Love at Goon Park (27 page)

“So when he's frightened, does he look to his mother?” Zimmermann asks. Does he hold on with that same desperate “save me from
the world” intensity? By now, Harry's graduate students were fully engaged in the research. They bought a little toy bear that marched and banged a small metal drum and a toy dog that barked—“Arf, arf, arf,” Zimmermann demonstrates. The point of these jerky, strange, noisy creatures was that they would trigger a fear response in the little monkeys. The researchers would put the toy in a box, roll it up next to a cage where a baby monkey was housed with a cloth mom, open the box, and start the bear banging the drum.

“These monkeys were only five days old, they could hardly walk, but some of them in sheer fear would just fly across the space to the mother,” says Zimmermann, his hands making a graceful arc in the air, replicating the airborne lift of baby to mother. “By the time they were just a few weeks old, say thirty days, when they could really get their feet under them, everybody was running to the cloth mother,” clinging with both hands, burrowing their faces into that warm fluffy body, closing their eyes. Pretty soon, the cloth mother was simply base camp. The little monkeys slept on her. A young animal might leave and explore a little, but he'd always hurry back. Even while venturing around the cage, he'd check over his shoulder to make sure that she was still there, watching over him.

The scientists now had twelve monkeys in the study. Zimmermann and Lorna Smith were testing the infants four to five times a day. The lab crew was putting together a picture based on Harry's favorite kind of statistics—small, tight, personal, real. “There were some people very critical of the surrogate work because of the statistics,” Zimmermann says. Critics complained that the study lacked large cohorts of animals and the statistical depth that comes with a big population. “And my answer to them was—the study didn't need elaborate statistics. It just made sense.”

The effects were so strong, the connection between baby and surrogate so visible, that the scientists began to wonder about other ways to test that bond and the security that seemed to come with it.

Bill Mason had taken a pocket of a room in the lab, six feet by six feet, and created a play space for the monkeys. He called it an “open
field.” Mason saw the field as a space where monkeys could be challenged beyond the WGTA's ordered trays. He wanted to use puzzles and locks and toys to study curiosity and he wanted to give the monkeys room to explore. Bob Zimmermann started thinking about the space itself. What if the open field could be made into a strange little world, a place somehow scary to a baby monkey?

Zimmermann had read a 1943 paper by a Gestalt psychologist, Jean Arsenian, who had conducted an experiment with children in a playroom. Arsenian had spent hours observing toddlers when their mothers were in the room, watching how they played or simply fell still when their mothers left. “And she talked about the mother having a field of influence,” Zimmermann says, and that field was like a charmed circle in which the baby could safely and happily play. If a child felt secure, it was as if she carried that charm with her so that she could wander freely away more easily than a less secure toddler. The playroom was a powerful way of demonstrating the mother's field of influence, Zimmermann thought. So what if they took the open field and they used it like an Arsenian playroom—would cloth mom also have a zone of influence, generate a charmed circle of safety?

By the time Harry gave his presidential talk to the American Psychological Association in September 1958, he and his students had been testing four of their surrogate-raised mothers twice a week for two months in the open-field test. Zimmermann's question seemed a charmed prediction. In the open-field room, the little monkeys rushed to the cloth mother, clutched her, rubbed her, and cuddled. The first few times the monkeys were in the room, they never once let cloth mom go, just held tight and barely looked up. But after a while, as long as she was there, the little animals would look around the space. They would begin to get interested. The youngsters might climb a little, push a puzzle piece around, go back to mom, wander out for a while, return to mom, chew on a toy, return to mom. Without her, though—if the scientists decided to keep cloth mom out of the room—literally, the infants were lost. They would screech,
crouch, rock, suck their hands. “Baby monkeys would rush to the center of the room where the mother was customarily placed, looking for her, and then run rapidly from object to object, screaming and crying all the while,” Harry said.

Wire mom was almost as hopeless as no mom. The wire mother could sit in the open-field room all day, but she had nothing to give in terms of reassurance. She was just one more unnerving object. The baby monkeys who went into the field with a wire mother, even those who were accustomed to being fed by her, looked like abandoned children. They were terrified out there in the strange little world of the open field. Even with wire mom sitting squarely and obviously in the middle of the room, they would turn instead to the wall, huddling in its shelter.

As it turned out, the behavior of the little monkeys in Harry's lab fit almost exactly with some inspired studies done by a young supporter of John Bowlby's, an Ohio-born psychologist named Mary Salter Ainsworth. Ainsworth had earned her degree at the University of Toronto. She trained under a scientist there, William Blatz, who was trying to make everyone, anyone, including his students, listen to his “security” theory, which argued, in part, that a child derives security from being near his parents. That sense of safety, Blatz argued, enables the child to go out and explore the world.

Ainsworth, who always described herself as rooted in insecurity, liked the theory so much that she focused her Ph.D. dissertation around it. In 1950, serendipity brought her and Bowlby together. Her husband got a job in England. She went with him and began job-hunting. Bowlby, by that time, was advertising in the newspapers for help and Ainsworth answered his ad. She spent more than three years working with Bowlby, James Robertson, the researcher who had filmed hospitalized children, and the new and precarious attachment team before again following her husband, this time to Uganda, where he had taken a teaching position.

Determined yet to do something with her psychology training, Ainsworth began spending time in the tribal villages, at first just
watching. For all her time with Bowlby, she still thought that the Freudians might be right, that a baby merely bonded to the person who fed him, reinforced, as it were, by being fed. But in the Ganda village, she watched children and their mothers and she changed her mind. The relationship was absolutely specific. “The mother picked up the baby, the baby would stop crying, but if somebody else tried to pick him up at that point, he would continue to cry,” Ainsworth said. The villagers might even share feeding duties, rocking duties, but, in the end, neither milk nor bed created the same bond. A child always knew mother from other.

Babies smiled differently for their mothers; their faces lit in a way that they didn't for strangers. They cooed and coaxed differently. If a mother walked out of the room, her baby would crawl after her. If she came into a room, baby scuttled joyfully in her direction. One of the central points in Bowlby's theory is that attachment involves a precise relationship—and an interactive one. The mother responds to the baby and the baby does her best to keep the mother doing that. She wants her mother close. Therefore, the infant works to bind and attach her mother. In return for all that effort, the baby is rewarded with security. A smile is a wonderful example, then, of a baby's pulling his mother in just a little tighter. “Can we doubt that the more and better an infant smiles the better he is loved and cared for?” Bowlby liked to say.

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.