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Monday, February 03, 2003A loner in childhood, Harlow began his career as an iconoclast, mostly ignored by his colleagues at Wisconsin. Unfazed, he built a laboratory from scrap lumber and inspired a cadre of talented students, including his first wife, Clara Mears. (The lab's address was 600 N. Park, Madison, Wis., but the careless handwriting of so many of its researchers led everyone to call it Goon Park; thus Blum's title.) Intensely driven by curiosity and a desire to prove the behaviorists wrong, Harlow was a workaholic who rarely spent time with his family. After Clara left him, taking their children, intense loneliness drove him to drink for the rest of his life. ''It was during those . . . sleep-deprived, alcohol-inspired days,'' Blum writes, ''that Harry Harlow first started thinking about the nature of love.'' He married again, fathered two more children, worked like a maniac, lost his wife to cancer, suffered from depression relieved only slightly by electroshock therapy and created his infamous isolated-monkey model of depression. Blum presents the puzzle of a man who legitimated a science of love while failing those who most loved him, and the paradox of work that made baby monkeys suffer in order to sensitize people to the needs of children. Maybe it was that lack of love in his own life that drove him to work so obsessively on it in monkeys. posted by Sydney on 2/03/2003 08:37:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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