Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection by Deborah Blum

Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection Reviews

• 
  Mark

  
  It's hard to believe that less than 100 years ago, psychologists believed that affection between parents and children was unnecessary, and recommended that the best way to raise children was to touch them and coddle them as little as possible. The behaviorist B.F. Skinner actually built a box to raise his young daughter Debbie in, with a window and filtered air and regular times when she could emerge to play or eat meals.
  
  Harry Harlow, a primate researcher at the University of Wisconsin, though hardly remembered today, was one of the people who changed all that, and brought science into line with what, as he put it, mothers had known all along.
  
  He did it by showing how necessary motherly love and affection were for rhesus monkeys in his lab. His most famous experiment involved inventing two kinds of surrogate moms for baby monkeys -- a cloth one and a wire one -- and showing that even without the interaction of a breathing, living mom, the babies would cling desperately to the cloth moms, even if the wire moms held their milk.
  
  Deborah Blum, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, has written a marvelous biography of Harlow in this book, but more than that, she has illuminated how animal researchers paved the way for other psychologists to champion the importance of touching, loving and paying attention to others in a social network.
  
  One reason Harry Harlow remains so little known today is that in his passion to understand all the ramifications of family affection, he also explored its dark side. Later in his career, he put some monkey babies in pits with sides so steep they couldn't scramble out of them, to see what effects isolation from other monkeys would have on them, and he invented some surrogate mothers who seemed cruel, including one that would thrust blunted metal prongs out of its body to dislodge its tiny charges. He also was sarcastic and sharp tongued, and even though in his professional life he championed women researchers, he didn't react well to criticism of his work by the nascent women's liberation movement in the 70s, some of whose leaders felt his research was designed to relegate women to staying at home to raise children.
  
  Blum doesn't shy away from Harry's warts, including the way that he ignored his own children to dedicate himself to his work. But she treats him sympathetically because of his seminal role in demonstrating that the early experiences of infants -- and their absolutely intense need to be touched, held, loved and supported -- were essential to healthy physical and mental development later on.
  
  A really, really good book.
  
  
• 
  AB

  This is probably the first or second most important book I've ever read. One of the very, very few books that I can say not only changed my life, but did so in such a way that I can provide evidence to back up my statement. I started studying psychology because of it, but that's just for starters.
• 
  Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides

  I read this in April 2010. If you ever took psychology or sociology, you probably learned about the experiment with the baby monkeys and the cloth mothers and the wire mothers. This is a popular scientific biography of the scientist who conceived that experiment.
  
  I'd call it a must-read for anyone who works with children (or non-human primates), or who is a people-watcher. Also for anyone who has even mild curiosity about psychology as a science. If you ever took a basic science class, this reviews a lot of the basic early studies which you learned about, with increased background detail. (Not just the wire mother/cloth mother studies, but also ones like the
  Little Albert experiment.)
  
  It talks a little about how babies respond to faces, which I thought was interesting. (I've noticed that crying babies will sometimes stop crying when they notice a face to look at -- even if it's a complete stranger's face.) But the underlying theme is how important nurturing is in the formative years of primate species.
  
  Reading this made me think of
  The Chosen, and wonder if Potok based Danny's difficulties with trying to learn about psychology and the human mind by studying rats on a real life story. Namely, that of Abraham Maslow --
  this thesis, and a few other results, suggested that Maslow was somewhat critical of the use of rats to learn about humans.
• 
  Vin

  Amazing, amazing book. Biographies of academicians is this fun new genre I've stepped into. Seeing how a young person's interest becomes a topic of research, and how they work on traditional and arguably mundane topics in the early years, until they get "hooked" onto a particularly important question, whose premise is often against the whims of the establishment, and if they manage to win that war of ideas, a question whose answer becomes their defining contribution to the field and beyond. It's pretty fertile territory for great stories - enough ideas, gossip and drama.
  
  I've been quoting this book a bit too much...worth a read
• 
  Sarah

  I read this for a psychology class and found it absolutely fascinating. I liked the detailed description from Publisher's Weekly, so here it is:
  
  In this surprisingly compelling book, Blum (The Monkey Wars) reveals that many of the child-rearing truths we now take for granted infants need parental attention; physical contact is related to emotional growth and cognitive development were shunned by the psychological community of the 1950s. As Blum shows, Freudian and behavioral psychologists argued for decades that babies were drawn to their mothers only as a source of milk, motivated by the instinctual drive for sustenance, and that children could be harmed by too much affection.
  
  Harry Harlow's experiments, Blum finds in this deeply sympathetic investigation of his life and work, changed all this, conclusively demonstrating that infant monkeys bond emotionally with a specific "mother" a dummy figure made of cloth even if it is not a source of food. The experiments also revealed, astonishingly enough, that puzzle-solving monkeys who were not rewarded with food actually performed better than those who were rewarded, leading him to conclude that baby primates and by extension, baby children are motivated by a range of emotions, including curiosity, affection and wonder.
• 
  Jessica

  Love at Goon Park was very interesting while also very frustrating and incredibly flawed. In the preface,
  Deborah Blum discusses writing an earlier book (
  The Monkey Wars) that angered people who knew Harry Harlow so much that many of them were wary of ever speaking to her again. She then launches into an entire book on Harry Harlow, much of it quite positive or at least minimally critical of his experiments and of him as a person. It's not till the epilogue that she shares any of the criticisms against him or offers any information that indicates that she might not have been unbiased in her narrative.
  
  With that in mind, Love at Goon Park was still an interesting look at the state of psychology in the first half of the twentieth century and the changes that came about, both intellectually in the field of psychology and practically in hospitals and homes, because of Harry Harlow's studies on affection and touch. Harlow focused specifically on primate research and the relationship between mothers and children, and many of his experiments sound by today's standards to be unnecessarily cruel - raising babies with artificial mothers made of cloth or wire, or putting monkeys in total isolation and depriving them of any contact with others. The epilogue wrestles a tiny bit with the question of whether and how we can justify cruelty in experiments if it results in a better understanding of our world, but otherwise the book does not take a critical or questioning stance at all. Likewise, the book also describes Harlow's personal life - his difficulties in his marriages and his failings as a father - but doesn't dwell at all on the irony of the psychologist who studies love and the importance of touch while completely neglecting to interact with his children.
  
  I learned quite a bit from reading Love at Goon Park and so I don't regret reading it, but I do think that the author felt an obligation to speak positively about Harry Harlow in order to gain access to the people she wanted to interview, and that the book was not honest with its readers as a result. The epilogue hints at how a more evenhanded treatment of Harry Harlow might have played out, but that is not the book we received, and I really can't recommend it as a result.
• 
  Arimo

  An excellent and interesting book about psychologist Harry Harlow and his monkey research. Thorough research shines through all over the book, and Love at Goon Park is full of interesting anecdotes and minor details that makes the subjects come to life.
  
  I'm giving the book very strong four stars. The biggest (but still minor) issue I had with the book was the length of the chapters and paragraphs. Sometimes, if I had trouble concentrating, I had to read some paragraphs multiple times to understand what I was reading.
  
  These problems mostly occurred near the end of the book. Love at Goon Park loses some momentum when it finishes the story of Harry Harlow and starts to tell about the things that have happened in the field after his death. The ending is still interesting, but it's also quite heavy reading as it isn't as clearly focused as the earlier parts of the book.
• 
  dejah_thoris

  Great book that described in detail Harlow's experiments and the controversy they were trying to overcome. I found it especially interesting that Blum originally wrote an animal rights article against Harlow, which resulted in many contacts who wanted to speak to her solely to correct her misconceptions. Some of this critique is given in the final chapter of the book with Harlow's rebuttals but the majority focuses on his attempt to overcome reliance on rats as subjects and to see relationships as a significant component of psychology.
• 
  Pancha

  A really interesting book. While it mostly concentrates on Harlow, it does also give you a sense of what other scientists were doing in the field, both those who agreed with Harlow and those who disagreed.
• 
  Cathy Faye

  Having a weird love-hate relationship with this book...
• 
  Marsmannix

  fascinating for anyone familiar with Harry Harlow's work with those poor little orphan monkeys
• 
  Lewis

  Top read. Lovely mix of narrative and psychology practice.
• 
  Mary

  The nature of love is about paying attention to the people who matter, about still giving when you are too tired to give.
• 
  Sarah Galvin

  What an absolute monster.
• 
  Anthony

  20th century thought on animals was that animals were simple, brainless even. Exposed to a stimulus, the animal would react. They were no more than response machines, trying to satisfy their basic needs of food and shelter. This thinking carried over to scientific opinion on children. Children had no emotional or intellectual capacities. And in fact, excessive parental affection could not only increase the chance of infecting your child with germs, but also interfere with the child's normal developmental process.
  
  Through the power of his carefully thought out research with monkeys, his lightning wit, and outspoken demeanor, Harry Harlow upended these popular beliefs of his time, dramatically altering how people viewed both animals and child-rearing.
  
  Love at Goon Park tracks Harlow's journey from a small boy with a passion for poetry to the man with a lab full of monkeys, relentlessly pursuing life's deepest issues; the power of love and relationships on mankind.
  
  The story's a great read about one of the pioneers of a new era in psychological research, one that respects and highlights the importance of emotions and relationships both in a child's life and society at large. And Harlow makes for an interesting character. He is crass, but honest. He champions motherhood, but ends up reviled by feminists. He illuminates love's importance, especially during childhood, but is a flawed family man himself. He possesses an indomitable spirit, but struggles with alcoholism and depression later in his life.
  
  Recommend to any science-lover, but also to anyone who needs reminding why cuddling is important.
• 
  Marianne Meyers

  I found this book fascinating, albeit difficult at times. These studies would never be done today but at that time, they were groundbreaking. No one had done research with monkeys, only rats up to that point. The belief in the early to mid part of the 20th century was that children left in a clean environment with regular meals would be just fine, they didn't need anyone else. Many people felt babies should not be held, it would make them weak. Harlow's studies with rhesus monkeys were in response to this and his discoveries are what we understand today - babies need to be held and nurtured and they need to be socialized when they are young. Without these basics, there is emotional damage and trauma. Harlow ran an empowering environment and was innovative in his research, but let's face it, putting a few baby monkeys through this is torture. The fact that Harlow was an eccentric person who dealt with alcoholism and depression at times and said a lot of things during the Women's Lib era to bait people make him very unsympathetic. The author has done excellent research, I think this is an important book.
• 
  Christiana Martin

  Overall, this was a well-researched book that explored important issues in psychology research and the nature of the parent-child bond. Harry Harlow's work is seminal in the field of developmental psychology, and this narrative of his life and work contained a lot of information in addition to his work with baby monkeys and cloth mothers that put Harry's personality and research into context. Parts of the book I flew through, while others seemed to drag a bit, and I think I would have enjoyed it more if it was purely pleasure reading (rather than an assignment with a deadline). Still, it's an thoughtful book exploring an influential time in experimental psychology that made me understand the foundations of my own work better and ask some hard questions about psychology research, parenting, and ethics.
• 
  Isaac

  Having read two of Deborah Blum's books now I feel like she is a competent, though not particularly remarkable, science/history writer. A little formulaic, a bit prone to meandering digressions that I am not sure enhance the narrative, but overall she explains the science well and does a good cradle to grave character treatment, and I like her conclusions where she talks about the impacts and echos of the science (and in this case ethics).
  
  That said, Blum chooses some real good subjects. I've come across references to Harry Harlow's work in many other books and it was real fun to get some depth into who he was and the context for his work. There was also an added level of joy in the hometown nature of the story living and working so close to the Henry Vilas Zoo, Harlow Lab and 600 N. Park itself.
• 
  Ruxandra Tihon

  Loved the book and wish I would have read it sooner. It validated my instincts and deep believe that a child needs affection and constant care. It’s weird that after all this time and research, people still think it’s okay not to hold or rock a crying baby, let him cry to sleep and avoid looking into his eyes.
  I also liked reading about the controversy around Harlow, though I disagree with his methods I understand the need to do what he has done.
  Very well documented, the author did a great job and it’s an easy read.
• 
  Laurel

  Harlow's work is some of the most groundbreaking research in shaping the way in which we understand emotional development. Blum does a solid job of narrating the progress of this research, and the ways in which it has shaped psychology and medical research today. I would have liked deeper examination of Harry himself, and the ways in which he was unable to apply his research to his own relationships.
• 
  Sharine Cheah

  A great discovery in psychology by Harry Harlow about love and attachment style at young age by years of observations and research on young apes and monkeys.
  
  I find it's shocking and unbelievable that hugging and cuddling, showing affection to our young babies were considered the worst methods in bringing up young human beings in the 50s by scientists and doctors. 💔
• 
  Arielle Ali

  This is a great book. I normally don't read biographies, but this was so well-written and contained so many interesting studies about the history and psychology of love, that I was riveted. Harry Harlow's life and writing give structure to the story. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone.
• 
  Leonardo

  ...wonderful biography of Harlow...
  
  
  The Happiness Hypothesis Pág.111
• 
  Ahmed Khawjah

  Reading the book made go thru a conflict, whither the end justifies the means or not. Harry Harlow’s experiments were horrible, but the results were imperative to the way we understand parent-child relationship. Absolutely brilliant book, I loved it and found it very interesting.
• 
  Ankur Gupta

  Remarkable. An amazing account of development of science around child rearing and attachment theory during the 1950s, that gave John Bowlby all the ammunition to formulate his theory. The genius and courage of Harry Harlow in unparalleled.