Harry Harlow showed love is life itself, but his primate subjects paid the price

If you're of a certain age, you probably recall this grotesque sight, courtesy of your Psychology 101 class: a film of a sweet-faced baby monkey, hanging on for dear life to a cloth-wrapped statue of a fake mother monkey, a grim-faced sentinel with a wooden head and bicycle reflector eyes.

This was "cloth mom." There might have been a "wire mom" right next door, a wire statue with a baby bottle at the ready. Food didn't matter — the baby monkey went for soft, cuddly contact, every time.

Harry Harlow was the man behind "cloth mom." "Love at Goon Park" is his story, that of a pioneer in the study of love and affection, a brilliant and sardonic man who would eventually enrage both animal-rights activists and feminists.

Author Deborah Blum won a Pulitzer for her reporting on animal experiments — her interest in Harlow grew out of that reporting and research for her later book, "The Monkey Wars." She explains Harlow in the context of his time by reconstructing a history of developmental psychological theory in the 20th century.

The beliefs about infants and mothers that Harlow discredited seem fantastic today. But Blum shows that Harlow was operating in a field where "love" was a dirty word.

Blum takes the reader back to the early 20th century, pre-antibiotic days when mass infections routinely wiped out the vulnerable — especially children. Children in orphanages and foundling homes died in droves of cholera, diphtheria and scarlet fever. Doctors decided that orphans should be isolated, protected from contagious diseases by remaining virtually untouched by human hands: "Windows were kept open, sleeping spaces separated, and the children touched as little as possible — only for such essentials as a quick delivery of food or a necessary change of clothes."

This crusade against contagion spread to the average American home. The eminent psychologist John B. Watson took it further, leading "a professional crusade against the evils of affection," Blum writes. " 'When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,' Watson warned."

Psychology was trying to justify its existence as a science by making its study of humans as pure and logical as the laws of physics. Behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner argued that if you couldn't observe it, it wasn't there. When a baby smiled at its mother, all it was doing is responding to a "stimulus" — food — mother as lunch wagon.

But other physicians were discovering that orphaned babies in spotless, hygenic rooms were fading away. From loneliness, the physicians suspected — dying at a rate seven times that of older children, according to one Chicago study. But arguments that babies and pediatric patients needed to be loved and physically handled were ignored by the psychology establishment. Into this breach stepped Harlow, a small-town Iowa boy who made it to Stanford University in 1924. After getting his Ph.D., Harlow took a position at the University of Wisconsin.

Harlow, the low man on the academic totem pole, didn't rate a lab. On a visit to the Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison, Harlow had the quintessential zoo experience — looking at the monkeys as they looked back at him, he thought how similar they were to people.

Through persuasion, indirection and subterfuge, Harlow persuaded the university to build him a monkey lab. Harlow discovered that monkeys were far more intelligent than they were getting credit for. They could solve complex problems and puzzles — indeed, they would go at them purely for curiosity's sake.

His experiments with affection came about from the same fear of contagion that turned orphanages into isolation chambers. Harlow began raising his own monkeys, but kept the babies separate from their mothers out of worry that a disease would wipe them out. But the babies, Harlow discovered, "seemed dumbfounded by loneliness," Blum writes. They would sit, rock themselves, stare vacant-eyed and reject anyone who tried to draw them out.

It was this phenomenon that impelled Harlow to challenge the psychological status quo — that babies needed their mothers only as food-delivery systems. He created "cloth mom." Orphaned baby monkeys would clutch at her soft body, craving contact. Even if a baby monkey's bottle was attached to a cold wire monkey statue, the babies would visit "wire mom" just long enough to get fed.

Harlow started spreading the word that affection toward the very young mattered. It was such a controversial subject that graduate students were afraid of signing up for his project, for fear of deep-sixing their careers. Said one: "... to talk about love at the University of Wisconsin, where everything was numbers and statistics ... I think the first assumption was that if you took that one (the mother surrogate project) you'd never graduate."

But his work prompted other researchers to take up the topic, some through the study of human mothers and their interactions with their children. Harlow was making love matter. On national television in 1958, he delivered this message, Blum writes: "if the monkey or the human doesn't learn love in infancy, he or she 'may never learn to love at all.' "

If Harlow's experiments had stopped there, his legacy might be wrapped in a rosier haze. But his work took a darker turn; measuring the effects of extreme isolation and even abuse.

There were "air-blast" monkeys that shot forced air at the baby monkeys. There was a monkey with blunt-tipped brass spikes on her chest that would unexpectedly push against the child.

It didn't matter — the babies just clung harder.

There were the experiments with monkeys and depression, which Blum suggests came out of Harlow's own depression, which descended when his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Harlow subjected a small number of monkeys to total isolation. When those monkeys had children, they abused and sometimes destroyed them. He created a device that Harlow called the "dungeon of despair, " a narrow inverted pyramid that was wide at the top and slanted downward to the point. No matter how hard the monkeys tried to escape, they would slide back down to the bottom, eventually assuming the hunched posture of total despair. " 'I asked ... why, why were they using these?' " said one researcher. "And Harry spoke up. He said, 'Because that's how you feel when you're depressed.' "

But the follow-up was to "repair the injury." Paired with healthy, cuddly young monkeys, the isolates would gradually become interested in life again.

By the time he died in 1981, Harlow had made a lot of people mad, though the ire of the animal-rights movement would be directed at him posthumously. Feminists felt threatened by his insistence on the primacy of mother love (it was still an age when fathers were seldom thought of as primary parents).

Today, no one disputes the conclusion that love matters. Harlow's studies on depression would lead to others, and his "evil mother" studies are now woven into the treatment of child abuse.

"Love at Goon Park" won't make you love Harry Harlow — indeed, Blum never succeeds in explaining what made a workaholic, alcoholic academic who neglected his own children hoist the standard of parental love and affection. But it will make you think.

You will think of the nonsensical arrogance of 20th-century psychologists, who affected government policy to the degree that 3 million pamphlets were printed on the importance of making babies sit silently in their cribs.

And you will think about the vast social experiment we are currently participating in — the separation of infants as young as three weeks from their mothers, who have to go back to work to make ends meet.

And you will think about the costs and benefits of experimenting on animals for humanity's sake.

For Blum, the jury may be out on the extremes of Harlow's work, but his conclusions made it worthwhile.

She writes: "... perhaps we needed — just once — to be smacked really hard with that truth so that we could never again doubt. ... Let us remember the best of Harry's contributions as well as the worst. Let us not slip backwards, ever, into believing that we are not necessary to each other's health and happiness."