Love at Goon Park (34 page)

The nuclear family studies were—deservedly—gaining Peggy real respect; she was beginning to regain the professional momentum she had lost when the University of Wisconsin took her first job away. She was now conducting research in the primate lab. She had a position as lecturer in the neighboring department of educational psychology. And she was beginning to prove, scientifically, something she believed in wholeheartedly. Her experiments were directed toward the idea that the whole family matters, that mother love works best in a communal sense, that it requires the help of father and friends and even the neighborhood. “When my wife became pregnant, [Peggy] talked to me about having kids, and gave me a lot of good advice about child rearing, the importance of interacting, parenting, a stable living environment,” Ruppenthal says. “She was looking at that in the lab, sure. But her real perspective was the human perspective.”

Peggy was still reserved enough, brisk and cool enough, that many of Harry's graduate students didn't see that human aspect. She was shy enough that she rarely shared such motherly advice. Ruppenthal knows that she was more widely disliked than not, that most students thought of her as cold to the heart. Ruppenthal doesn't care: “She was, absolutely, a wonderful person.” And he still admires her research. “I think her hopes were that creating a stable compound environment would bring out the best in the animals. It showed that you can become a very sophisticated animal in a warm environment,”
he says. “It was far greater than she expected; it blew her away and it blew me away.”

One can wonder where her fascination with family would have taken Peggy Harlow, whether she might, herself, have become a psychology star at the University of Wisconsin if she had had a little more time. But she didn't have the time, not enough of it, anyway. In 1967, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, already spread just beyond the bounds of control. Her illness would slowly, but relentlessly, help push Harry closer to his questions about the risky side of love. It would make real all those troubling questions of fear and loss and vulnerability that hovered around edges of relationship research. Harry would consider, once again, the dark places that love can lead you.

Peggy was still working like a foot soldier; if she was well enough to stand, she was at the lab, fussing over her monkeys, taking conscientious notes. Harry was still soldiering on, too, but he was desperately worried and was stretching to snap point. He was so exhausted and distracted that he could sometimes hardly remember why he was there, much less anyone else. “I saw him in the lab one Saturday morning,” Ruppenthal says, “and he said, ‘Who the hell do you work for?'”

Harry was traveling constantly, having confounded another of Terman's expectations and become a nationally sought-after speaker. In the main psychology department, his reputation as the least visible member of the Goon Park community continued. “The comment was, there's the East Coast Harlow, who lives at Kennedy Airport, and the Washington Harlow, who lives at NIH [National Institutes of Health] getting money, and there's the Wisconsin Harlow, who's never there,” recalls Gerald Wasserman, a UW psychologist at the time.

Harry was no longer responsible only for the primate lab. The NIH had decided that since primate research was so promising, it would create a series of centers, spread across the country, to explore the scientific possibilities raised by our primate cousins. Harry Harlow was among the psychologists and physicians and primatologists who helped persuade NIH to invest in primate research. He also convinced the agency to name Wisconsin one of its seven regional
primate research centers. Madison thus became the home of the only NIH primate center in the Midwest. It was an enormous honor—and an enormous added responsibility. Harry was directing the center, running his own lab, attending assorted committee meetings, and, when he could, pursuing research. Wasserman, now a behavioral science researcher at Purdue University, still remembers the passing blur of Harry Harlow in action: “He'd be at his desk and it would be piled high and he'd be carrying on a coherent conversation while he was opening envelopes and reading things and grabbing things. It was as if he could operate with two different minds at the same time.”

Of course, no one maintains the two-brain illusion forever. Harry was stretching thinner, the proverbial rubber band, pulled by guilt and worry in one direction and by his need to prove himself, always, in the other.

What snapped him was another success. He'd always struggled with achievements, always worried that they signaled the last peak moment in his career. It used to confound his friends how much an honor would trigger Harry's insecurities. Gig Levine was among those who joined Harry in celebrating after the famed “Nature of Love” talk. Levine's strongest memory of that party, though, is not a jubilant one. It's of Harry Harlow huddled in the corner of a bar, sliding down into bourbon and self-doubt. The evening had begun joyously enough with celebratory drinks, and then more drinks, and then more. “And it wasn't just a drunk but a really black drunk,” Levine says. “His mood just got blacker and blacker and he said to me, ‘What am I going to do next?'”

In 1967, Harry Harlow became the first (and only) primatologist to win the National Medal of Science. He was called to the White House for a ceremony presided over by President Lyndon Johnson. It seemed to give him no pleasure at all; he told friends only about Johnson's impatience with the whole affair. Harry came home convinced that this time indeed there was no next, that with the medal he had topped out professionally. And in his personal life, although
he wrote to friends about the promise of chemotherapy and about doing the best they could, Harry was preparing to lose his wife.

Steve Suomi, who now heads NIH's Laboratory of Comparative Ethology, remembers his arrival at Wisconsin for graduate school in the winter of 1968. Suomi showed up at the lab expecting to pursue primate research with the most famous psychologist in the department. Within two weeks, Harry had said to him, “I'm not doing well,” and left for the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota, where he sought treatment of a paralyzing clinical depression. He would stay there for two months. The depression proved stubborn enough that doctors would move from drugs to electroshock therapy in trying to control the illness. The depression would moderate, but it would linger long after he came back.

Harry returned to Wisconsin a quiet man. He was silent about the time in Minnesota, withdrawn from the lab for one of the few times in his life, preoccupied just with making it through the days. He seemed to be a man worn out with research, a man who had finally given up on the next big project. “People would talk about what he used to be like,” says one former graduate student. But, in reality, he was also considering a new research direction, a next challenge. And this one, finally, would move him over the line. He was thinking now about the darkest side of love, not what it gives but what it takes away. He wanted to create a monkey model of depression. He wanted to explore the biochemistry of this particular wasteland. If they could find a good way to study it, he was sure there were better ways of helping people lost in the Arctic zone of depression. He could serve as a personal witness to how much that work was needed.

Harry had a clear image of what that model of depression would be. It would be complete and utter aloneness; isolation taken to the icy extreme. Years later, he would look back on those experiments and group them together in a book chapter titled “The Hell of Loneliness.” We all live, Harry wrote, with periods of social isolation: illness in the family, leaving familiar friends and family, business trips, going to college, divorce, the death of someone we love. “The extremes
of human social isolation might be, at one extreme, a child's first day at school and, at the other, the solitary confinement of a criminal offender. The strangeness of a child's first day at nursery school, kindergarten or first grade, after mother leaves, will usually dissipate after the first few days among socially raised tots.”

But if it doesn't fade away, if we don't connect, if we feel trapped in solitude, well, all of us know just how painful that really is. “The total social isolation of solitary incarceration is considered so drastic that Americans pride themselves on reserving it for the most pernicious prisoners,” Harry wrote.

That knowledge had been simmering at the Wisconsin lab for years. Shortly after the first cloth mother studies, John Bowlby had come to meet with Harry and tour the facility. The rejecting surrogate studies were underway then, the monster mothers designed to push the babies away. The point of those experiments was to see if rejection induced psychopathic behavior. And it hadn't, the baby monkeys just kept coming back, trying to tighten the relationship, make it better.

Bowlby had been consoling about the apparent failure of the rejection study. No one has a winner every time, he reminded Harry. And then Bowlby went on his tour of the laboratory, where most of the animals were caged alone, according to the practice of the time. As Harry's students remember it, John Bowlby came back shaking his head. “Harry, I don't know what your problem is,” he said. “I've seen more psychopathy in those single cages than I've seen anywhere else on the face of the earth.” The monkeys were sucking themselves, rocking back and forth, cuddling their own bodies. “You've got some crazy animals,” Bowlby said. In later years, Harry would laugh about Bowlby's ability to see what he himself had been blind to. “It takes a psychiatrist to have a psychosis,” he said.

The first paper, focusing on the effects of isolation, was published out of Harry's lab in 1960. Bill Mason was the primary investigator on that study. In the same way that they had tried to take apart the mechanics of mothering, the Wisconsin researchers tried to explore exactly what made isolation so destructive. Was it the loss of physical
contact only? What if the monkeys also couldn't hear any other animals? What if they couldn't see a single companion? They tried soundproofed cages, cages with solid walls that allowed no view of another animal. But it was difficult, maybe impossible, to filter out those separate effects. Because isolation just hammered the monkeys, flattened them out.

A rhesus macaque could make it with one relationship, even a swinging surrogate, a dog. But he could not make it alone. The effects of isolation—the despairing huddling—could look a lot like depression. Both Rene Spitz and John Bowlby had written about the way infants seemed to tumble down psychologically when they were separated from their mothers. Spitz called the numbed apathy that he observed an “anaclitic depression.” He charted its progress like this: first, protest (symptoms: screaming, tantrums, weeping); and then depression (symptoms: withdrawal, slowness of movement, stupor).

The unanswered scientific question was whether this response to separation was true depression. Not every baby tumbled so simply into apathy. If the child had a restrictive mother—one who was continually confining her, like David Levy's overprotective moms—then, maybe not surprisingly, the child didn't seem to miss her mother quite so severely.

What Harry and his students worked out, then, might strike you as pure common sense. But, again, that was always Harry's measure of good science. The children who really suffered, the little monkeys who wholly grieved, were the ones who felt that they had genuinely lost something. “In other words,” Harry wrote, “depression results from social separation when the subject loses something of significance, has nothing with which to replace that loss, and is incapable of altering this predicament by its own actions.”

So what if you created just that scenario—total loss, total isolation, and total helplessness? If love is necessary to health and happiness, what happens if you strip a life completely bare of affection and connection? Wouldn't you then expect the kind of crippling despair that sends grown men off to clinics to be shocked and shaken back into a
functional existence? What are the costs of belonging to a species that can never quite go it alone? How much can we actually bear? Everyone can take some loss and some loneliness, but there seems to be a point, different for each, when the burden becomes too much. One of the hallmarks of depression seems to be the crossing into that place where helplessness overwhelms almost every other sensation. If you want to accomplish despair in a laboratory, then, where do you begin to find that point of no return?

The first isolation experiments, of course, weren't looking for depression as an end point. They were pure explorations into the power of loneliness. The closed-off cage was an example. It was a blank space, equipped with a one-way mirror. The scientists could look in but the monkey inside could not see out. He had no company but himself. A baby monkey could be raised, almost from birth, without seeing anything except the experimenter's hands as they changed bedding or put in fresh food and water. The researchers placed a few infant monkeys into these boxes for thirty days. When the monkeys were moved, they were so “enormously disturbed” that two of them refused to eat and starved themselves to death. After that, the scientists at the Wisconsin lab force-fed monkeys coming out of isolation, to make sure the animals stayed alive.

The next experiments isolated baby monkeys for six months, and the next for an entire year. If the researchers kept a monkey in isolation for twelve months, they ended up with a rhesus macaque entirely new in the natural world, an animal who didn't explore, didn't play, barely moved, appeared alive only by the thud of its heart and the sigh of its lungs. Harry's students eventually had to re-isolate some of those animals. The monkeys were like born targets, so fearful, so helpless that they brought out the worst in their new companions. The other macaques would form a bullying ring; the isolates would cower within. “And as soon as the other animals would let up, these isolates would take off, which is a stimulus for more attack, and so you'd sit there and say to yourself, ‘Please don't move. Please don't move,'” Bob Zimmermann remembers.