Harry Harlow & Love

So there's a lot more to Harry Harlow than I thought. This reading was extremely interesting because it not only shared many details about his experiments, but also about Harry himself.

Harlow suffered from a somewhat depression multiple times in his life. He didn't have a good relationship with his mother, which could be a reason why he studied mother child relationships so much. In school and also at the college Stanford he didn't fit in. His best friend was Lewis Terman, who was an IQ researcher. Terman basically thought that Harlow would never amount to anything. Harlow first married one of Terman's students, Clara Mears. She has an IQ of 155. They had two children together and the marriage didn't last very long because Harlow cheated on her multiple times. Clara took the two children and moved in a trailer park with a construction worker. Harlow began to drink heavily and became an alcoholic. He remarried Margaret Kuenne also known as Peggy. He had two children with her also, but still cheated on her and drank heavily. His wife Peggy died from breast cancer, and Harlow was suffering from multiple problems so he has electroshock therapy so he didn't remember many experiences. After this, he got back together with his first wife, Clara. Soon after Harlow died of Parkinson's disease.

As for his experiments they were very interesting he started off with using rhesus monkeys. He made two fake monkey mothers. One that was made out of wire and had the food through a fake breast that had the food the monkey needed to survive and the other one was made of terry cloth and cardboard, so this mother was more of a comforting touch mother. A great way to explain how Harlow looked at his experiments would be, "The best way to understand the heart, was to break it." He took newborn monkeys and found that the monkeys were almost attached to the terry cloth mother and would get food from the wire mother and then return to the terry cloth mother. He identified that contact comfort was most important for love. Later, he saw that monkeys were not normal later in life so he found that there were other variables in parenting and those are play. He let the monkeys play with other monkeys for a half an hour a day and they were normal later in life. Harlow also created a "rape rack" where he would tie females up and let the male monkeys actually rape the females. This is because he wanted to know what motherless mothers would do. There is a huge controversy over if what Harlow did was right. Did the ends justify the means? It's obvious that you would rather test a monkey than your own son, but controversy still exists.