50 Psychology Classics (30 page)

To test the idea further, Harlow and his team built a “surrogate mother” from wood covered with soft cloth, with a light bulb behind it providing warmth, and made another “mother” simply out of wire mesh. For four newborn monkeys, only the cloth mother provided milk and the wire mother did not; for four other newborns, the opposite was the case. The study showed that even when the wire mother was the one lactating, the monkeys vastly preferred to be with and have physical contact with the soft-cloth mother.

This result overturned the conventional wisdom that babies become conditioned to love their mother because she provides milk and is therefore their ticket to survival. Clearly, the ability to nurse was not the main factor for the monkeys; what mattered was the bodily contact, or the “mother's love.” Harlow went so far as to suggest that perhaps the main function of nursing was to ensure frequent physical contact between baby and mother, since the loving bond seemed so vital for survival. After all, he noted, long after the actual sustenance stops, it is the bond that remains.

As real babies flee to and cling to their mothers at any sign of fear or danger, Harlow wondered whether this would still apply to baby monkeys even with a cloth or wire mother. It did, with the monkeys running to the cloth mother irrespective of how much this mother had “nursed” them. The same happened when the monkeys were placed in an unfamiliar room with new visual stimuli, and were given the opportunity to return to the cloth mother.

Harlow also found that monkeys that were separated from the surrogate mother for long periods (five months) still responded immediately to it if given the chance. The bond, once initially formed, was highly resistant to being forgotten.
Even monkeys reared without any mother figure at all, real or surrogate, after a bewildered and frightened day or two in the presence of a cloth mother would warm to her and forge a relationship. After a while these monkeys expressed similar behavior to those who had enjoyed a surrogate mother all along.

In another variation, some of the surrogate mothers were given a rocking motion and also made to feel warm. Baby monkeys became even more attached to these mothers, clinging to them for up to 18 hours a day.

Was it the face of the surrogate mother, with her big painted-on eyes and mouth, that especially kindled the love of the baby monkeys? Harlow's first surrogate-raised monkey only had a mother whose head was a ball of wood with no face, and she bonded with this surrogate over a period of six months. When later placed with two cloth mothers that had faces, the monkey actually turned the heads around so that she saw no face at all—just what she was used to in her mother! Again, Harlow's experiment showed that what matters most is the close connection we form with our mothers, irrespective of what they look like and even how indifferently they treat us. Harlow was not joking when he wrote, “Love is blind.” He concluded that there was little difference in the quality of mothering provided by a surrogate or a real mother—it was apparent that the baby monkey needed only a very basic “mother figure” to grow up healthy and happy.

This assessment, however, turned out to be premature. Harlow observed that when his baby monkeys grew up, they had many things wrong with them. Instead of the normal range of responses, they swung between clinging attachment and destructive aggression, often tearing at their body or shredding bits of cloth or paper. Even as adults they had to cling to soft, furry things, and did not seem to know the difference between living and inanimate objects. Though they could be affectionate to other monkeys, few were able to mate as adults, and those who did have offspring were not able to take care of them properly. Clearly, the lack of normal response from their fake mothers, and their isolation from other monkeys, had made them socially backward. They had no idea what was or wasn't appropriate behavior, no concept of the usual give and take of normal relationships.

What the Harlows discovered had actually been observed in the 1940s by Hungarian psychiatrist Rene Spitz. His well-known study compared babies raised in two institutional settings. The first was a foundling home that was very clean and orderly, but a little clinical; the second was a prison nursery, a rough-and-tumble sort of place where the children had lots of physical contact. Within a two-year period, over a third of the kids in the foundling home had died, whereas five years later all the prison nursery children were alive. Of
the foundling home babies who did not die, many grew up with problems, with over 20 remaining institutionalized. What made all the difference was that the nursery kids' mothers were allowed to care for them, while the foundling home's children lived under a controlled regime run by professional nurses. Whether you define “death” as physical or psychological, it was the lack of physical affection and love that was the cause.

Critics say that all Harlow did was prove scientifically what was common sense—that babies and young children need to form a close physical and emotional attachment to someone as much as they need oxygen. But the task of proving beyond any doubt what we already know seems to be the role of experimental psychology, and it took Harlow's experiments to change the way children's homes and social service agencies were run. What began as defiance of the prevailing view on child rearing has now become conventional wisdom. For instance, the suggestion often given to new mothers that they should hold their minutes-old newborn against their bare skin can be traced back to the devastating effects of not having such contact, discovered by Harlow.

His work with monkeys also elevated what we now believe about the intelligence and capacity for feeling in animals. B. F. Skinner (see p 266) believed that animals had no feelings, but Harlow's monkeys were creatures who thrived on curiosity and learning, and they had deep emotional needs.

Yet all this knowledge came at a price, for the great irony of the scientist who helped determine the “nature of love” was that his labs were often brutal places for the monkeys themselves. As he grew older, Harlow's experiments got more cruel, and with good reason he became a focus of the animal liberation movement. Many of those who helped in these later experiments found the experience devastating.

For a more personal account of Harlow—his divorce, the death of his second wife, remarriage, issues with alcohol, and the quality of his parenting—read Deborah Blum's
Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection
(2003). The title comes from a nickname given to Harlow's lab at the University of Wisconsin, whose address was 600 N. Park, which could easily be read as “Goon Park.” Many thought the name fitting, as with his antifeminist views, famous bluntness, and ruthless reputation as an experimenter, Harlow cut a frightening figure.

Born Harry Israel in Fairfield, Iowa in 1905, Harlow was an ambitious child whose intelligence gained him a place at Stanford University. He gained a BA and PhD, and when he was 25 was appointed to a position at the University of Wisconsin. About this time he changed his surname from Israel because, although he was Episcopalian, he was told that anti-Semitism would affect his career. Harlow soon established a primate psychology lab, and worked with IQ researcher Lewis Terman, and also Abraham Maslow
.

Harlow stayed at the University of Wisconsin for most of his career, and was George Cary Comstock Research Professor of Psychology until 1974. He did a stint heading the Human Resources Research Branch with the US Army and lectured at Cornell and Northwestern universities among others. In 1972 he received a gold medal from the American Psychological Association, and in 1974 moved to Tucson to become an honorary professor at the University of Arizona
.

His first wife Clara Mears worked with him on primate research, but they divorced in 1946. Harlow then married Margaret Kuenne (Marlow), and the year after her death in 1970, remarried Clara Mears. They had three sons and a daughter. Harlow died in 1981
.

“The purpose of this book is not only the presentation of new data but also an answer to the question of why people do not live as good as they know how already. They may know that the experts have had a lot to say about human behavior, but this knowledge does not seem to have had the slightest effect on their hangover, their splintering marriage or their cranky children.”

“Once we understand positions and games, freedom of response begins to emerge as a real possibility.”

In a nutshell

If we become more conscious of our ingrained reactions and behavior patterns, our life can begin to be genuinely free.

In a similar vein
Eric Berne
Games People Play
(p 26)
Anna Freud
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence
(p 104)
Karen Horney
Our Inner Conflicts
(p 156)

You know that a book has become a classic when you see it featured in sitcoms. In an episode of
Seinfeld
, Jerry Seinfeld opens the door of his apartment to find all-time hopeless case George Costanza spread out on the couch reading
I'm OK—You're OK
. For Jerry, reading a self-help book with a silly title is just one more piece of proof of his friend's loser status.

I'm OK—You're OK
was indeed an icon of the pop psychology boom of the 1960s and 1970s. Demand for the book was tremendous, and today it sits comfortably in the pantheon of titles that have sold over 10 million copies. But what do sales figures indicate? A lot of tacky books sold by the truckload in that era. What is different about
I'm OK—You're OK
is that it is still read and used.

To understand the success of Harris's book, we must look at the trail blazed by his mentor, Eric Berne, in
Games People Play
(see commentary on p 26). Harris used Berne's work as a basis for his own, but instead of analyzing the games people play, he focused on Berne's concept of the three internal voices that speak to us all the time in the form of archetypal characters: the Parent, the Adult, and the Child. All of us have Parent, Adult, or Child “data” guiding our thoughts and decisions, and Harris believed that transactional analysis would free up the Adult, the reasoning voice.

The Adult prevents us being hijacked by unthinking obedience (Child), or by ingrained habit or prejudice (Parent), leaving us a vestige of free will. The Adult represents the objectivity that inspired Socrates' statement, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” It is the reasoning, moral voice that lets us grow, checking Child or Parent data to see if it is appropriate for a given situation. We might feel like throwing a tantrum when a hotel desk mixes up our booking, but instead we choose to accept it for the moment, figuring it is better to stay calm if we want a positive solution.

Harris includes many examples of conversations that display people caught up in Child or Parent patterns, showing how difficult it is to remove racism or any type of prejudice when one has no awareness of the patterns under which one is operating.

What does the title phrase “I'm OK—You're OK” actually mean? Harris observed that children, by virtue of their inferior power in an adult world, learn that “I'm not OK, whereas you, being an adult, are OK.” Every child learns this, even if they have a happy childhood, and many adults only overturn this basic decision after their parents pass on, and then perpetuate it in reverse fashion with their own children. Yet the good news is that, once we are aware that it
was
a decision, we can decide to replace it with a relaxed, selfliking mode of being.

We do not drift into the “I'm OK—You're OK” position. We may experience it on occasion, but for it to become more or less ingrained it has to be a conscious decision (not merely a feeling), based on faith in people in general. It is a little like the Christian concept of grace; that is, total acceptance of ourselves and of others. From this position we are also better able to see beyond another person's Parent or Child behavior, even if that behavior would normally cause offense. We reach a level where we don't expect every transaction to make us happy, knowing that “I'm OK—You're OK” is true even when we don't see evidence of it.

Whether you name it the Superego, the Adult, or, in New Age parlance, the “Higher Self,” a willingness to allow our grown-up internal voice to come to the fore is part of any human being's development.
I'm OK—You're OK
provides a key for letting us out of a mental prison that we may not even have known we inhabit. Often it is more satisfying, and certainly easier, to play games or be defensive or rest on prejudices, and in our society we can be considered a success while essentially remaining in Child mode all our life; in doing so we consider other people as objects who will either help or stand in the way of our aims. Genuinely successful people, in contrast, assume that others are equals from whom they can learn valuable things.

Though Berne's work on transactional analysis may be the better book, Harris's
I'm OK—You're OK
became a huge bestseller, and a major reason has to be his use of the easy-to-understand Parent, Adult, and Child framework. The terms may seem a little goofy, but in fact parallel Freud's original trinity of superego, ego, and id, the basic elements that Freud put forward for understanding human behavior. Although this is a work of popular psychology, Harris did not try to dumb it down to appeal to everyone. He freely quotes from the likes of Emerson, Whitman, Plato, and Freud, assuming that if readers do not know about such figures they certainly should.