Today--I have been thinking about Harry Harlow’s infamous experiments with the cloth and wire surrogate mothers. I started to write about them--then thought I’d better look it up. Good thing. My memory had the date wrong (1950s, not early 60s), the monkey wrong (macaques, not chimps), and, in some ways, the whole point wrong.

I tend to wonder about Harry himself, what his parents were like, what led him to do research that involved separating baby primates from their mothers at birth. I heard Harry Harlow speak once in the 1980s. Reading his own 1958 summary of his work, like hearing him speak, reminds me there is always more to the story. What he was originally trying to study was love.

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Harlow/love.htm