Customer Reviews

Learning to Love

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Adoption Detective: Memoir of an Adopted Child

Harlow's work demonstrates the importance of caregiving and companionship in social and cognitive development. His work influenced key changes in how orphanages, adoption agencies, social services groups, and child care providers approached the care of children. Along with child analysts and researchers, including Anna Freud and René Spitz, Harlow's experiments added scientific legitimacy to two powerful arguments: against institutional child care and in favor of psychological parenthood. The permanence associated with adoption was far superior to other arrangements when it came to safeguarding the future mental and emotional well-being of children in need of parents. His themes are evident in the book Adoption Detective by Judith and Martin Land. Reference: Page 273-274

The strength of this book comes when Harlow describes what he's directly observed in his monkey-torture experiments. His experiments were clearly sick and sociopathic (or at the least dramatically lacking in empathy), but there's much to learn from them. Scattered throughout the book are nuggets of information on how his monkeys reacted differently to each other, to life, to the world, and to themselves after they'd been deprived of healthy parenting and healthy social interaction as infants, and Harlow does a great job of comparing these deprived and dysfunctional monkeys to healthy monkeys. This at times sheds an incomparably bright light on the screwed-up dynamics of humans.

However, his insight-provoking monkey descriptions make up a minimum of the writing in the book, and are just scattered throughout occasionally. Had the whole book been about his monkey experiments it would have been a definite five-star piece - and a classic in psychology writing. But instead Harlow wrote mostly about humans, humans, and more humans, and his insights are often conservative, old-school, boring, conventional, and of his time and place. He is a great proponent of heterosexual, romantic love as the highest ideal, and contrasts this with narcissistic love, never realizing that all-too-often they're the same thing!

(Actually, I came back a few weeks later and have added in this parenthetical, because I have since learned Harlow was ahead of a lot of the psychologists of him time ---- SCARY!!!)

I quickly got tired of Harlow's point of view about humans - and no surprise. When I think about it, why would I want to trust the supposedly brilliant insights on humanity of a guy who can so easily torture innocent little almost-human monkeys? Had it been legal to do his experiments on human babies (as has been done by others in centuries past) you have to wonder if he, in his quest for fame, would have done it. And yet we take this guy - who clearly has massive impairments in his ability to love - as an expert on love???