Researching love
Harry Harlow was a psychologist working in the fifties who became somewhat famous for his experiments with monkeys. He was trying to discover something about intelligence and started with conventional tests like puzzles to see how the monkeys behaved. During the process, however, he became fascinated in the animal's social interaction and gradually shifted his attention to other things, including a series of experiments on the impact of different forms of care on the development of personality in baby monkeys.
Bear in mind that, at the time, conventional wisdom and psychologists were agreed that children should be protected from harmful infectious contact with people. Mothers were discouraged to touch their new born infants, children in hospitals lay in isolation, sometimes only touched through a screen and if children had to be taken into care, they remained isolated for many years. Sadly, one of the consequences of this approach was that, while the rates of infection went down, the rates of mortality stayed stubbornly high.
What did he find? “Love, Harry would eventually argue, was not built on one relationship but many. Our love lives, all of them, forge links in a healthy chain of normal development: maternal love, infant love, paternal love, friendship, partnership – one connecting to the next and then the next. The early attachment is the first link of that chain, the start of our ability to connect with others.” Pg 194
“In a social species, Harry said, one relationship is never enough. We build a world of connections. We weave them – contacts and friendships and family and loves – into something that we lightly call “a support network” and which is really the safety net that catches us as we balance our way along the high wire act of everyday life and from which all of us occasionally fall”.
“In the end, Harry Harlow’s vision of the nature of love was a sweeping one…. [He believed that] love matters, that social connection counts, that we are defined as individuals, in part, by our place in the community”. Pg 263
What's your community like? How are you, as a person, supported by the community in which you work?
Source: Blum, D. (2002), Love at Goon Park, Perseus, ISBN 0-7382-0278-9
Bear in mind that, at the time, conventional wisdom and psychologists were agreed that children should be protected from harmful infectious contact with people. Mothers were discouraged to touch their new born infants, children in hospitals lay in isolation, sometimes only touched through a screen and if children had to be taken into care, they remained isolated for many years. Sadly, one of the consequences of this approach was that, while the rates of infection went down, the rates of mortality stayed stubbornly high.
What did he find? “Love, Harry would eventually argue, was not built on one relationship but many. Our love lives, all of them, forge links in a healthy chain of normal development: maternal love, infant love, paternal love, friendship, partnership – one connecting to the next and then the next. The early attachment is the first link of that chain, the start of our ability to connect with others.” Pg 194
“In a social species, Harry said, one relationship is never enough. We build a world of connections. We weave them – contacts and friendships and family and loves – into something that we lightly call “a support network” and which is really the safety net that catches us as we balance our way along the high wire act of everyday life and from which all of us occasionally fall”.
“In the end, Harry Harlow’s vision of the nature of love was a sweeping one…. [He believed that] love matters, that social connection counts, that we are defined as individuals, in part, by our place in the community”. Pg 263
What's your community like? How are you, as a person, supported by the community in which you work?
Source: Blum, D. (2002), Love at Goon Park, Perseus, ISBN 0-7382-0278-9
posted by st at 1:01 PM
2 Comments:
Hi,
Harlow's work is definitely crucial, in helping us see that there is an innate motivation to relate to others. If you haven't done so yet, I recommend you look at the work of John Bowlby, and more generally at attachment theory. As a psychologist, I am only just beginning to come to terms with the pervasiveness of the impact of early experiences in later well-being and behaviour. Jeremy Holmes does a good book on Bowlby, which is readable. For coaching etc., have you looked at the FIRO?
Tim (a friend of Giles)
Tim, thank you for your comments. I have been putting together a piece on Bowlby's work which I will post shortly. While preparing it, I've been looking for research about the role of attachment in the workplace and haven't found a great deal.
I am also conscious that the relationship we have with our work is often complex, with some of us feeling a love for the work itself, some for the organisations or brands we work for and I would like to start another thread on this topic.
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