Deborah Blum, Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection (Cambridge, MA:
Perseus Publishing, 2002), Chap. 2, Untouched by Human Hands, p.31.

The book is primarily a biography of Harry Harlow, an experimental psychologist whose work on
monkeys at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, became somewhat controversial do to the
cruel methods employed while testing for adverse reactions in baby monkeys being separated
from their mothers at an early age and raised in cages by inanimate surrogate mothers.

My interest did not lie with Dr. Harlow per se; but the background leading up to and the out
come of the experiments.  The background that lead Dr. Harlow to his work was based on the
fact that the prevailing wisdom at the time, going back to the end of the nineteenth century, was
that parents should not hold and cuddle and otherwise connect with their children on a strong
emotional level.  “Keep your distance” or you will spoil the child was what parents and others
believed.  Therefore, what Dr. Harlow set out to prove and did, even if at the expense of the baby
monkeys, was that deprivation of a mother’s love can be extremely detrimental to a monkeys
emotional makeup as an adolescent and adult.  The implication, of course, is that people will
have the same negative effects when deprived of the mother love and bonding, the lack of which
created, what we might describe in humans as neurosis, psychosis and antisocial behavior
(messed up people with hang-ups, large and small).