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> Summer 2004 > Book reviews

By Lekshmi Santhosh

Objective: To demonstrate the effects of love in the laboratory.

Doesn’t sound like material for serious scientific research, does it? Nevertheless, Deborah Blum’s powerful new biography, Love at GOON Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection, explores just that as it delves into the life and lab of Harry Harlow, the eminent psychologist who reined love back into the field of science with his famous experiments using baby macaque monkeys.

In the 1950s, when the psychology community felt that even hugging children too often could result in personality disorders, Harry Harlow challenged conventional thinking and showed that love is an important ingredient for infant development. At the heyday of behaviorism, Watsonians and Pavlovians ruled with their stimulus-response theories, which considered man to be a series of automated responses to stimuli. Amid this climate of empiricism, psychology was limiting itself to physics-like formulas and precise statistical demonstrations while eschewing theory. Harlow refocused the camera on love and on human relationships and at the same time brought science back to psychology with precise and innovative laboratory experiments.

Blum reconstructs Harlow’s life story with the help of eyewitness accounts. His character comes to life with funny anecdotes and snippets of Harlow’s own verse, adding beautiful poetry to Blum’s already moving, lyrical style. She deftly follows the course of his life, from his beginnings as an ambitious Iowan boy who did not quite fit in, to his rise in becoming one of the most controversial yet respected psychologists of his time, to his struggles with depression, alcoholism, failed loves, and ultimately, Parkinson’s disease. The reader becomes well-acquainted and even sympathetic to this strange character of a man, brimming with brilliance but struggling with personal problems. Blum superbly explores and reconciles the complexity and contradictions of Harlow’s eccentric disposition.

Along with the story of this solitary psychologist, Blum weaves in the history of psychology and the moods of the time to put things in historical context. Skinner, Maslow, and Watson, all famous in psychology textbooks, come alive not only with their theories but also with their unique personalities.

In addition to the superb narrative of Harlow’s character, Blum elegantly conveys the tension and excitement of each discovery in the lab, describing experiments in vivid detail, yet with simple terms.

For example, she describes one of Harlow’s most famous experiments which challenged current psychological theory that babies viewed mothers merely as feeders. Harlow paired infant macaque monkies with two makeshift “mothers” — one made of cloth with a makeshift scary-looking face and the other made of wire. The “wire mother” was equipped with a milk bottle that was always full, while the “cloth mother” had no milk. Harlow’s lab found that the babies overwhelmingly preferred the cloth mother, even though it did not provide nourishment. Harlow also showed that a father monkey could also play the role of the main parent and that the mother did not need to be the most important caretaker; what was important was that the monkey had one reliable caretaker.

Harlow’s impact extended beyond the laboratory: he established what most of us take for granted — that children need parental love to grow. This is not a sentimental book telling readers why love is important, but rather a critical scientific look as to why love and relationships affect our lives and how the lack of love can turn animals (and people) dysfunctional, pathological, even insane. A biography that reads like a novel, appealing to people of all (or no) science backgrounds, Love at GOON Park will make you laugh at the hilarious anecdotes, cry at the tragedies, and really empathize with this strange man who changed science and psychology forever.

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