Love at Goon Park (26 page)

And despite the fears by Mason, and even Bob Zimmermann, that the head was going to get them laughed out of psychology, Harry was absolutely determined. He had suddenly been given a first-class platform for his arguments. He'd finally—as Lewis Terman had predicted—been elected president of the American Psychological Association. And he was going use that position, he decided, to pound the podium and make his argument. He was absolutely sure of what he was going to argue. He had even thought of a title. He was going to call his talk “The Nature of Love.” And as Zimmermann still remembers, “He came back into the laboratory and said to me, ‘Bob, I have written one of the finest speeches ever delivered to the APA as president. Go get me the data.'”

So they put a plain wooden ball on top of the bundled body. Harry still wasn't satisfied. “It doesn't have a face,” he said. By this time, Bob Zimmermann had fully taken over the construction project and he was willing, if he had to, to put a face on the surrogate mother. Harry had recruited Zimmermann, a tall, lanky man with dark hair trimmed into a ruthless crewcut, from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He was a promising and ambitious young psychologist. Zimmermann had received three offers from graduate schools, but Harry had written “the most beautiful letter” about Wisconsin and the land and the support the school could offer. After Zimmermann was properly seduced, he remembers, Harry wanted the letter back. It had worked so well that he wanted to try it on the next year's crop of recruits.

Zimmermann took the problem of the cloth mother's face to the lab's resident equipment-building genius, Art Schmidt. Schmidt was
another typical Harry Harlow hire. He was a geography major and a hell of a handy guy. Even in his seventies, Schmidt remained lightly, toughly built. He still raced cars for fun. He had steady blue eyes and a slow smile. “I can build anything,” he says simply. To help pay his way through school, Schmidt took a 90-cents-an-hour job at the primate lab, where he repaired cages and put up storm windows. When Schmidt graduated in 1953, Harry offered him a full-time job. Schmidt had gradually lost his enthusiasm for geography and he thought Harry would be a good boss. “He'd always go to bat for you if he thought you did a good job,” he said. The new job partly required that he listen to the young researchers—who were all thumbs, according to Harry—and build their ideas into something functional.

Schmidt built the Butler box and long remembered Harry showing it off to visiting air force officials:

Oh, that head was a challenge, too. “First, it had to be designed to be pretty nondestructive,” Zimmermann says. “Monkeys are very destructive creatures. And then it had to have eyes. Mothers have eyes, Harry said. So what are we going to do for eyes? So I go to these dolls' hospitals and stuff looking for eyes. If you've ever seen dolls' eyes, they're so fragile. And I said, ‘Well, we need something that's a little stronger, that can take a knocking around.'

So this woman at the doll store says, ‘Well, they're pretty expensive.'

I said, ‘Price is no object.'”

Zimmermann is grinning again as he tells this story, blue eyes crinkling at the corners. “So she says, ‘You must work for the state.'”

They kept shopping. They didn't just want indestructible eyes. They wanted eyes that were also repulsive to monkeys. Harry had warned Schmidt and Zimmermann that the cloth mothers could not have faces that monkeys obviously found attractive. “Because then someone could say, hey, your experiment had nothing to do with touch or being held—it's just that it's an attractive stimulus,” Zimmermann says. Critics might dismiss the cuddle effect and argue that the babies liked the way the face looked and that was why they clung to the softer body. “So we started fooling around with different configurations of faces, and then we would see how the monkeys reacted.” They decided on bicycle reflectors for the eyes, which gave the face a bug-like stare. “Those are red bicycle reflectors. The mouth was green plastic, curved in a half moon smile. And the ears were a very hard black plastic that Art Schmidt had hanging around the lab. The nose was maple, painted black.”

Schmidt and Zimmermann had even labored over what kind of wood to use for the heads. They'd tried pinewood balls, but the energetic monkeys chewed the soft wood into splinters. Zimmermann remembers complaining to Harry, “Dr. Harlow, the monkeys are destroying the heads. As fast as we make them, they're chewing 'em up.”

And he remembers that Harry looked at him, completely deadpan, and replied, “Children have been destroying their parents for years.” The researchers decided to use hardwood for the heads and settled on maple croquet balls, near rock-like in their construction.

Babies do chew on their parents, pull their hair, gnaw on their ears, drool on their shoulders, and throw up all over their shirts. Zimmermann points out that if you watch a baby monkey with its natural mother, the little guy will tug on fur, nibble on ears, yank and pull—all in affection. They'll do the same thing to a father monkey, given a chance. And this is not destruction at all; it's curiosity, touch, feel, and the infinite security of being held by someone who will put up with all that tugging and chewing. But monkeys and babies—as
Bowlby had been trying to say—indulge in those behaviors only with someone they love and trust.

One of the surrogate mothers in Harry's lab had a head but no face yet. The head was just a blank ball of wood because Schmidt and Zimmermann had not yet perfected the smiling mother's face. A baby monkey arrived a month early, so they put the animal in with the faceless cloth mother. “To the baby monkey this featureless face became beautiful and she frequently caressed it with hands and legs,” Harry said. That lasted for about three months. “By the time the baby had reached ninety days, we had constructed an appropriate ornamental cloth-mother face, and we proudly mounted it on the surrogate's body. The baby took one look and screamed.”

The little monkey huddled in the back of the cage, rocking in dismay. After several days, the infant solved the problem. She marched up and rotated the head 180 degrees so that the blank back of the ball faced forward. The scientists turned it back. She turned it again. They turned it. She turned it. “We could rotate the maternal face dozens of times and within an hour or so, the infant would turn it around 180 degrees.” Within a week, the baby had resolved the problem entirely. She took the head off and rolled it into a corner of the cage and ignored it. And she was willing to repeat this; calmly, Harry said, and with infinite patience. He knew exactly what such behavior represented. Bowlby's theory predicted that one of the ways a baby bonds to a particular mother comes from its recognition of “the particular mother's face.” It's that absolute sureness that this is
my
mother, that she's here, that makes everything all right.

The baby doesn't attach to just anyone, and John Bowlby, Harry Harlow, and a growing army of others were going to make that undeniably clear. There's an actual relationship here that matters; the baby recognizes this one special person as
the
one. Later studies at Wisconsin showed that monkeys definitely did not admire the face dreamed up by Zimmermann and built by Schmidt. They preferred a dog's face to the bug-eyed, green-smiled version of a mother. But for Harry, the antipathy also made a critical point. The infants might
not like the mother's face, he said, but they loved the mother. She could have a blank face, a bug face, any face that they knew well—as long as she had mom's face. To a baby, mother's face is always beautiful, he said: “A mother's face that will stop a clock will not stop a baby.”

The nature of love project was absolutely, beautifully straightforward in making that connection.

Art Schmidt built—as Bill Mason had first proposed—not one but two “surrogate mothers.” The first was a cloth mother. She had that smiling face on a round head and a cylindrical body. The cloth mother was made from a block of wood, covered with sponge rubber, and sheathed in tan cotton terrycloth. A light bulb behind her back radiated heat. You could call her an ideal mother, Harry said, “soft, warm, and tender, a mother with infinite patience, a mother available twenty-four hours a day, a mother that never scolded her infant and never struck or hit her baby in error.” The other mother had a squared, flattish face, two dark holes for eyes, and a frowning mouth. Beneath that scowling visage was another cylindrical body, also warmed by a light bulb, but this time made of wire mesh. It was perfect for climbing, but the wire mother had not a cuddly angle to her. She was metallic all the way through.

Eight baby monkeys went into the first surrogate mother study. Each went into a different cage. In every cage, two mothers awaited the little animal—a cloth mom and a wire mom. Would they prefer her with a warm, soft cloth body or a warm wire one? Oh, but Harry didn't want a question quite as simple as that. In four of the cages, cloth mom was also equipped to hold a bottle filled with milk. The other four had a “barren” cloth mother; wire mom held the bottle. So the experiment tested the prevailing theories of motherhood on two levels. If infants were indifferent to touch, they might be expected to shift equally between the two mothers. Unless the infant-mother relationship was based on food. If that were so, neither wire mom's stiff body nor cloth mom's pillowy one should make a difference. The babies should emphatically prefer the wire mom with the
bottle to the cloth alternative. And if they did? Well, that would have been the end of Harry Harlow's research into the nature of love.

Instead, it was clear to Harry, hell, it was clear to everyone, that being fed formed no relationship at all for these baby monkeys. The mother love study suggested that the wire mother could have been dripping with milk, standing in puddles of the stuff, and yet the little monkeys wouldn't have cared for her. Cloth mom, on the other hand, was a magnet for a baby monkey.

In the published paper that followed, there are two small, neat, astonishingly clear graphs labeled “Fed on Cloth Mother” and “Fed on Wire Mother.” The graphs track how much time that the baby monkeys spent with each mother in a typical twenty-four-hour period. What makes the charts so remarkable is how alike they are. By the age of six months, both groups are spending pretty much all their time, about eighteen hours a day, with the cloth mom. The wire-fed monkeys hustle back to the wire mother for food, but they eat fast. The charts show that they spend no more than an hour a day on wire mom. Mostly, every one of the baby monkeys are sleeping on cloth mom. Or cuddling. Or tucking their bodies close against her when they are startled. Or just stroking her. The graphs seem to have invisible writing running through them that says food is sustenance but a good hug is life itself.

Harry knew that he should summarize these results in the psychological jargon of the day. In that famous speech to the APA, he put it like this: “These data make it obvious that contact comfort is a variable of overwhelming importance in the development of affectional responses, whereas lactation is a variable of negligible importance.” Psychology may have been insisting for decades that the baby's connection to its mother was a limpet-like grip on its source of food, but did psychologists really believe that? Could anyone watch the way an infant burrowed happily into the arms of a parent and believe that it was merely about milk? Or, again, in the lingo of the profession: “This is an inadequate mechanism to account for the persistence of infant-maternal ties.” Really, do you believe that a lifetime
bond is built on who holds the bottle? There had been no good experiments to justify that position, Harry argued. And now, when his laboratory had actually done the experiments, he and his students hadn't found a trace of a bottle-built relationship. They'd found that the baby monkeys—and Harry thought they represented human babies perfectly in this study—responded instead to the reassurance of a gentle touch.

Harry called this “contact comfort.” He meant contact in its most nurturing sense, joyfully skin to skin. Comfort was just another word for security. “One function of the real mother, human or subhuman, and presumably of a mother surrogate, is to provide a haven of safety for the infant in times of fear and danger.” When a child is frightened or sick, it instinctively seeks that haven, he said, and “this selective responsiveness in times of distress, disturbance or danger may be used as a measure of the strength” of the emotional connection. This again was an idea very close to John Bowlby's notion that a parent provides a secure base for a child. Harry and his students decided to pursue that connection further, to see whether they could better define the way a parent makes a child feel safe. What does it take to provide a safe harbor?

“We started asking simple questions,” says Bob Zimmermann. “What does a baby do? How does a baby react in relation to his mother?” They were already beginning to appreciate just how intensely the small animals attached to the green-smiling surrogates. The surrogates were wrapped in a cloth “smock” that was changed every day for hygiene reasons. When the surrogates needed to be cleaned, a door came down between the baby monkeys and their mothers. The lab crew would then provide the clean clothes. Meanwhile, the little monkeys wailed in dismay, pressed against the door, paced the cage looking for her. When the door came up again, the babies would plaster themselves against cloth mom, grasping onto her smock like a lifeline.