Love at Goon Park (45 page)

And perhaps, sometimes, the patch is the best we're going to achieve. So far we haven't figured out a way to rescue all children
soon enough, to stop child abuse, to guarantee every baby a loving home. So far, there's no guarantee that we will. So perhaps we should put the energy into making some damn good patches for damaged children.

A few people have put the patch idea into direct practice. One is a neuroscientist, Bruce Perry, the outspoken chief of child psychiatry, at Houston's Baylor University. Perry argues that our biology is designed for a more complex social world than even a good nuclear family may provide. “Our current living systems are disrespectful of the brain's potential,” he says. “It's unfair to expect one or two parents to provide all of the rich opportunity that our brain is seeking.”

Perry has also tried enrichment approaches, touch therapy, dance, art, storytelling, and drama. By doing brain imaging, he's been able to see that such activities can help strengthen specific parts of the brain; for example, storytelling can build up the outer cortex, and play therapy can stimulate the limbic system, at the base of the brain. The children who benefit the most from this, he says, are neglected children. They haven't had anyone to play with them, stimulate them, and teach them how to interact with others. “You smile at your mother. She doesn't smile back. You want to be hugged. She's busy; she pushes you away. You ask a question and she doesn't look at you when she answers. And so you're taught that smiling gets you nothing, that people don't want to look at you, that you are unwanted,” Perry says, and there is both sympathy and frustration in his voice.

Studies of neglected children find that often what they see is a still-face, no matter what the expression. When shown photographs of facial expressions, abused children often mistakenly see anger. Neglected children, too, often see nothing. Many of them lack the basic face reading skills, period. Happy, sad, furious? They just weren't sure what a face might be telling them. Of course, this makes complete sense. Who would teach them to read a face? The mother who had no interest in them? The father who wasn't there? No one had been there to teach them how to interact with another person.
Once again, it was back to cloth mom and her empty heart and empty head.

This was what Harry saw as the ultimate failure of cloth moms; socially, he said, “they have an effective IQ of zero.” The stuffed surrogate could offer her children a warm body—but teach them nothing about a living one. The final tally of Harry Harlow's studies, and those that grew out of them, gives us “a body of knowledge about the devastating effects of social isolation and their extreme resistance to treatment. Many people still do not appreciate how bad the effects are,” says psychologist Irwin Bernstein. Sometimes it seems that this is the hole in the dike, the chink in the armor, of our very successful species—our need not just to
be
loved, but to
feel
loved, when no one is guaranteed either.

A parent might not respond to a child for many reasons: depression, stress, weariness, drugs, alcohol, indifference. If a parent turns away consistently, Ed Tronick suspects that the child begins to see herself as ineffective and helpless. Perhaps it's worth repeating that we all—child and adult—need at least one relationship we can lean on without worrying about falling. And by definition, this means that both people in the relationship must do their part—asking for what they want, answering, talking, listening, reaching out, and reaching back. One leans when she is weary, one supports when he is strong. The still-face experiment is all about the baby's seeking the adult's response: Smile back at me, talk back to me, touch me when I reach for you. That means it's also all about the adult's paying attention. “The infants' message is that their mothers should change what they are doing,” Tronick says. And the point—at least for the infant—is that if you are paying attention, you are indeed going to catch her when she unexpectedly falls.

What's important is not that the mother gets it right every time. No mother studied by any psychologist responded perfectly to her child in every instance. No psychologist who studies mothers thinks that perfection has anything to do with good mothering. It's fixing mistakes that matters—even just the willingness to try again. Tronick
found that when infants are confronted by a mismatch—I asked you for this, you gave me
that
—the babies usually just signal again. And he has analyzed what happens next. Thirty-four percent of mothers in his study recognized the baby's need next time round. Another 36 percent nailed it on the third try. “Infants and their mothers are constantly moving into mismatch states and then successfully repairing them,” says Tronick. He thinks of this as interactive error and interactive repair. The mother plays peek-a-boo until the baby is overexcited. He looks away, he stops smiling—it's a message. Stop. I need a break. The responsive mother breaks off the game, lets the baby cool down, corrects the mistake, and returns gently to the game or goes on to something else.

If one returns to the idea of the right parent, it may simply be a mother or father who doesn't give up on the child. No one gets an infallible parent. No one gets a perfectly secure base every minute of every day. We have built-in buffers for that, all those self-comforting actions that everyone needs occasionally. There is no requirement for angelic perfection in parenting. The requirement is just to stay in there. Harry's research tells us that love is work. So do all the studies that follow. The nature of love is about paying attention to the people who matter, about still giving when you are too tired to give. Be a mother who listens, a father who cuddles, a friend who calls back, a helping neighbor, a loving child.

That emphasis on love in our everyday lives may be the best of that quiet revolution in psychology, the one that changed the way we think about love and relationship almost without our noticing that had happened. We take for granted now that parents should hug their children, that relationships are worth the time, that taking care of each other is part of the good life. It is such a good foundation that it's almost astonishing to consider how recent it is. For that foundation under our feet we owe a debt to Harry Harlow and to all the scientists who believed and worked toward a psychology of the heart.

At the end, in Harry's handiwork, there's nothing sentimental about love, no sunlit clouds and glory notes—it's a substantial, earthbound
connection, grounded in effort, kindness, and decency. Learning to love, Harry liked to say, is really about learning to live. Perhaps everyday affection seems a small facet of love. Perhaps, though, it is the modest, steady responses that see us through day after day, that stretch into a life of close and loving relationships. Or, as Harry Harlow wrote to a friend, “Perhaps one should always be modest when talking about love.”

EPILOGUE

Extreme Love

 

 

 

“IF YOU'RE GOING TO WORK WITH LOVE, you are going to have to work with all its aspects,” Harry Harlow once said. No one could have meant that more sincerely. Harry was unflinching in pursuit of love in all its incarnations. His research led from the best of mother love to the worst. He looked at families made joyfully close and families shredded apart. He measured kindness. He measured hopelessness. He charted life surrounded by affection and life stripped of all relationships. He explored emotional damage and he insisted on exploring emotional healing, as well. Harry described the arc of those studies as: love created, love destroyed, love regained. No American researcher before or since has sent young primates through such a range of love's terrain, from transcendent to treacherous.

If he had only explored love at its best, the golden nature of touch, say, a discussion of the moral and ethical issues raised by Harry Harlow's work might not be necessary. But in the same way that his results helped transform our understanding of love, his open-ended
inquiries helped transform our sense of ethical and moral limits in such research. Can you imagine choosing to do his experiments on total isolation, to induce such grief in a baby monkey that he literally dies in your care? To design and build a monster mother that flings a clinging baby across a cage? Yes, those were extremes, even in Harry's lab. But should research go to extremes? One of the questions that now underlies Harry's work is this: What are we willing to pay for knowledge? How far into the ethically risky realms of research should we go in pursuit of a promising idea, a compelling question?

Harry Harlow never denied that animals suffered in his laboratory. He was equally forthright about why he could live with that. “Remember, for every mistreated monkey there exist a million mistreated children,” Harry said. “If my work will point this out and save only one million human children, I really can't get overly concerned about ten monkeys.”

But other people can get concerned. Other people can mind a lot about those ten lost monkeys. Many among the animal rights movement still mind; they remember Harry Harlow all too well. His name doesn't speak to them of love or friendship or the absolute imperative of relationships. They remember him as the man who tortured small and helpless animals. They want the rest of us to remember him that way, too.

Harry Harlow's legacy can seem paradoxical, bright and shadowed at once. His work helped change psychology for the better. We now take for granted the idea of holding our children when they are frightened, of treating them with affection. We accept that standing by matters. Being ready to comfort or listen or laugh—being willing to give as well as to receive—is fundamental in a relationship. We believe that, too. But our acceptance represents a revolution of sorts in the study of relationships. Both as a society, and as individuals, we now believe that our watch counts, that how we treat others shapes them and also shapes us.

Even the darkest of the Wisconsin studies—the motherless monkey work, the evil-mother studies—spoke to that recognition of one
person's influence over another. Harry's studies are now woven into the treatment of child abuse. They played a role in illuminating the strength of the connection between a child and a dangerous parent. They made real the long-term effects of what was once considered a brief period in a child's life. The controlled studies that he conducted could never have been done in children. Early in the twentieth century, the National Institutes of Health did receive a proposal to isolate children for up to two years. It was, naturally, rejected. “Since that time, nonhumane experiments have told us what results this inhuman experiment would have produced,” Harry wrote in an introduction to a 1971 psychology textbook. His experiments are still used to counter criticisms that human data—continuing studies of children in orphanages—are just circumstantial. Attachment researchers say they still sometimes rely on the cloth-mother work to answer those who say that a parent's touch doesn't matter. “I think Harry would be surprised to realize how important he is in clinical treatment,” says his old friend William Verplanck.

And yet, Harry's work also casts an ethical cloud over the research itself. It
is
hard to dismiss the image of a baby monkey who desperately clings to his mechanical mother while she shakes him until his bones rattle. It's hard to think of the infant who calls and calls for a mother who will never come back. There are photos from Harry's lab of monkeys who have been released from long-term isolation. The images make you think that, melodramatic or not, the name is apt. The animals look like survivors of a concentration camp: eyes blind with horror, arms still wrapped around themselves. Is it hard to look past those haunted faces? Some would say impossible.

Harry's darkest work can seem so very dark that even some of his fellow psychologists stand deliberately back from it. Some worry about being associated with such politically difficult studies. Some are troubled by the ethical implications. There are those who could wish away the sorrow and loss unmistakable in even the black-and-white images of Harry's work. If you had never heard of Harry Harlow before you opened this book, if you wonder how a psychologist who did so much
pioneering work can seem so invisible only twenty years after his death, that transparency is due partly to the unease he yet stirs in his own profession. “There's no doubt that he's been considered politically incorrect,” says psychologist Duane Rumbaugh, Harry's friendly competitor in the science of primate intelligence. “It was surprising to me how fast the citations dropped off after his death.”

In her exploration of the psychology and science of parenting,
Mother Nature,
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy makes one reference to Harry's work. She describes it simply as “bizarre.” The recent
A General Theory of Love
argues, as Harry did, that love in childhood shapes our brains—and therefore our futures. In outlining their theory, California psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon acknowledge the power and importance of the Harlow experiments. They also acknowledge them as destined for “perpetual notoriety.”

Robert Sapolsky, the primate researcher known for his explorations of behavior and social connection, expresses the paradox in his 1994 book on the biology of stress,
Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:
“These were brutal studies,” he wrote of the Wisconsin experiments. The legacy of the research still resonates with tension. Animal activists ask why Harry's research was necessary. Or, as Sapolsky paraphrased their question, “Why torture baby monkeys to prove the obvious?”