside could not see out. He had no company but himself. A baby monkey could be raised, almost from birth, without seeing anything except the experimenter’s hands as they changed bedding or put in fresh food and water. The researchers placed a few infant monkeys into these boxes for thirty days. When the monkeys were moved, they were so “enormously disturbed” that two of them refused to eat and starved themselves to death. After that, the scientists at the Wisconsin lab force-fed monkeys coming out of isolation, to make sure the animals stayed alive.

  The next experiments isolated baby monkeys for six months, and the next for an entire year. If the researchers kept a monkey in isolation for twelve months, they ended up with a rhesus macaque entirely new in the natural world, an animal who didn’t explore, didn’t play, barely moved, appeared alive only by the thud of its heart and the sigh of its lungs. Harry’s students eventually had to re-isolate some of those animals. The monkeys were like born targets, so fearful, so helpless that they brought out the worst in their new companions. The other macaques would form a bullying ring; the isolates would cower within. “And as soon as the other animals would let up, these isolates would take off, which is a stimulus for more attack, and so you’d sit there and say to yourself, ‘Please don’t move. Please don’t move,’” Bob Zimmermann remembers.

  If the standard housing—one monkey to a cage—produced selfdestructive behaviors, total isolation created far worse ones. Here, indeed, was psychopathology. These semiparalyzed monkeys, not surprisingly, were incapable of having normal sexual relations—of having any relations at all. When the lab crew had figured out a way to strap the dysfunctional females into a “receptive” position, they managed to induce a few pregnancies in already unstable monkeys. The result was an extreme reminder of just how dangerous an animal who has no “social intelligence” can be. “Not even in our most devious dreams could we have designed a surrogate as evil as these real monkey mothers,” wrote Harry. “These monkey mothers that had never experienced love of any kind were devoid of love for infants, a lack of feeling unfortunately shared by all too many human counterparts.” Most of the loveless mothers just ignored their infants. Unfortunately, not all did. One held her infant’s face to the floor and chewed off his feet and fingers. Another took her baby’s head in her mouth and crushed it. That was the end of the forced pregnancies.

  So, Harry had evil mothers. He had crazy monkeys. He had unhappy and socially bizarre youngsters. But he still didn’t see classic depression, that undeniable slump into misery. The researchers in his lab had created grief and loneliness and misery. But Harry was still looking for something more definitive, that paralyzing sense of life’s being just too much, that state of being when air itself can feel as weighted as stone. “Depression in humans has been characterized as a state of helplessness and hopelessness, sunken in a well of despair,” Harry explained. And that’s what still seemed to elude him, that slide down into the bottom of the pit. Perhaps, he thought, they hadn’t yet made their monkeys feel helpless enough.

  This idea that depression springs partly from a sense of being trapped—a prisoner who has no escape—was just beginning to surface in psychology. While working with rats, scientists had found that if they exposed the rodents to inescapable electric shocks, so that no matter what they did the rats could not get away from that unpleasant jolt, the animals would visibly give up. The researchers could watch the rats collapse in what looked like a furry heap of despair. Later, in the 1970s, clinical psychologist Martin Seligman would begin developing such reactions into a theory of “learned helplessness” and the way that being stripped of power—or seeing yourself as so powerless—infiltrates every response. Seligman would come to believe that learned helplessness can drive not only depression but also the angry, lost behaviors often associated with it. He would also develop this understanding into the more positive notion of “learned optimism.” Seligman was particularly interested in helping people achieve that sense of control and the buoyant sense of well-being and purposefulness that can follow.

  Harry wasn’t thinking about optimism at all. Quite the opposite. It was the bleaker aspects of learned helplessness that interested him because they seemed to lead toward his goal of true depression. And so he tried another approach. “Again, this was on the inspiration of Bowlby,” Suomi says. “Bowlby had described the effect of separating the infant and the mother, the protest and the despair. Back in 1962, Harry had replicated that and Robert Hinde had as well. There was a flurry of mother-infant
separation studies. They found the monkeys responded pretty much like Bowlby described but not as severely. The effects were transient. And then Harry came back from Mayo and he had an idea for a chamber that he thought might be useful.” Technically, Harry called his design a “vertical chamber apparatus.” It was shaped like a narrow inverted pyramid, wider at the top and slanting downward to a point. The monkey was placed in the point, at the bottom of those steep, slippery sides. The wide opening was covered with a mesh. The apparatus worked, as they say, perfectly. The monkeys would spend the first day or two trying to escape, scrambling up the steep sides so that they could look out. This took a lot of energy, though, with the constant sliding and slipping to gain a brief glimpse of the outside. After two or three days, “most subjects typically assume a hunched position in a corner of the bottom of the apparatus. One might presume at this point that they find their situation to be hopeless.”

  Harry had another name for the vertical chamber; he called it a pit of despair. His colleagues and students tried to persuade him to stay with the technical description. They warned him that it would be politically easier to use less inflammatory, less visual—perhaps less candid—descriptions. “He first wanted to call it a dungeon of despair,” says Sackett. “Can you imagine the reaction to that?”

  It didn’t really matter what you called the apparatus because what really mattered was how it worked—which turned out to be terrifyingly well. You could take a perfectly happy monkey, drop it into the chamber, and bring out a perfectly hopeless animal within half a week. As part of his doctoral dissertation, Steve Suomi ran some of the vertical-chamber tests. As Suomi wrote, in 1970, the chamber changed every monkey who went into it for the worse. It could make abnormal monkeys pathological, make normal monkeys abnormal. The researchers couldn’t find even one macaque who seemed to have any defenses against it. Indeed, the pit was a powerful reminder that even a healthy normal childhood doesn’t protect against the effects of depression.