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

This book is really well written by a skilled author. It reads almost like a work of fiction, but unfortunately, it’s all true.The science of attachment theory owes a lot to Harlow, but he himself was a tragic character, and the book is about Harlowe as it is about attachment science and theory. Harlow might have been a hard character to like, but what he proved to the world—if we will listen—is that we do need love. Even the smallest child, even the other baby primates—we need love. Without love, without physical bonding when we are young, we will become self/destructive creatures. It’s easy to understand why people behave as they do when we look at them through this lens: were they loved as small children? No? Were they neglected? If so, there will be trouble.It’s disturbing material, but this is important information for all people. It is so sad to read descriptions and see pictures of what these poor little baby primates experienced, (not to mention suffering of their mothers too), but if more of us read about what Harlow showed us, then maybe the suffering of those little baby primates was not in vain. I think that’s important to keep in mind when looking at Harlowe’s studies; no, this was not humane treatment of these helpless baby creatures, but what we learned and can learn from these studies has enormous power to change our world for the better. For that reason, these experiments have great value, even though we should acknowledge the tragedy and profound suffering of these innocent animals.This is a really good book. I’m glad I read it. It’s easy to read, as far as the beautiful writing, but the subject matter is hard to take. That’s what makes it like a work of fiction, I guess.Well done.

This is a book about my Dad. The creative jacket was totally like new (including the monkey cutout and the book itself followed the same condition.

I was wondering what love was since I have never felt love in my life. This thought first came from a religious perspective which states that without love you have nothing. I don't think that I have any ability to love. I bonded with my father rather than my mother, but this was a very limited relationship because just as I had never seen an example of familial love, neither had my parents. I kept reaching out to my father but with no success.I have a good memory of my early childhood, and this book reinforced what I had already suspected. While I took the blame for all of their disappointments in me, it was they who made me what I was.I lived to get away from my mother. And I had decided by the time that I graduated from high school that I could not put another child through what I had been through. I would have been exactly like her because I had never seen an example of a child being loved.My mother did not want to be a mother. This book explains why I am the way that I am today, anxious and isolated and not being able to socialize.The learning disabilities that I had were monumental, but at least I lived during a time where I was not labeled.I scored poorly on the Stanford Binet test and overheard my mother say to my dad that she guessed that I would never amount to nothing.This book is so important, and if it makes women feel guilty, so be it. How the mother treats the child determines the child's future.I love animals, and the thought of using them for testing makes me sick. But if testing animals will make people understand what they are doing to their children, it is worth it and PETA be damned.

"Love At Goon Park" is a fascinating look at a man and his work. Deborah Blum provides the reader with an extensive and sobering background before exploring Harry Harlow's research. Did you know that as recently as the 1950s, psychologists were trying to convince parents that too much cuddling and "love" were bad for their children? Harlow, with his revolutionary experiments on baby monkeys, was bucking the conventional wisdom of his time. He was trying to say that mother's love mattered, that touch mattered, that affection mattered. His peers didn't want to hear this, but Harlow's research finally forced the profession to listen.Blum's writing is never dry, never boring. She writes with amazing flair and humanity. You'll feel that you are getting to know this person, Harry Harlow. Even more, you'll feel you are there in the lab with Harlow and his graduate students, waiting to see how the baby monkeys will react to the latest experiment. What will we learn? Will anyone listen? Blum cares, and you'll care too.You can't help but feel for the monkeys when you read this book. And Blum doesn't gloss over the issue of abuse, especially mental, that was visited on our primate cousins in the name of science. "Goon Park" takes an unflinching look at Harry Harlow, warts and all. I think her treatment of all the issues was fair and balanced.I highly recommend "Love At Goon Park." It's well-written, interesting and important.

This book is incredible, it truly is an experience and worth every cent

Book came on time and I was anxious to read the book so it being on time was appreciated. Book was in good shape. Thanks everyone!

This is a phenomenal book about the necessity of love and exactly what that means scientifically. What is necessary from a mother and how should the child be pushed into the world with the mother's backing ? What are the biochemical effects and what other sources can bring back a poorly mothered child ? What relatives and friends and environment can make a difference ? Watching monkey families in tough circumstances can tell us what we need to know.Harry Harlow's real life is set against the primate family situations in this compelling story of love's basic place in our lives set against the psychology of the day including other giants such as Bowlby. It makes one challenge and examine the relationships in their lives.

This trilogy (Shadow Moon, Shadow Dawn and Shadow Star) really does shine as yet another example of what can happen when a trilogy is written based on a succesful Gearge Lucas film. Following on from the "and they all lived happily ever after" ending of the film the books quite wonderfully shatter that myth by starting with a semi-Apocalypse and continuing with Willow once again being dragged away from his family (and this time he's in for the long haul), as once again he must save Elora Danann, if only from herself, for the Princess of the prophecies has grown up to be a spoilt brat with an inflated sense of her own importance.

This is about a scientist who vindicated the common-sense approach that mothers had always taken to babies, by showing that a monkey prefered a soft mother-doll to a mother-doll with milk. And also unexpectedly discovering that monkeys raised that way could not function as normal monkeys. All of this was a corrective to psychologists of the day who preferred to work wiht rats and who thought that new-born babies were better off isolated from their mothers.There's a fascinating small tale about an early monkey-baby who was given a mother-doll with no face. When later they later tried to give it a face, the baby was horrified. This matches the earlier observations about how British children evacuated from cities to safe homes in the country were mostly miserable despite homes that were loving and in many ways better than they had come from.It's also explained how rat-mothers and rat-babies bond strongly, but any mother or baby will do, baby rats can be added or removed without disturbing the family structure.There's lots of other interestng stuff, but read the book and find out for yourself.

A largely non technical read about a fascinating psychologist who did some frankly horrible primate experiments in order to prove his contention that babies need a nurturing and loving adult (preferably the mother) in order to survive and grow into healthy and happy people.A fascinating read about an important and largely neglected scientist.

Amazing Book

Harry Harlow's paradigm is succinctly: Love created, love destroyed and love reinstated. Imagine a scientist in the mid-twentieth century hoisting the banner of love. Harlow's irrefutable proof of love in our monkey cousins is a milestone, where he cleanly dissected out love from sex and eroticism. The experiments were on infant-mother bond in monkeys, a species native to North India. It shattered myths woven by Freud, challenged paediatrician's unscientific infant isolation drive, and demolished childcare techniques of behaviourist.The "purified psychology", says Deborah Blum in her book Love at Goon Park, in the 1950s was in fact rat psychology. Irony of the mid-twentieth century was, Blum writes: it was difficult even for a British psychiatrist John Bowlby to join the words mother and love together. Thus the challenge before Harry Harlow was to measure "love in rat". But for Harlow a rat laboratory was a dream at Wisconsin. An intuitive bridge player one day, seeing extremely worried Harlow suggested that he better study orangutans at a local zoo, who were more charming than rats. Soon the orangutans saw a boyish looking professor watching them. At this time, a student joined Harlow. He was an independent thinker, Abraham Maslow. Both came to a conclusion that the monkeys were suitable for study of human relationships. The first one they explored was the dominance hierarchy. In words of Blum, Maslow showed that monkeys need beautifully tuned social skills to navigate these often risky social ways. And Harlow now wanted a primate laboratory. Astonishingly, with the helping hands of his students he built one. This laboratory began to revolutionise the very premises of love.Those psychologists who followed Descartes's dictum that animals are like machines, were entirely wrong. Monkeys in Harlow's laboratory solved problems like a genius--the hypothesis testing in WGTA (Wisconsin General Test Apparatus). Later using these tests, in India Sheo Dan Singh found that the forest monkeys are as good as urban monkeys in learning (Scientific American 1969).But life is full of unpredictable tragedies, as Buddha said long ago. Harry Harlow, whose vision was reaching out from intellect to love, fell apart from his wife Clara and little sons. "Oh, how blind we all were!" recalls Erwin Schrödinger, who left his ailing mother alone to die, in pursuit of intellect. Or, as Deborah Blum would have it, "Harry was alone, for the moment, with psychology as mistress and wife and family." For Buddha, Schrödinger and Harlow, the intellect unfolded it's treasure along the non-attachment pathway, or in my view the fire of separation field their search for truth.Harlow was lucky to have these North Indian rhesus monkeys: adaptable, sturdy and suitable for study of love. On the basis of his experiments, Harlow could say confidentaly that nurturing and affection are akin to breathing. The standard practice in laboratory was to rear subjects alone in cages, little realising that social animals were likely to go mad in isolation. Thus Harlow found in his monkeys psychopathology of various kind. The most undeniable was depression due to social isolation, as Harlow developed in personal life after death of Margret his second wife. Here, we notice the greatest leap of Harlow's imagination. His determination to reinstate love in isolation suffering monkeys. His great grand family of research scholars materialised the dream. For the isolate monkeys company of compassionate monkeys, and for Harlow personally the reunion with the first wife Clara and children, was a turning point.The destiny had more bitterness for Harlow. As if none was there to care enough for a person who cared for everyone. After death, the tirade of animal lovers in the United States against Harlow crossed its limits. They did not spare even his well-intentioned lessons of love. The Love at Goon Park by Deborah Blum is an archive of light and dark side of these untold stories, to borrow Steven Pinker's words, behind flourishing of affection paradigm.