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

by Deborah Blum

  The aspect of Freud’s theories that Bowlby found so difficult had to do with reality. Freud had declared that the unconscious in the adult is “in large measure made up of the child slumbering within, the child who dreams and fantasizes of a better life, so intensely that sometimes the adult cannot distinguish the two.” And neither, Freud suggests, could the child. In other words, a child might be most heavily affected by his fantasy life and not by real events. This would mean that what a parent might do to a child was not nearly as important as the child’s internal perceptions and desires and fantasies about that parent. A mother’s touch might be meant as affection, for instance, but be turned into sexual dreaming by the child. If a child reported sexual abuse, then, it might only be the manifestation of desire. Perhaps the memory of a seduction was actually the memory of a wish. A sexual dream woven out of equal parts imagination and longing. Young children, Freud said, have a potent erotic drive that causes them to want sex with their opposite-sex parents. Reality doesn’t have to enter into it at all.

  Freud didn’t say that early connections were meaningless. Shortly before his death, he wrote that the tie with the mother was “unique, without parallel, laid down unalterably for a whole lifetime” as the prototype for all other relationships. On the other hand, he still said, that unparalleled relationship didn’t have to be entirely real. The child might be influenced by his perceptions of something his mother had done, or his dreams of her, or even those lingering erotic fantasies. Spitz could argue that baby needed mother; Goldfarb could argue that children must learn affection when young; Bakwin might insist that babies are emotional creatures. But if doctors were looking for professional support in keeping mother and child physically together, they were not yet going to find it in the community of Freudian psychoanalysis. Anna Freud once explained it like this: “We do not deal with happenings in the real world but with their repercussions in the mind.”

  So when John Bowlby trained in psychiatry, he was startled to find that “it was regarded as almost outside the proper interest of an analyst to give systematic attention to a person’s real experiences.” It didn’t take Bowlby long to realize that he couldn’t work that way. His time with the maladjusted school children had convinced him of the power of real life. He knew that how parents treated children—if they had parents—mattered intensely. In 1948, working for the World Health Organization, Bowlby took his stand, beginning with a report titled Maternal Care and Mental Health. In it, he gathered together his allies. The report rings with the work of Bakwin, Goldfarb, Spitz, Bender, and other observations, including Bowlby’s own.

  Scientists who knew Bowlby remember him as almost a stereotype of the British gentleman, sometimes arrogant, dry in humor and tone, unsentimental, outwardly cool. But in the WHO report, he is passionate. Anger hums in the pages like electricity through a wire: “The mothering of a child is not something which can be arranged by roster; it is a live human relationship which alters the characters of both partners. The provision of a proper diet calls for more than calories and vitamins; we need to enjoy our food if it is to do us good. In the same way, the provision of mothering cannot be considered in terms of hours per day but only in terms of the enjoyment of each other’s company which mother and child obtain.”

  Another concept, beloved by the Freudians, was that the baby’s first relationship was not with the mother as a whole, but with her breast. Infants, so the thinking went, lacked the mental capacity to form a relationship with a whole person, or even to keep the concept of a person. When Freud wrote of mother love, he also explained that the breast that feeds is an infant’s first erotic object, and that “love has its origin in attachment to the satisfied need for nourishment.” Bowlby had studied under another dedicated Freudian psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, who agreed that the most important “being” in an infant’s life was the breast. The mammary relationship, so to speak, would define the child’s connection to its mother. This was Freud’s “oral stage” of development, the mixing of nourishment with a faint tinge of erotica. After World War II, when she had worked with displaced children, Anna Freud was more willing to discuss the notion that a child might love a mother. But she didn’t believe that bond began in affection: “He forms an attachment to food—milk—and developing further from this point, to the person who feeds him and the love of the food becomes the basis of love for the mother.”

  This dovetailed beautifully with psychology’s faith in the conditioned response—the baby is hungry, his hunger drive is satisfied, he becomes conditioned to associate his mother with food. Mother and breast are equal; good mother means good feeding. It was another perfect meeting of the minds in defining human behavior. There was Freud and his followers and their faith in fantasy and food. There was the conviction of mainstream psychology that affectionate mothering was irrelevant and that children could and should be trained. There was the medical profession’s reluctance to believe that health and emotions were in any way connected. “It’s hard to believe now,” says psychologist Bill Mason of the University of California-Davis, now an expert in social relations, “but when I first started working in Harry Harlow’s lab, the prevailing view in psychology was that a baby’s relationship to the mother was based entirely on being fed by her.”

  By the late 1950s, despite the films and arguments and reports, the baby and the mother remained loveless in psychology. John Bowlby was running out of patience. He published another paper, or you could say another salvo, titled “The Nature of Child’s Tie to His Mother” that was flatly grounded in the everyday reality of touch and affection. It was also his first attempt at putting forth his own theory of mother-child relationships, today known far and wide as attachment theory. And what attachment theory essentially says is that being loved matters—and, more than that, it matters who loves us and whom we love in return. It’s not just a matter of the warm body holding the bottle; it’s not object love at all; we love specific people and we need them to love us back. And in the case of the child’s tie to the mother, it matters that the mother loves that baby and that the baby knows it. When you are a very small child, love needs to be as tangible as warm arms around you and as audible as the lull of a gentle voice at night.

  Yes, Bowlby said, sure, food’s important. But we don’t build our relationships based on food. We don’t love a person merely because she comes in carrying a bottle of milk or formula. We don’t seek her out, clinging to her, sob when she leaves, just because she can feed us. That’s lower in the hierarchy of needs—in the terminology of psychology—a secondary drive. Love is primary; attachment is primary. In Bowlby’s view, a whole and healthy baby will want his parent nearby and will work for it—“many of the infant’s and young child’s instinctual responses are to ensure proximity to the adult.” Babies aren’t stupid; they know who will watch over them best. In attachment theory, a plethora of the infant’s behaviors target mom or dad: sucking, clinging, following, crying, and smiling—perhaps cooing and babbling as well—are all part of the instinctive way a child tries to bind his parent tight.

  There’s a Darwinian side to this, Bowlby said, because a nearby parent undoubtedly increases the survival chances of the offspring. Without these behaviors, if parents lost interest, “the child would die, especially the child that was born on the primitive savannas where people first evolved.” And, yes, obviously, food is necessary to survival, but it’s a byproduct of the relationship. A baby knows that if the mother is there, she will provide food. Equally important, Bowlby said, if the mother isn’t there, not only is there no food but no protection against predators, and cold, and all the dangers of the night. So you might logically expect that we would evolve to be afraid and even despairing if our parents suddenly disappear. If you see a baby who appears to be suffering in his loneliness, Bowlby said, then you are seeing reality.

  Push a child away, abandon it, and you do not see a well-disciplined miniature adult. You see the sobbing child in Spitz’s film; James Robertson’s Laur
a, clinging to her parents’ hands; Bakwin’s grave and shrunken babies in their screened-off beds. Bowlby’s studies showed that, as children grew older, became toddlers, this need didn’t lessen at all. The older children were just more aware. They knew their mothers better. They grieved when their mothers left them. They mourned a loss. They wanted their mothers back. In Bowlby’s theory, this was a natural childhood reaction, like fear of the dark, of loud noises, strange people, and shadowy forests. If a baby’s call wasn’t answered, the child was left to fend for herself, make her own defenses. This could be part of what Goldfarb saw in the emotionally cold children from orphanages. Their emotional distance might be self-protective, Bowlby agreed, because it buffered away grief and loss. But it could also be destructive because “it sealed off the personality not only from despair but from love and other emotions.”

  Bowlby’s ideas angered almost everyone he knew. Anna Freud dismissed him outright. She sincerely doubted that infants had enough “ego development” to grieve. Klein accepted that an infant might look sad, go through a “depressive” stage; but that wasn’t missing a mother, she said, that was normal development. All Bowlby was seeing, she insisted, was reaction to sexual tensions, probably just baby castration fears and rage against dominating parents. The British Psychoanalytic Society was so hostile to attachment theory and its author that Bowlby stopped going to the meetings. “Unread, uncited, and unseen, he became the non-person of psychoanalysis,” wrote Karen.

  For the moment, all that compassionate momentum on behalf of children seemed to have stalled. It was beginning to look like a noble but lost cause. Perhaps that’s exactly what attracted Harry Harlow to the research. That’s not to say that the call was immediate. When Harry graduated from Stanford, John Watson still ruled, and there was no one around to take young Professor Harlow particularly seriously. Stanford hadn’t; and, as it turned out, when he arrived in Wisconsin, his new university didn’t, either. To hoist a banner in the name of love, Harry Harlow was going to need more than a name change. He would have to persuade other psychologists to listen to him. He would have to prove that his opinions mattered. He would pursue those goals in the least predictable ways: conduct experiments at a zoo, hand-build a laboratory, become obsessed with the intelligence of monkeys, and become convinced that he could, and should, quarrel with his own profession. You could call it an unusual route to the advocacy of love and affection. But there was never anything conventional about Harry Harlow.

  THREE

  The Alpha Male

  We speak of love, but what do we know about it, unless we see the power of love manifested; unless we are given the power to bestow and a willing heart to bestow it on?

  Inscribed on the northeast wall of

  Memorial Church, Stanford University

  THERE ARE OBVIOUS PHYSICAL differences between Stanford and the University of Wisconsin, starting with water. The Madison campus overlooks a tree-rimmed lake rather than the sharp edge of the Pacific, a vista pretty rather than breathtaking. In the summer, Lake Mendota dances with wind-ruffled wavelets of light. In the winter, the waves freeze solid and unusually fanatical fishermen venture out on the rough gray-green surface and drill through to the frigid waters below to drop their lines. The campus, rambling above water level, changes with the lake. The tree-dense hills blaze like flame in the fall, turn white as ash in the long, long winters. The inevitable snow and ice and the frozen wind off the lake produced in Harry nostalgic memories of the same season at Stanford. Even the old slights and insults could take on a golden tint of warmth: “They expected to place me in a California junior college,” he once said, “and with every Wisconsin winter, I wish to God they had.”

  But it wasn’t the ice-rimmed winds or the sudden shift from graceful Italian architecture to sturdy sandstone that provided the real culture shock. It was the shift from Stanford’s high-intensity program to Wisconsin’s more easygoing approach. When Harry arrived in Madison, the psychology department had four faculty members, took on about three Ph.D. students a year, and was compact enough to be tucked into a basement of the administration building. It’s hard to maintain visions of being an influential psychologist when no one can find you. In fact, Harry himself couldn’t find the psychology department when he arrived on campus.

  The university didn’t cater to junior faculty. In case he’d missed that point, he had no map, no guide, and only the name of the administration building to get him there. “Excuse me,” he said to two passing students. “Can you tell me where Bascom Hall is?” They looked at him. He was not quite twenty-five years old. Short, slight, with a rounded youthful face and curly dark hair. “Sorry,” one of the students replied. “We can’t help you. We’re freshman too.” Fortunately for Harry, Bascom Hall had presence even if he didn’t. It loomed over the campus. The administration building sat atop the university’s steepest hill, overlooking a new lawn, remnant forest, and lakefront. The multistoried hall was built of local pale gold sandstone and fronted with massive white Grecian-style columns.

  Harry climbed the granite steps and, just inside the front doors, he found a reassuring sign on the wall. It was a black-and-white building directory listing “Harlow, H. F., Room 14.” He wound his way into the basement, found his little cubby of a room, and sank down behind the desk, “savoring the first thrill of being a professor.” Almost immediately, the door burst open again and a young man with a shock of wild dark hair stuck his head through the opening. He regarded Harry with dismay.

  “Don’t tell me he isn’t here yet,” the student exclaimed. “I absolutely must get started and I’ve been waiting to see him to know what to do. Have you any idea when this new man Harlow is coming?”

  “Yes,” Harry said.

  It was apparent to him that being taken seriously at Wisconsin was going to be a lot harder than he had expected. In fact, learning to be taken seriously at Wisconsin was going to teach him just about everything he would need to know to be taken seriously elsewhere. He had an inkling of that on the opening day of his first undergraduate psychology class, an experience commonly described in his department as “being thrown to the wolves.”

  On the first day of class, Harry stood up in front of four hundred–plus freshmen and sophomores and was abruptly overwhelmed by his childhood shyness. His tongue tied. His r’s disappeared. He tried mumbling them, but no matter. They sounded like w’s. When Harry attempted to say “right” and it came out “wight,” some of the students booed. “The first ones weren’t very loud, but the next ones were,” he recalled. By the end of class, he could hardly be heard over the catcalls and laughter. Not that he wanted to say anything else. He just wanted to get out of there.

  Later, he would call that class one of his most important learning experiences. At the time, he was worried and hurt. In the early twenty-first century, when we work so hard to be tolerant of differences, we forget how culturally accepted intolerance once was. Thus Terman’s almost unchallenged division of the world into the deserving gifted class and the undeserving stupid class. People scoring below the curve on Terman’s Stanford-Binet were called “feebleminded,” remember, and that was one of the politer terms. They were also “mental defectives” or “morons” or even “undesirables.” People who limped were “gimps.” The homeless were bums. People who couldn’t talk were dumb. And the Elmer Fudds of the world, people like Harry who struggled with an “r” here and there—they were ridiculous. It was standard procedure for students to boo a teacher if they considered him a joke.

  At first, the situation seemed impossible. The more nervous Harry became, the more he stumbled over the dreaded r’s. He decided to try appeasing the wolves in another way. He hunted up funny little anecdotes and jokes, relying heavily on Reader’s Digest, and he started slipping them into his lectures. The students laughed at the stories but they still booed his pronunciation. Finally, he decided to give the students something to really boo about—a groaner of a joke, a truly appalling pun. Harry was a pun addi
ct anyway; word play was like child’s play to him, pure fun. He punned and the students groaned. He added a few more puns. As the puns became more obnoxious, the groans turned into boos. So Harry became even more outrageous. The boos grew louder. Increasingly, though, it was the jokes the students were reacting to. As Harry relaxed, he was stumbling over “r” less, anyway. He discovered, too, that if he slowed down the pace of his speech, kept an even rhythm, he could almost make those errant w’s disappear. He developed such a clear, distinctive speaking style that a fellow psychologist once described Harry’s voice “as cool and crisp as chilled lettuce.”

  Eventually, puns would come as naturally to Harry Harlow as poetry and breathing. When the university billed him for distilled water, he put up a notice on his bulletin board: “Distilled waters run steep.” When a student asked him why male animals did better in certain tests, he snapped back, “They have to meet a stiffer criterion.” Harry never completely conquered the r’s, but eventually he learned not to care. He even credited the undergraduate wolves for confounding Terman’s predictions and turning him into a speaker of national caliber. “Teaching elementary psychology. It’s the best possible speech and timidity therapy you can have,” Harry said.

  He also credited someone else. He had an accomplice in figuring out how to thwart the wolves, a graduate student in psychology, Clara Mears, who rapidly became more than a friend. Clara was the daughter of a Congregationalist minister. She had little tolerance for cruelty and was delighted when Harry won the teaching war. “The only trouble,” she liked to say, “was that he never did stop punning.” And that made Harry laugh. The two of them seemed a natural support system. Friends and colleagues and family encouraged the relationship. So did Harry’s old professor, Lewis Terman. Harry’s friendship with Clara Ernestine Mears had an odd small-world twist to it. She wasn’t just any bright graduate student. She was a charter member of Terman’s study of gifted children.