However, this is very education as it teaches us how important love, and compassion is. This book talks about how important love really it.
"Students who read about Harry Harlow in textbooks of psychology or animal behavior are usually presented with two impressions: appealing pictures of young rhesus monkeys clinging tightly to cloth- or wire-covered mother surrogates equipped with small nursing bottles for feeding, and the almost obligatory, sanctimonious comments about the alleged cruelty of Harlow's monkey experiments (FigureHarry Harlow with a Cloth-Covered Surrogate Mother and a Baby Monkey in 1958.). Deborah Blum's biography of Harry Harlow describes the complex and fascinating realities behind these two simplistic impressions. Her book recounts the remarkable career of Harlow at the University of Wisconsin and the largely unappreciated effect of his monkey studies on our views of healthy infant care.
Harlow arrived at the University of Wisconsin in 1930 as a new faculty member with an unlikely combination of shyness and insatiable ambition. His lifelong research strategy was to go for the big creative leap, bypassing others and, if possible, demolishing sacred cows along the way. After building a small primate laboratory on university property without obtaining official permission, he spent the next 25 years demonstrating the wonderfully diverse and complex learning capabilities of rhesus monkeys. He taught rhesus monkeys concepts that were the most difficult of any taught to a nonhuman primate up until that time. Harlow showed that monkeys could learn to disassemble a complex puzzle without the reward of food as easily as they could with the reward — a result inconsistent with the commonly assumed primacy of drive reduction in learning. These achievements were attained only with a prodigious amount of work at the laboratory, seven days a week including nights, with costs to his marriage, family, and mental well-being.
By the late 1950s, Harlow had a new, more spacious laboratory and a successful breeding program for rhesus monkeys. At this point, relatively late in his career, he had an epiphany about building an artificial mother, the now-famous mother surrogate. During the next 15 years, he and his graduate students conducted one of the most remarkable research programs in 20th-century psychology. Their initial studies showed that comfortable, tactual contact provided by terry-cloth–covered surrogates increased the attachment of infant rhesus monkeys to surrogates dramatically more than did the provision of milk. The mother surrogate was an enormously effective innovation. It could be used to measure an infant's attachment to an artificial mother and was easily modified to determine the effect of multiple, maternally related variables on that attachment. The surrogate studies were quickly followed by others on the effects of social isolation on behavioral development and maternal behavior, including demonstrations that the depression sometimes observed in human children who had been separated from their mothers could be reproduced in young rhesus monkeys.
Before his studies of the mother surrogate and social isolation, Harlow's fame had been largely confined to the community of academic psychologists. However, his investigations of maternal love and the psychological devastation caused by social isolation spread his fame far beyond the world of psychology. He became a widely sought speaker, combining his fascinating results in monkeys with a flow of caustic humor delivered with the skill of a professional comedian. These successes must have fulfilled in large measure his visions of greatness on his arrival at Wisconsin 40 years earlier. Unfortunately, they were accompanied by increasingly severe depression, alcoholism, and the death of his wife.
The second theme in Blum's book is that Harlow's studies in monkeys had a large and still unappreciated effect on our views of early child rearing. In an early, haunting chapter, Blum recounts the high death rates due to infection in orphanages and foundling homes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These horrifying statistics encouraged isolation and minimal human contact as strategies for minimizing infection. Furthermore, a dominant view of child rearing, when Harlow's mother-surrogate studies began, was that too much maternal contact would weaken the subsequent character of a child. During the 1940s and 1950s, several psychologists and psychiatrists had tried, with little success, to draw attention to the devastating effects of isolating young children from direct physical contact with their parents. Attitudes toward child rearing did change after the Wisconsin studies in monkeys.
In his later years, Harlow was demonized by feminists and animal-rights activists. The feminists complained that his advice to mothers — that they should stay at home with their children — was sexist. The animal-rights activists complained that his experiments in monkeys had been cruel. Harlow's predictable response was to bait both groups with his caustic humor, which only intensified the disdain of his opponents. Most critics never understood Harlow's savage humor.
Blum's valuable book is sometimes enchanting and sometimes poignant, but always interesting. It shows the reality behind the simplistic stereotypes that have often been associated with this brilliant and troubled genius."
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