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

by Deborah Blum

  In that Ugandan village, Ainsworth could see exactly the kind of behaviors that Harry and his students were producing in their experiments. The babies would make short excursions away from their mothers. Then they would stop and check, crawl back to touch, or just smile, making sure that she was still there for them. Ainsworth put it like this: “The mother seems to provide a secure base from which these excursions can be made without anxiety.” Ainsworth, too, began to wonder about the nature of security. What behavior makes the good mother, the one who puts a child’s world right? It was clear from Harry’s work that cuddling and comfort were essential blocks in building a secure base; therefore, the wire mother could never be a source of security, no matter how often she provided food. It didn’t matter that wire mom never rejected or walked away from her child. By the very fact of her metallic nature, she was unable to provide emotional support.

  What if you translated the wire mother—the cool, businesslike but available parent—into human terms? Harry once told of meeting a woman who, after hearing about his research, marched up to him and diagnosed herself as a wire mother; she was uncomfortable holding her children, she said, and she disliked the clutch of their hands. “It could have been worse; she could have been a wire wife,” he joked. But he told the story to emphasize that there are such mothers out there; wire mom wasn’t just a lab creation; she represented a style of parenting. And perhaps because of psychology’s fixation on feeding and conditioning, researchers hadn’t realized how wrong that kind of cold and distant parenting might be.

  What happens to the child who must navigate through life without a parent who is willing, or able, to provide security? If there’s no way for a baby to bind a parent to him, heart to heart, then what provides him with a sense of safety while he explores the big, bad world out there? Can a small boy, a little girl, ever achieve the everyday courage of curiosity if no one loves the child enough to hug back?

  You could make the argument that Harry’s wire-mothered monkeys, afraid to explore, to touch, even to look around, were a perfect case study in insecurity—or even insecure attachment. A few years later, in the early 1960s, Ainsworth began testing for such responses in children. She had left Africa (and her husband) and was working at Johns Hopkins University. In Maryland, Ainsworth worked out a plan to monitor the way children attach to their parents, to see some of the consequences of a stable connection or a fragile tie. Her “strange situation” tests—not so different from the open-field experiments in concept—were rigorously designed and detailed in their measurements. Like Harry Harlow, like John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth realized just how nailed-to-the-floor the studies had to be to make psychology pay attention.

  The strange-situation test is still used today and it works like this: Mother and infant arrive at the lab together and settle themselves in a playroom. A friendly researcher welcomes them and then sits quietly in a corner. Toys and games litter the cheerful room and, typically, once there, surrounded by all the bright plastic possibilities, the baby crawls off to explore. But here’s the catch. A few minutes later, the mother leaves the room; the baby is now alone in that fascinating but still strange place. Only the unknown researcher remains. Then, after a few minutes or so, the mother returns.

  Remember the way the baby monkeys leapt and clung to their cloth mothers? Almost all the human babies, too, rushed to the returning mother. They smiled and they clutched her close. If the mother’s leaving had been a little impatient or brusque, the baby might even cling tighter on her return. Uncertain in their mother’s absence, those children seemed to be testing her response to them. They wanted extra reassurance: They were glad to see her; was she happy to see them?

  Without their mother, many of the children stopped playing. Some cried. They might tearfully look around, search the room, toddle toward the door in search of the missing parent. None of them found the researcher’s presence reassuring. They tended to look at her doubtfully, if at all. She was a stranger. Nothing about her presence made them feel secure.

  There were some variations on this pattern. Sometimes, a child would continue playing in his mother’s absence and, upon her return, still relaxed, merely look up, beaming. Ainsworth classed these children as beautifully, securely attached. They seemed to have no worries that their mothers wouldn’t return; they were just “there” for them. Ainsworth also found the opposite, responses that seemed to suggest the child of a wire mother. Some children showed no comfort or happiness when their mothers returned. They might crawl to the mother, as if seeking reassurance, but then hold their bodies stiffly away from her. Others didn’t even try; there was an odd wariness in the relationship. They would flick the mother a glance and then look away. Here was born the term “insecure attachment.” After further study, Ainsworth divided the insecurely attached children into two primary groups. There was the ambivalent attachment, such as the child who sought the hug and then couldn’t really get anything from it. And there was the avoidant attachment, the slightly hostile connection between the mother and the child who knows her and looks away from her.

  One of the enormous differences between these children and Harry’s surrogate-mothered monkeys was the relationship itself, the give and take, back and forth between baby and mother. When Ainsworth and her students visited these families in their homes, again as observers, they found that the mothers of securely attached children were acutely tuned to their children. They were responsive to the cry and the smile, quicker to pick up a crying child, inclined to hold a baby longer and with more apparent pleasure. The mothers of ambivalent children were often unpredictable—some moments hurrying to cuddle, some moments indifferent to a baby’s sobs. Neither the researchers nor, apparently, the infants could rely on which response a mother would give. The mothers of avoidant children might be called rejecting in manner. They were often irritated when they did pick up a child. They did it resentfully and a little roughly. They sometimes spoke of their dislike of physical contact, and in Ainsworth’s tapes they could be heard snapping “don’t touch me” if their children reached out.

  Ainsworth’s findings countered Watson almost point by point: mothers who responded quickly and warmly to their babies’ cries during the early months of life not only had babies who were securely attached but also babies who actually cried less than the others. By age one, those youngsters seemed to feel they didn’t need to cry for attention. They relied on gestures and expressions and gurgling coos. They didn’t look clingy, as the old theory would have predicted. They looked independent. By contrast, the avoidant babies apparently had learned to expect nothing from their parents. The infants sobbed frequently and usually to themselves. They didn’t look self-reliant. They looked miserable—or angry. And if their mothers did come to pick them up, the defensive infants turned away. Huddled away like that, the avoidently attached babies resembled nothing so much as Harry’s wire-mothered monkeys, lost in the open-field room, heads down against the wall.

  Could Harry’s work—or the timing of it—have been more perfect for John Bowlby’s arguments? Alienated from psychiatry and the high priests of human behavior, Bowlby had already been spending more and more time talking to animal behavior researchers. Among the best was Konrad Lorenz, who would later win the Nobel Prize for his work with “imprinting”—the passionate, instinctive attachment of baby birds to their mothers. Lorenz was able to show that this first loyalty was given to the “mother” first seen by the tiny birds. The “mother” thus could be Lorenz, actually, if he was hovering over the nest when greylag goslings—the species he studied—first cracked their way out of the egg shells. It wasn’t a perfect match, obviously, for human behavior. It certainly didn’t impress Bowlby’s critics. “What’s the use to analyze a goose?” mocked one of Bowlby’s colleagues in the British Psychiatric Association.

  If you considered Lorenz’s studies seriously, though, you realized they were a reminder that nature fully intends a helpless baby to be well connected to a protector. In the geese, the
attachment might seem hard-wired. Human relationships are more flexible, and therefore more difficult, but Bowlby insisted that the basic point was the same: Mothers mattered. Babies needed them; babies were born to need. And now here was Harry Harlow, conducting experiments on a species much closer to humans. Harry’s work was saying exactly the same thing. The Wisconsin experiments blew away the notion that mothering was equivalent to feeding, or that any old mother could comfort a child. You might not like Harry’s results, but you couldn’t ignore them.

  John Bowlby wrote to Harry Harlow on August 8, 1957, after the cloth and wire mother work had started but before Harry drafted his landmark speech. Bowlby had heard of the Wisconsin surrogate experiments from a highly respected animal behaviorist at Cambridge University named Robert Hinde. At a psychology meeting at Stanford that year, Harlow and Hinde had fallen into an extended discussion of motherhood. The discussion made enough of an impression on Hinde that, upon his return to England, he promptly contacted Bowlby. And what Hinde said intrigued Bowlby enough that he promptly sent Harry a draft of a paper he was working on: “I need hardly say I would be most grateful for any comments and criticisms you cared to make ... Robert Hinde told me of your experimental work on maternal responses in monkeys. If you have any papers or typescripts, I would be very grateful for them.”

  The draft manuscript Bowlby enclosed was that near-diatribe on behalf of children, the report that would infuriate so many of his psychiatry colleagues in London, The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother. Unlike the British psychiatrists, Harry loved what Bowlby had to say. He wrote back promptly himself: “It appears that your interests are closely akin to a research program I am developing on maternal responses in monkeys.” He invited Bowlby to come and see the surrogate-raised monkeys. Harry wrote that the relationships they were looking at were growing stronger and stronger, beyond anything that researchers in his lab had expected.

  In one series of tests, Harry’s graduate students had put a cloth mother into a Plexiglas box in the middle of the open-field room. The baby monkey clearly didn’t want mother behind glass; she cooed coaxingly, she fingered her way around the clear barrier, trying to find a way to get her parent out. But she would, in the end, settle for just being able to see mother’s face. All the little monkeys tested would eventually begin exploring the room, and when they found something that interested them—a small puzzle, say—they would pick it up and bring it back to the box, as close to mom as they could get. In other tests, the monkeys could open the box if they figured out how to undo a series of locks. They would puzzle and puzzle without end until they had every lock undone and could tuck themselves close against mother. Even if young monkeys had graduated from cloth mom’s care and been moved into the company of other juvenile macaques, they would leap to free her. They might have been away from her for months, but it made no difference. Apparently, Harry said, the little monkeys were “resistant to forgetting.”

  Bowlby promptly began citing Harry’s work. He would say later that the two research projects that began to make people take him seriously, that eventually eased him back into the British Psychiatric Association, were the stunning work of Mary Ainsworth and the inarguable findings from Harry Harlow’s lab. After them, Bowlby said, “Nothing more was heard of the inherent implausibility of our hypotheses.”

  The speech Harry made in 1958 upon assuming presidency of the American Psychological Association rings like a war cry: exasperated, provocative, and startlingly poetic in its very outrage. He wondered out loud that his profession could be so willfully blind. “Psychologists, at least psychologists who write textbooks, not only show no interest in the origin and development of love and affection, but they seem to be unaware of its existence.” The only books that seemed to address love were written by fiction writers, by poets and novelists, and they were fixated on adult love. It was as if the whole world were colluding to pretend that our first loves, those of childhood, don’t matter at all.

  And when Harry Harlow described the cloth mother experiments he touched on Bowlby’s eloquent explanations of why the child clings to the mother. Everything, however preliminary and new, and contrary to earlier arguments, spoke of a “deep and abiding bond between mother and child.” The poets and the novelists, he said, might have written more prolifically and more beautifully of love but, in the end, he thought they could not always illuminate it as well as a scientist with a willing mind. “These authors and authorities have stolen love from the child and infant and made it the exclusive property of the adolescent and adult,” he said. In that, he could promise his audience, the poets were as wrong as the psychologists. Love begins at the beginning; perhaps no one does it better, or needs it more, than a child.

  SEVEN

  Chains of Love

  Because of the dearth of experimentation, theories about the fundamental nature of affection have evolved at the level of observation, intuition and discerning guesswork.

  Harry F. Harlow,

  The Nature of Love, 1958

  IN THE LATE I950S, A TRIO of child psychologists—Joseph Stone, Henrietta Smith, and Lois Murphy—decided to pull together a book on the science of babies. They started collecting studies. Then more studies. And still more studies. The paper pile was getting so big that, Stone said, they started wondering whether they were merely incompetent researchers, unable to get a grip on the science. Finally, they realized that the stacks of studies held a unified message: They had tapped into a “genuine knowledge explosion.” Science was finally discarding its vision of the passive child. Suddenly, babies were real people, people with feelings, and passionate ones at that.

  The resulting book, The Competent Infant, began with a story: “Some years ago, a young psychologist of our acquaintance was helpfully diapering his six-month-old first born son. His wife came on the scene and protested: ‘You don’t have to be so grim about it, you can talk to him and smile a little.’ At which our friend drew himself up and said firmly, ‘He has nothing to say to me and I have nothing to say to him.’”

  And how wrong he was, the authors said. And how wrong science had been. They followed that assertion with a two-page list of other mistaken assumptions adopted by baby experts about babies. As they put it, “We can collect embarrassing moments from the professional literature almost at random.” Among their choices for the most ridiculous scientific ideas: Babies can’t see faces (reported in 1942); babies are unaware of almost anything around them (1948); newborn babies are only a collection of reflexes (1952); they don’t see color until the age of three (1964); and even “the human infant at birth and for a varying period time afterwards [is] functionally decorticated” (1964); in other words, babies are brainless.

  The Competent Infant is a 1,314-page, fully loaded rebuttal to the empty-headed infant idea. Pointed commentary from the editors is wrapped around 202 studies and essays authored by scientists from around the world; each contributor aimed at reinventing our image of the child. The babies in Stone and Smith and Murphy’s sharply edited book can see people just fine. They pay attention to those people, too, and think about them. These small humans work hard at relationships. Parents matter; and, oh, by the way, love matters, too.

  Stone, who was chair of the child study division at Vassar, and his colleagues picked their evidence carefully. They realized, as Bowlby had before them, that to make their argument they were going to need not only direct human evidence but also circumstantial evidence, the kind found in well-controlled animal studies. Still, the research had to be the best; they included only a tenth of the studies they had gathered. Stone contacted Harry Harlow almost as soon as The Nature of Love came sizzling off the APA presses. The cloth-mother studies—and Harry’s outspoken championship of love and relationship—had catapulted Harry out of the small community of primate researchers into the bright, light, big-city world of baby care expertise.

  It wasn’t only Stone, although Harry liked Stone; he called him “one of nature’s wonderful men” and pro
vided him with reams of material for the baby book. At that moment, everyone seemed to be calling Harry F. Harlow to hear his message about love. He spoke at campuses around the country, hurrying from conference to committee meeting to conference. And Harry was also talking mother love and baby love outside the scientific community: he appeared on the television networks, in national magazines, in newspapers, on the talk circuit. Life, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, CBS, NBC, the BBC—they all wanted him to reinvent the mother-child bond. One of the reasons, his former colleagues agree, why Harry Harlow was so effective in shifting mainstream psychology’s stand on love was that he was such a tireless and eloquent advocate for his cause.

  “Harry had already established a reputation as being bold, caustically witty, playful and innovative—qualities that were very rare among academic psychologists,” says Bill Mason. “He had also demonstrated that he was eager to apply these qualities to attacking some of the sacred cows of the Hullians and Skinnerians, central figures in the Zeitgeist of experimental psychology of the fifties.” Mason believes that the message was well timed. There was a related uprising of work by ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz, Bowlby’s colleague Robert Hinde, and University of California psychologist Frank Beach, all illuminating the importance of early experience. Donald Hebb, too, had performed rat studies showing that early experience could alter adult performance in animals. Their studies and Harry’s spoke to many who had become uneasy about the rigid direction psychology seemed to be taking. It was an unusually receptive moment, a rare opportunity to reconsider the mainstream views of psychology.