The Professor of Love

By Michael Lemonick Sunday, Nov. 10, 2002
    • Harry Harlow is probably the most famous psychologist you've never heard of. Back in the 1960s, his work was widely covered in the press — and with good reason. Through a series of brilliant experiments, Harlow proved that love, despite what most of his colleagues believed, plays a crucial role in mental well-being. The idea that such a thing needed proving in the first place seems bizarre today. But as Deborah Blum explains in Love at Goon Park (Perseus; 336 pages), her thorough and beautifully written biography of Harlow, it made perfect sense in the context of mid--20th century psychology.

    At the time, conventional wisdom held that animals, human and otherwise, were essentially machines that responded to rewards and punishments. Babies clung to their mothers not for affection but because mothers provided food rewards. Using baby monkeys and artificial "mother" dolls in a series of experiments at the University of Wisconsin — Madison in the 1950s and '60s, Harlow proved the babies would cling to the dolls even when food was offered elsewhere. Love, which other psychologists had dismissed as irrelevant and scientifically meaningless, was in fact the linchpin of mental health.

    Harlow's descent into obscurity had a lot to do with the man himself. He was a hard-nosed experimentalist and a poet, a workaholic and an alcoholic. Despite his extraordinary success, Harlow was constantly plagued with depression and self-doubt. He was appallingly sexist in some ways yet treated female colleagues with absolute equality.

    But it was the way he treated monkeys that hurt his reputation. Harlow went on to study what happened when monkeys were deprived of love, kept in solitary confinement and emotionally tormented. The monkeys became psychotic in various ways; in one case, according to a visitor, they looked and acted like concentration-camp survivors. Harlow didn't seem to care. "I certainly don't like monkeys," he told a reporter. "I just have no feeling for them — at all."

    With the rise of the animal-rights movement in the 1970s, Harlow became a punching bag. Feminists also got on his case, since one — admittedly oversimplified — implication of his work on the infant-mother bond was that women should take care of their kids and stay out of the work force. By the time he died, Harlow had become an intellectual outcast. But his once radical ideas about love had become and remain utterly mainstream.