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The sterile environments recommended for medical reasons, which must surely have horrified some of the caregivers, fit nicely with the prevailing wisdom in psychology. In the early 20th century, the president of the American Psychological Society, John B. Watson—famous as the founder of behaviorism—warned of the "Dangers of Too Much Mother Love," insisting that responsible parents refrain from kissing and hugging their children, lest they become emotionally needy or—horrors—get germs. Watson's bestseller on raising children was praised by everyone from Bertrand Russell to Parents Magazine.
But still the children kept dying, germs or no germs.
We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love. 1 John 3:14
The dark world of child psychology was deeply and clearly in need of a revelation. And like another revelation about love 2000 years ago, this one was heralded by a lone voice calling from the wilderness. The lonely voice calling American psychology to repentance was that of Harry Harlow, an eccentric psychologist who spent most of his controversial career at the University of Wisconsin.
Harlow's story is told with elegance and passion by Deborah Blum in Love at Goon Park. It is a tale of love or, more accurately, the absence of love and the tragic consequences that ensue when love does not flow naturally and freely into the nooks and crannies that Mother Nature has provided for this most basic of human emotions.
Love at Goon Park chronicles the exposure of this shocking and demoralizing state of affairs as it slowly gave way to our modern celebration of parental love. Credit for this overdue scientific revolution goes largely to Harlow, whose work appears in just about every introductory psychology text. You may recall the touching photos of a baby monkey clinging to an artificial cloth-covered "mother." Harlow's highly original experiments on baby primates revealed an unimaginably profound need for love—a love that could only be communicated by touch. Forced to choose between a cloth mother that felt "maternal" or a wire mother with a supply of milk, baby monkeys always chose the former, abandoning her only momentarily to feed.
Harlow fought an entrenched establishment led by luminaries like John Watson. He needed powerful weapons to dislodge the near universal scholarly consensus that parental love for children should be checked. Harlow's intellectual weaponry came in the form of highly illuminating experiments on primates. What happens when a baby is raised with no love? What happens when a baby is raised in total isolation? What happens when comforting sources of love are removed? And so on.
There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear. 1 John 4:18
Harlow led psychology away from the paradigm of clinical sterility that had (mis)guided a century of research into child-rearing. Given the tragic state of children in "scientifically informed" institutions, there can be no doubt that a great many lives were saved by the work of Harlow and his colleagues. The life-saving revelations came with a price: Harlow's primate subjects were treated with extreme cruelty—not gratuitously, but by the very design of his experiments. Was it worth it? Read Love at Goon Park and decide for yourself.
There is however, a much deeper question here than Harlow's experimental procedures. How was it that something as natural and commonsensical as the importance of love for children could be so thoroughly misunderstood by the scientific community? Picture a sophisticated, well-educated, high society mother listening to classical music while her baby cries in the next room. An expensive table lamp illuminates the pages of the book she is reading—a parenting book warning against the dangers of giving her baby too much attention. She chides herself for the primordial instinct that tells her to go to her child, pick him up, and offer some comfort against the terrors of the night. Juxtapose this image with that of an illiterate rural farmer's wife comforting her newborn at her breast. She is completely ignorant of the scholarly consensus that her actions will ultimately undermine her child's development. She is unaware that her actions require much thought for she is simply doing what comes most naturally. She is doing what every mother would do, unless instructed by science to do otherwise.
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