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

by Deborah Blum

  Margaret Kuenne Harlow died on August 11, 1971, at the age of fifty-two. She had just been made a professor of educational psychology by the University of Wisconsin, some twenty years after her first job had been taken away. Only once did Harry let any bitterness about this seep through publicly and that was during an interview for Psychology Today, when he let it be known that Peggy “was not listed as a member of the psychology department until the last departmental budget presented after her death. They thought that made the percentage of women look better.”

  An interviewer once asked Harry whether Peggy ever tried to compete with him. “No,” he said, “there was no competition at all. She knew that I was better at creating research and that she was better at presenting it.” In this, though, perhaps Harry didn’t give her enough credit. She was methodical in her work and careful in her presentation. “She was very proud of the nuclear family apparatus design,” says Gerry Ruppenthal. “And that was the first paper she wanted to do, just describing the device.” Her approach was more methodical, less dramatic—but she also had a message worth sharing.

  During Peggy’s fatal illness and Harry’s depression, the Harlows managed to illuminate a near perfect arc of social behavior. In those years at the Wisconsin lab, you could contrast a life rich in relationships to a life having none; compare those sure-footed, confident members of Peggy’s nuclear family world to the huddled creatures from Harry’s well of despair. You could see the ways that fathers mattered, as well as mothers, siblings, neighbors, friends. You could see how the very biology that makes us rejoice in company makes us, sometimes terrifyingly, vulnerable to losing it.

  Harry and Peggy Harlow’s studies juxtapose the ways that love can support us and the ways that it cannot. After Harry’s depression experiments were finished, Steve Suomi had the vertical chambers disassembled and thrown away. An isolate monkey, he says, will tear your heart out. The chambers have never been rebuilt. The work from that time, though, stands as testament to the ways that love can be the best—and the worst—part of our lives. Harry himself understood that lesson perfectly. It wasn’t long after Peggy’s death that he began to consider the perils of his position. He knew, all too well, that the cold lands of loneliness are not a safe place to live, not for long, anyway.

  NINE

  Cold Hearts and Warm Shoulders

  If monkeys have taught us anything it’s that you’ve got to learn how to love before you learn how to live.

  Harry F. Harlow,

  This Week, March 3, 1961

  IT WAS AT THIS MOMENT, when he was still stumbling for balance, that Harry Harlow was suddenly accused of being a scientist on the wrong side of truth. It wasn’t—as you might think—the monkey isolation experiments that got him into trouble. That would come later. At this moment, in the shifting culture of the 1970s, it was mother love that was the real problem. His pro-parenting stance had turned him into a politically incorrect scientist. He was unprepared, dumbfounded by that turn around. His simplest and most admired work was suddenly on the line. He couldn’t, at first, understand it. Love, beauty, truth, motherhood—how could anyone object to that kind of message?

  If you were a cynic, of course, and you considered those proclaiming the merits of mother love, you might wonder about their sincerity. The scientific standard bearers were all men. They were all scientists who spent more time at work than at home. They, none of them, had practiced the stay-home-and-nurture behavior that they were urging on women. John Bowlby admitted that his wife took primary responsibility for raising their four children. And Harry had never convinced even his children that they were first in his life.

  Beyond the personal behavior standard, there was an edgy, accusatory undercurrent to some of the mother-be-good scientific pronouncements. If you wanted an example—at the extremes—you might consider the stance of Bruno Bettelheim, once a famous child psychologist and now, perhaps, an infamous one.

  One of the leading experts in autism in the 1960s, Bettelheim seemed to thrive on challenging others. He rightly campaigned for the better treatment of autistic children. Bettelheim insisted that the children needed individual therapy rather than being locked away in institutions. He took an equally strong position on why those children had become autistic, why they had so much difficulty with life. Autism, Bettelheim proposed, was the fault of the mother. The disease could be blamed on the cold, rejecting mother in particular. Bettelheim had a term he liked to use for these women; he called them “refrigerator” mothers.

  Bettelheim visited the Harlow lab after Harry’s influential “Nature of Love” talk. As an autism expert, Bettelheim was struck by the rocking and pacing and self-clasping of the monkeys who had been raised with cloth mom. Their restless turning and hand wringing reminded him immediately of his own autistic patients. But he thought he recognized cloth mom, too, with her fixed face and unresponsive body. She reminded him, he said, of those “cold, rigid, intellectual” mothers who induce autism. He thought that cloth mom’s stillness and silence, “fixed in space and emotionally unresponsive, prevented the monkey infant from becoming a real monkey,” and that the same might be happening to the children he treated. In his book, The Empty Fortress, Bettelheim wrote this of the refrigerator mothers: “Certainly they are not free-moving in their emotions or at least not in relation to their autistic child ... many of them are nearly as frozen, nearly as rigid when they deal with the child as was Harlow’s terrycloth mother.”

  Harry completely agreed that cloth mom had all the limitations of a statue. He didn’t deny that her silent stillness could be responsible for serious emotional and social difficulties. But this, he thought, had absolutely nothing to do with autism. Cloth mom’s value was in allowing scientists to explore how relationships might alter normal development. He didn’t think autism began with normal development. Behind autism, he said, was more likely a brain disorder, still mysterious, undoubtedly genetic in some way. “Possibly some children are rendered autistic by maternal neglect and insufficiency, but it is even more likely that many mothers are rendered autistic because of the inborn inability of their infants to respond affectionately to the mothers in any semblance of an adequate manner,” he wrote in a thoroughly dismissive review of Bettelheim’s book.

  The newly minted feminist movement wasn’t impressed. Women weren’t inclined to believe even supportive statements from men who spent their lives at work while recommending that women stay home and raise children. Once the women’s movement began to emerge as a political power, this male-delivered message of ideal motherhood was, well, infuriating. It directly countered what the feminist leaders themselves were arguing—that mothers shouldn’t be shackled to home. Women needed the freedom to go out and to work and to be someone, someone more than their mothers had been. To have prominent male researchers—who had never sacrificed a nanosecond of their professional lives to child rearing or domesticity—tell women that now science wanted them back in the house. Who did they think they were fooling? It was obviously yet another establishment attempt to slap females back into place.

  Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, herself a primate researcher, a cultural anthropologist, and, by the way, a working mother, recalls that early in her career, an eminent scientist in her field was asked about her work. He replied that “Sarah ought to devote more time and study and thought to raising a healthy daughter. That way misery won’t keep traveling down the generations.” Hrdy could logically remind herself that her critic was a working father, constantly away from home himself. She could argue that her own husband, a physician, was also pursuing a career, that this criticism was completely unfair. But no matter how hard she reasoned, the guilt stayed. And, she says, it stung.

  Other women responded to such charges with simple anger. Women picketed John Bowlby’s appearances and walked out of Harry’s lectures. Eventually, books such as Mother-Infant Bonding: A Scientific Fiction (published in 1993) appeared, in which attachment was dismissed as undiluted psychobabble. By this reckoning, Bowlb
y’s theory was just another attempt to use the tyranny of mother guilt to stop women from living up to their potential. The author, Diane Eyers, freely parodied the rules that men forced on women: “Thou shalt worry that anyone but yourself that takes care of your children will shame you and damage them.” When a national magazine interviewed Harry in 1972, the first question dealt with his politically incorrect work. The interviewer pointed out that he, like John Bowlby, had infuriated the fledgling feminist movement by insisting “that human infants need full-time mothers.”

  Neither Harry Harlow nor John Bowlby handled the backlash well. Bowlby was irritated enough to be wholly undiplomatic: “This whole business of mothers going to work, it’s so bitterly controversial, but I do not think it’s a good idea. I mean, women go out to work and make some fiddly little bit of gadgetry which has no particular social value, and children are looked after in indifferent daycare nurseries.” Harry also used exaggeration as a weapon. He repeatedly told of an event during which he showed a slide of a baby monkey to college students. The male students studied the baby face with interest; the female students, however, let out a breathless “ooh” of response to such cuteness. Harry firmly described that as a natural maternal response. “I have often said that the best way to be a mother is to be born a woman.”

  He meant that last comment to be deliberately provocative. He had no patience for the suggestion that the mother-child bond wasn’t really important, that it was some fiction of scientific misogyny. He’d never cared, anyway, about fitting in or saying the politic thing. He wasn’t going to start pandering now.

  It wasn’t just being attacked that was so upsetting. Both Bowlby and Harlow had endured years of that from their own colleagues. They could shrug off a few insults. It was the irony of it, the injustice. Why should they be criticized for saying that mothers mattered, that the female of the species was loved, needed, and extraordinarily influential? Why should they be harassed for saying that children mattered? Even Sarah Hrdy has expressed dismay over the feminist movement’s apparent resistance to the realities of childhood. “Denial of infant needs runs like an invisible and insidious counter current through publications purporting to correct the ‘river of motherblame’ coursing through our society,” Hrdy wrote recently, in her beautiful and provocative book, Mother Nature.

  If you looked objectively at Harlow and Bowlby, neither was actually insisting that women should be housebound slaves. Harry had never taken fathers out of the parenting formula. There’s evidence of that even in his APA presidential speech. After dismissing the food-equals-love approach, Harry pointed out that if love begins with just being there, with comforting and holding a baby tight, then “the American male is physically endowed with all the really essential equipment to compete with the American female on equal terms in one essential activity: the rearing of infants.”

  And if you were still fixed on the connection with feeding, Harry added, men are just as capable as women of holding a bottle. If Harry’s point seems as obvious as death and taxes, it’s worth repeating; as psychology historian Roger Hock notes that, “this view may be widely accepted today, but when Harlow wrote this, in 1958, it was revolutionary.”

  After the years with Clara and Peggy, Harry was also wise enough not to dismiss women and their fiddly little jobs. It was hard on the family if the mother worked, he agreed; but he suspected that as long as women went home and really paid attention to their children, the relationship would shine through anyway. Harry Harlow had spent more than a decade looking at the whole glittering arc of the social support system. He said that mothers were important, not that they were the be-all of life. He did believe that early experience and care were crucial. And he did think that women were just naturally good—maybe better than anyone else—at giving a child what was needed.

  Bowlby also emphasized the need for a strong, stable, loving caregiver, especially in the first three years. He, too, thought women did this job exceptionally well. But what he rated most highly was stability. What bothered Bowlby about other arrangements was the tendency for children to be shuffled from one indifferent caretaker to another. “Looking after other people’s children is very hard work, and you don’t get many rewards for it,” he said. “I think that the role of the parents has been grossly undervalued.” He refused to shift from his fundamental point: A baby needs a reliable, loving someone to make the world right. That’s what attachment theory is about, after all.

  “What did Bowlby actually say?” asks Hrdy. “He said that primate infants, including humans, are born immobile and vulnerable. This is true. He pointed out that they respond very poorly to being left alone, or otherwise being made to feel insecure, which is also true. Human infants have a nearly insatiable desire to be held and to bask in the sense that they are loved. To this extent, the needs of human infants are enormous and largely non-negotiable.”

  Hrdy belongs to the modern generation of scientists, but Bowlby could definitely have used her on his side back then. So could Harry. If Harry could have made his argument with Hrdy’s clarity, and perhaps her charity, he might yet have won at least some of his female audience back. He didn’t try elegant persuasion. He was tired and unhappy. He had lost his wife. He was battling alcoholism and loneliness and the clinging dark grip of depression. He was listening to women say that the best of his work was merely male tyranny, without merit or honesty. Quietly and thoroughly, Harry simply lost his temper. He didn’t bother trying to educate his audience again. He turned to the other weapons he possessed—a talent for being provocative, an ability to underline his words with gilt-edged sarcasm. “Harry’s pen was sharp,” says a former student. “But his tongue was equal.”

  When a bright young psychologist named Carol Tavris came to interview Harry for Psychology Today, she found her subject ready for battle.

  “If you don’t believe that God created women to be mothers and essentially nothing else, let me prove it to you,” he told her. And that was only in the second paragraph of a ten-page interview published in the spring of 1972. Harry mockingly went on to contrast the play style of the male and female monkeys. “Males play rough and females play soft and sweet and gentle. They sit quietly on the sidelines saying mean, catty, nasty things about other women.

  “Physical strength is the one trait in which man is superior to woman and speaking is the one trait in which woman is superior to man. Now consider what happens when a couple argues. The man tries to talk to the woman. The stupid fool, he can never win. Are you married?”

  TAVRIS: Do you have to be married to argue with a man?

  HARLOW: God created two species, one named man and one named woman. I can even tell you the difference between them. Man is the only animal capable of speaking and woman is the only animal incapable of not speaking.

  TAVRIS: Women’s liberation will get you for that one.

  Even today, Tavris isn’t sure how much of this was real and how much of it was Harry Harlow’s wish to provoke.

  “Sometimes Harlow was a blatantly appalling sexist, yet it was hard to know how much of it was designed to rile people up and how much was what he really thought. There was an unexpected sweetness to him that made his obnoxious remarks seem oddly artificial at times,” she says now.

  Harry wrote her a letter after the interview appeared:

  Dear Carol: Let me congratulate you on the splendid job you did on the interview. I am not sure whether you were interviewing me or I was interviewing you. If I had known as much about recent developments in primate research as you do, I would have been able to respond to your questions in a more intelligent manner. I am convinced that you could raise the IQ of a vegetable—human, or otherwise.

  Her editor, after reading Harry’s note, sent Tavris a memo: “Total surrender. But not the letter of a small man.”

  She agreed.

  In fact, Harry did hold men and women to the same professional standard. He expected them all to work really, really hard. Harry didn’t hit up his female s
tudents. He didn’t demand sexual favors. He didn’t chase them around the cages. He didn’t play groping games in return for good grades. He did expect the same mental toughness and independence of the women that he expected of his male students. “He’d push you to your limit if he thought you were up to it,” Lorna Smith Benjamin says.

  Then Lorna Smith, she came to the lab in 1956, one of the first female graduate students there. She wasn’t invited to have a drink at the corner bar. Harry was comfortable doing that with the male students, she says. But he never talked to her “like a girl,” demanded less of her, or treated her as if she needed coddling. The paradox, she says, was that Harry treated everyone equally and women just weren’t used to it. “His manner was challenging and hostile and females of the time were not used to dealing with that. If they were flattened and intimidated, Harry would take advantage of that like any good primate. If you fought back, that was fine with him. He was always mocking and sarcastic and he didn’t mind getting it back; but women, especially women back then, weren’t socialized that way.”

  Smith once put a drawing of Harry’s head and a monkey’s head in his office, with a “Paradise Lost” slogan over them. Her friends in the lab warned her that he would be angry. Instead, he roared with laughter and kept the drawing for his own amusement. “I’m not saying that I was not a victim of sexism and sexual harassment in that time period. I was indeed,” Smith adds. “But none of that was from Harry. He never propositioned me or grasped or even flirted, and therefore there was none of that retaliation for refusing.” Even now, after years as a respected psychologist at the University of Utah, she appreciates that her graduate professor judged her strictly for her abilities.