2 CommentsIn honor of Valentine’s Day I would like to discuss an article I just read for a psychology course. It’s called, “The Nature of Love,” by Harry F. Harlow. It was first published in American Psychologist in 1958. However, I see this as a timeless subject. The article opens with the line, “Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding.” He continues to say, that “the little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written by poets and novelists.” As a poet myself, who has read a great deal of poetry, I believe this to be very true. Another interesting factoid is that “The word ‘love’ has the highest frequency of any word cited in Bartlett’s Book of Familiar Quotations.”
The article explores how we develop our need for love and Harlow basically believes that our initial love responses are made by the infant to the mother or mother substitute. It is during infancy that we learn the power of how to love. He also says that mothers are most responsible for our primary drives which include hunger, thirst and pain and that we learn how to love through the affection associated with these drives. The mother’s function, he purports, whether human or subhuman or surrogate, is to provide a safe haven for the infant to protect him or her against danger. In fact, he said, that given the situation where both parents are present, the frightened child clings to its mother and not its father.
Harlow did some research and found that baby monkeys in the laboratory showed a strong attachment to the cloth mother over the metal mother. He said that when the infants were separated from their mother and then suddenly saw her, they rushed to her, climbed up, clung tightly and rubbed their heads against her body. The study also showed that whether the infant was breast fed or bottle fed was of less importance than the actual contact comfort. “Love is an emotion that does not need to be bottle- or spoon-fed, and we may be sure that there is nothing to be gained by giving lip service to love,” he said.
He concluded by saying that mothers can be replaced for child care and that women in the working classes are not needed in the home because of their primary mammalian capabilities. He said, and rightfully so, that in the future, which is now, neonatal nursing will not be a necessity, but a luxury which will probably be limited to the wealthy upper class. And now, more than forty years later, this is definitely the case.
Happy Valentine’s Day to you, my beloved readers!
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