Love at Goon Park by Deborah Blum

Author:Deborah Blum
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Chains of Love

Because of the dearth of experimentation, theories about the fundamental nature of affection have evolved at the level of observation, intuition and discerning guesswork.

Harry F. Harlow,

The Nature of Love, 1958

IN THE LATE I950S, A TRIO of child psychologists—Joseph Stone, Henrietta Smith, and Lois Murphy—decided to pull together a book on the science of babies. They started collecting studies. Then more studies. And still more studies. The paper pile was getting so big that, Stone said, they started wondering whether they were merely incompetent researchers, unable to get a grip on the science. Finally, they realized that the stacks of studies held a unified message: They had tapped into a “genuine knowledge explosion.” Science was finally discarding its vision of the passive child. Suddenly, babies were real people, people with feelings, and passionate ones at that.

The resulting book, The Competent Infant, began with a story: “Some years ago, a young psychologist of our acquaintance was helpfully diapering his six-month-old first born son. His wife came on the scene and protested: ‘You don’t have to be so grim about it, you can talk to him and smile a little.’ At which our friend drew himself up and said firmly, ‘He has nothing to say to me and I have nothing to say to him.’”

And how wrong he was, the authors said. And how wrong science had been. They followed that assertion with a two-page list of other mistaken assumptions adopted by baby experts about babies. As they put it, “We can collect embarrassing moments from the professional literature almost at random.” Among their choices for the most ridiculous scientific ideas: Babies can’t see faces (reported in 1942); babies are unaware of almost anything around them (1948); newborn babies are only a collection of reflexes (1952); they don’t see color until the age of three (1964); and even “the human infant at birth and for a varying period time afterwards [is] functionally decorticated” (1964); in other words, babies are brainless.

The Competent Infant is a 1,314-page, fully loaded rebuttal to the empty-headed infant idea. Pointed commentary from the editors is wrapped around 202 studies and essays authored by scientists from around the world; each contributor aimed at reinventing our image of the child. The babies in Stone and Smith and Murphy’s sharply edited book can see people just fine. They pay attention to those people, too, and think about them. These small humans work hard at relationships. Parents matter; and, oh, by the way, love matters, too.

Stone, who was chair of the child study division at Vassar, and his colleagues picked their evidence carefully. They realized, as Bowlby had before them, that to make their argument they were going to need not only direct human evidence but also circumstantial evidence, the kind found in well-controlled animal studies. Still, the research had to be the best; they included only a tenth of the studies they had gathered. Stone contacted Harry Harlow almost as soon as The Nature of Love came sizzling off the APA presses.

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