Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

by Deborah Blum

  Watson believed that emotions should be controlled. They were messy; they were complicated. The job of a scientist, of any rational human being, should be to figure out how to command them. So he was willing to study emotions, but mostly to show that they were as amenable to manipulation as any other basic behavior. The emotion of rage, he said, could be induced in babies by pinning them down. That was a simple fact, observable and measurable and controlled by the mastery of science. If it sounds cold, he meant it to be. Watson, as many of his colleagues, was driven by a need to prove psychology a legitimate science—with the credibility and chilly precision of a discipline such as physics.

  Psychology was a young science at the time, founded only in the nineteenth century. Until that point—perhaps until Darwin—human behavior was considered the province of philosophy and religion. Scientists considered physics, astronomy, chemistry as serious research subjects, but those disciplines had hundreds of years behind them. Even one of the founders of the American Psychological Association, William James of Harvard, said that psychology wasn’t a science at all—merely the hope of one.

  As a child, Watson had been dragged to tent revival after tent revival by his mother. He still remembered with revulsion the sweaty intensity of the faithful. He was determined to wash the remnants of spirituality and, yes, emotion out of his profession. “No one ever treated the emotions more coldly,” Harry Harlow would say years later. To his contemporaries, Watson only argued that a scientific psychology was the way to build “a foundation for saner living.” He proposed stringent guidelines for viewing behavior in a 1913 talk still known as the Behaviorist Manifesto.

  “Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science,” he insisted. Its goal was the prediction and control of behavior. “Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, and neither does consciousness have much value.” Psychologists should focus on what could be measured and modified. In the same way that animals could be conditioned to respond, so could people. The principle applied most directly to children. Watson’s psychology was in near perfect opposition to the intimate, relationship-focused approach that Harry Harlow would develop. Rather, he argued that adults—parents, teachers, doctors—should concentrate on conditioning and training children. Their job was to provide the right stimulus and induce the correct response.

  And that was what Watson argued, forcefully, in his 1928 bestseller , The Psychological Care of the Child and Infant. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell proclaimed it the first child-rearing book of scientific merit. Watson, he said, had triumphed by studying babies the way “the man of science studies the amoebae.” The Atlantic Monthly called it indispensable; the New York Times said that Watson’s writings had begun “a new epoch in the intellectual history of man.” Parents magazine called his advice a must for the bookshelf of every enlightened parent.

  From today’s perspective, it’s clear that Watson had little patience for parents at all, enlightened or not. Watson wrote that he dreamed of a baby farm where hundreds of infants could be taken away from their parents and raised according to scientific principles. Ideally, he said, a mother would not even know which child was hers and therefore could not ruin it. Emotional responses to children should be controlled, Watson insisted, by using an enlightened scientific approach. Parents should participate in shaping their children by simple, objective conditioning techniques. And if parents chose affection and nurturing instead, ignoring his advice? In his own words, there are “serious rocks ahead for the over-kissed child.” Watson demanded not only disciplined children but disciplined parents. His instructions were clear: Don’t pick them up when they cry; don’t hold them for pleasure. Pat them on the head when they do well; shake their hands; okay, kiss them on the foreheads, but only on big occasions. Children, he said, should be pushed into independence from the day of their birth. After a while, “you’ll be utterly ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you’ve been handling your child.”

  Watson was a hero in his own field, hailed for his efforts to turn the soft-headed field of psychology into a hard science. He became a hero in medicine because his work fit so well with the “don’t touch” policies of disease control. The physicians of the time also considered that affection was, well, a girl thing, something to be sternly controlled by men who knew better. The Wife’s Handbook flatly warns mothers that their sentimental natures are a defect. The book’s author, Dr. Arthur Albutt, takes a firm stand against spoiling, which he defines as picking babies up when they cry, or letting them fall asleep in one’s arms. “If it cries, never mind it; it will soon learn to sleep without having to depend on rocking and nursing.” Dr. Luther Holt took the same stance and his publication, The Care and Feeding of Children, was an even bigger success. There were fifteen editions of his book between 1894 and 1935. Holt believed in a rigorous scientific approach to the raising, or let’s say, taming of the child. The whole point of childhood was preparing for adulthood, Holt said. To foster maturity in a child, Holt stood against the “vicious practice” of rocking a child in a cradle, picking him up when he cried, or handling him too often. He urged parents not to relax as their child matured. Holt was also opposed to hugging and overindulging an older child.

  It’s easy today to wonder why anyone would have listened to this paramilitary approach to childcare. Undoubtedly—or at least we might hope—plenty of parents didn’t take heed. Yet, Holt and Watson and their contemporaries were extraordinarily influential. Their messages were buoyed by a new, almost religious faith in the power of science to improve the world. The power of technology to revolutionize people’s lives was a tangible, visible force. Gaslights were flickering out as homes were wired for electricity. The automobile was beginning to sputter its way down the road. The telegraph and telephone were wiring the world. There were mechanical sewing machines, washing machines, weaving machines—all apparently better and faster than their human counterparts. It was logical to assume that science could improve we humans as well.

  John Watson wasn’t the only researcher to publicly urge scientific standards for parenting. The pioneering psychologist G. Stanley Hall, of Clark University, entered the childcare field as well. In 1893, Hall helped found the National Association for the Study of Childhood. His own work focused on adolescence and he believed that the difficulties encountered at this time of life were in part due to mistakes by parents and educators in the early years. Hall admired much about what he called the adolescent spirit and its wonderfully creative imagination. But it needed discipline, he said, moral upbringing, strict authority to guide it.

  Speaking to the National Congress of Mothers—a two-thousandmember group organized in 1896 to embrace the concept of scientific motherhood—Hall urged Victorian tough love upon them. Their children needed less cuddling, more punishment, he said; they needed constant discipline. After Hall’s talk to the mothers’ congress, the New York Times rhapsodized in an editorial, “Given one generation of children properly born and raised, what a vast proportion of human ills would disappear from the face of the Earth.” Women at the conference left determined to spread the word. No more adlibbing of childcare, they insisted. There were real experts out there, men made wise by science. Parents needed to pay attention. “The innocent and helpless are daily, hourly, victimized through the ignorance of untrained parents,” said the Congress of Mothers’ president, Alice Birney, in 1899. “The era of the amateur mother is over.” (The mothers’ congress, by the way, changed and grew and eventually became part of the PTA.)

  The demand for scientific guidance was so pressing that the federal government’s Child Bureau—housed in the Department of Labor—after all, childrearing was a profession—went into the advice business. The bureau recruited Luther Holt as primary advisor on its “Infant Care” publications. Between 1914 and 1925, the Labor Department distributed about 3 million copies of the pamphlet. Historian Molly Ladd-Taylor, in her wonderfully titled book, Raising a Ba
by the Government Way, reports that the Child Bureau received up to 125,000 letters a year asking for parenting help. The bureau chief, Julia Lathrop, said that each pamphlet was “addressed to the average mother of this country.” The government was not, she emphasized, trying to preempt doctors. “There is no purpose to invade the field of the medical or nursing professions, but rather to furnish such statements regarding hygiene and normal living as every mother has a right to possess in the interest of herself and her children.”

  The “Infant Care” pamphlet covered everything from how to make a swaddling blanket to how to register a birth. It discussed diapers, creeping pens (which we today call playpens), meals from coddled eggs to scraped beef, teething, nursing, exercise, and, oh yes, “Habits, training, and discipline.” After all, “the wise mother strives to start the baby right.”

  The care of a baby—according to the federal experts—demanded rigid discipline of both parent and child. Never kiss a baby, especially on the mouth. Do you want to spread germs and look immoral? (This part, obviously, straight from the mouth of Luther Holt.) And the government, too, wanted to caution mothers against rocking and playing with their children. “The rule that parents should not play with the baby may seem hard, but it is without doubt a safe one.” Play—tickling, tossing, laughing—might make the baby restless and a restless baby is a bad thing. “This is not to say that the baby should be left alone too completely. All babies need ‘mothering’ and should have plenty of it.” According to federal experts, mothering meant holding the baby quietly, in tranquility-inducing positions. The mother should stop immediately if her arms feel tired. The baby is never to inconvenience the adult. An older child—say above six months—should be taught to sit silently in the crib; otherwise, he might need to be constantly watched and entertained by the mother, a serious waste of time in the opinion of the authors. Babies should be trained from infancy, concludes the pamphlet, so “smile at the good, walk away from the bad—babies don’t like being ignored.”

  Universities also began offering scientific advice to untutored parents. Being research institutions, they tended to reflect John Watson and the zeitgeist of experimental psychology. Reading them today is curiously like reading a pet-training guide—any minute, the mother will be told to issue a “stand-stay” command to her toddler. In the Child Care and Training manuals, published by the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Welfare, the authors advised that the word “training” refers to “conditioned responses.” They assured their readers that when a mother smiles at a baby, she is simply issuing a “stimulus.” When the baby smiles back, he is not expressing affection. The baby has only been conditioned to “respond” to the smile.

  Further, parents should be aware that conditioning is a powerful tool, the Minnesota guidebook warned. For instance, if a child falls down and hurts herself, mothers and fathers should not condition her to whine. They might do that if they routinely pick her up and comfort her. Treat injury lightly and “tumbles will presently bring about the conditioned response of brave and laughing behavior,” the guidebook advised. Watson had declared that babies feel only three emotions: fear, rage, and love (or the rudiments of affection), and the Minnesota psychologists agreed. They warned that it is easy to accidentally condition unwanted fears. The researchers cited the common practice of locking children in a dark room to punish them. They recommended against it. This, they said, only conditions the child to fear darkness. A stern word, a swift swat, is so much better. The scientists also suggested that parents try not to worry about their children and their safety so much: Fear conditions fear. “The mother who is truly interested in bringing up children free of fear will try to eliminate fear from her own life.” Watson equated baby love with pleasure, brought on by stroking and touch. But he also believed that too much such affection would soften the moral fiber of the children. So did the Minnesota group. Their manual states that although ignoring and being indifferent to a child could cause problems, it was “a less insidious form of trouble than the over-dependence brought about by too great a display of affection.”

  It was serendipity, it was timing—the ideas fit together like perfectly formed pieces of a puzzle. Medicine reinforced psychology; psychology supported medicine. All of it, the lurking fears of infection, the saving graces of hygiene, the fears of ruining a child by affection, the selling of science, the desire of parents to learn from the experts, all came together to create one of the chilliest possible periods in childrearing. “Conscientious mothers often ask the doctor whether it is proper to fondle the baby,” wrote an exasperated pediatrician in the late 1930s. “They have a vague feeling that it is wrong for babies to be mothered, loved, rocked and that it is their forlorn duty to raise their children in splendid isolation, ‘untouched by human hands’ so to speak and wrapped in cellophane like those boxes of crackers we purchase.”

  Oh, they were definitely saving children. In 1931, Brenneman reported that his hospital in Chicago was averaging about 30 percent mortality in the children’s wards rather than 100 percent. Yet the youngest children, the most fragile, were still dying in the hospitals when they shouldn’t. They were coming in to those spotlessly hygienic rooms and inexplicably fading away. At Children’s Memorial, babies were dying seven times faster than the older children; they accounted for much of that stubborn 30 percent mortality. Brenneman also noted that babies who did best in the hospital were those who were “the nurses’ pets,” those who enjoyed a little extra cuddling, despite hospital rules. Sometimes the hospital could turn an illness around, he said, by asking a nurse to “mother” a child, just a little.

  New York pediatrician Harry Bakwin had come up with a description for small children in hospital wards. He titled his paper on isolation procedures “Loneliness in Infants.” French researchers had begun to suggest that the total “absence of mothering” might be a problem in hospitals. An Austrian psychologist, Katherine Wolf, had proposed that allowing a mother into a hospital ward could improve an infant’s survival chances. She insisted that there might be actual risk from “the best equipped and most hygienic institutions, which succeeded in sterilizing the surroundings of the child from germs but which at the same time sterilized the child’s psyche.” Did this make sense? Absolutely—today. At the time, absolutely not.

  Hadn’t psychology declared that children didn’t need affection and mothering? Why would anyone even consider the notion that hygiene and that wonderfully sterile environment might be dangerous to a child? The idea was just silly; so silly, so ridiculous, so trivial, in fact, that the field of psychology pretty much ignored Wolf, Bakwin, Brenneman, and the whole idea. Years later, British psychiatrist John Bowlby went hunting for studies of the relationship between maternal care and mental health. He could find only five papers from the 1920s in any European or American research journal. He could find only twenty-two from the 1930s. What he found instead were thousands of papers on troubled children—on delinquent children, children born out of wedlock, homeless children, neglected children. Neglect, as it turned out, bred neglect beautifully. As one physician wrote, “The baby who is neglected does in course of time adjust itself to the unfortunate environment. Such babies become good babies and progressively easier to neglect.”

  In a curious way, it took a war to change things, and a major one at that, the last great global conflict, World War II. Perhaps a minor skirmish would never have shaken psychology’s confidence so well. It was an indirect effect of the war that actually started catching researchers’ attention. Bomb fallout, the smashing apart of cities across Europe, the night bombings of cities by the Germans, the counterbombings of the Allies, street after street in London blown apart, Dresden fire-bombed into a ruin of ashes: As the fires blazed, as their homes and streets shattered around them, many parents decided to protect their children by sending them away. They hustled their offspring out of the big-city targets to stay in the homes of friends or relatives or friendly volunteers in the countryside. In England
alone, more than 700,000 children were sent away from home, unsure whether they would see their parents again. “History was making a tremendous experiment,” wrote J. H. Van Den Berg, of the University of Leiden. It was impossible to deny the emotional effect on these children; they were safe, sheltered, cared for, disciplined—and completely heart-broken.

  Austrian psychologist Katherine Wolf listed the symptoms: Children became listless, uninterested in their surroundings. They were even apathetic about hearing news from home. They became bedwetters; they shook in the dark from nightmares and, in the day, they often seemed only half awake. Children wept for their parents and grieved for their missing families. In the night, when the darkness and the nightmares came calling, they didn’t want just anyone; they wanted their mothers. Nothing in psychology had predicted this: Wolf was describing affluent, well-cared-for children living in friendly homes. It was startlingly clear that they could be clean and well fed and disease-free—you could invoke all the gods of cleanliness and it didn’t matter—the children sickened, plagued by the kind of chronic infections doctors were used to seeing in hospital wards. It seemed that having good clean shelter really didn’t always keep you healthy. The refugee children were defining home in a way that had nothing to do with science at all.