Opening Skinner's Box by Lauren Slater

Author:Lauren Slater
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

THIS ALL OCCURRED during the late 1950s and 1960s. Harlow was studying love and had earlier fallen out of love. He was always at his lab, never at home. Clara, with the high IQ, well, she was at home taking care of their two babies, while night after night her husband was out in the old box factory, devising test after monkey test. It was a cold, cold winter in Madison, and Harry Harlow had an affair. “That’s why my parents broke up,” says Harlow’s oldest son, Robert Israel. “It’s very simple, my father had an affair.”

Clara left with her two children, later to marry a construction worker and live in a trailer in the southwest part of the country. Harlow barely seemed to notice. There was a woman—we don’t know who she is, possibly a student—and then there was this other woman whom he called the Iron Maiden. The Iron Maiden was a special surrogate mother Harlow had designed; she shot out sharp spikes and blasted her babies with air so cold and forceful the infants were thrown back against the bars of their cages, clinging and screaming. This, claimed Harlow, was an evil mother, and he wanted to see what would happen.

Here is where Harlow begins to earn his darker reputation. Here is where he steps from science into fairy tales—brutal stepmothers, the Brothers Grimm, the Iron Maiden in a magic forest where trees put down their second legs and start to walk away. Why did Harlow want to see such things? Animal rights activists say he’s a sadist, pure and simple. I, myself, don’t think that’s it, although what drove him—the variables—I cannot quite detect. Did Mabel have sharp spikes? Too easy. Was his nature essentially, serotonergically tilted toward the difficult? Perhaps, but too easy. Was it that he had seen some things? He did a stint with the army where he went to New Mexico and observed soldiers setting off atomic blasts. He saw the firecloud, the black fallout in the distance, the huge horrific light. He has never written about that.

But the Iron Maiden, he has written about her, almost with glee. He made many variations: some iron maidens pumped freezing cold water over their children; others stabbed them. No matter what the torture, Harlow observed that the babies would not let go. They would not be deterred; they would not be thwarted. My god, love is strong. You are mauled and you come crawling back. You are frozen, and yet still you seek heat from the same wrong source. There is no partial reinforcement to explain this behavior; there is only the dark side of touch, the reality of primate relationships, which is that they can kill us while they hold us—that’s sad. But again, I find some beauty. The beauty is this: We are creatures of great faith. We will build bridges, against all odds we will build them—from here to there. From me to you. Come closer.

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