The Nature of Love

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   Infant monkeys chose the cloth mother with no milk over the wire mother with milk, showing experimentally that the bond is not bought with food — comforting contact is a need in its own right.

   The Nature of Love · 1958

   The infant fed from the wire and went back to cling to the cloth.

   Harlow's experiments are both a scientific landmark and an ethical problem worth naming directly: the infants were separated from their mothers and raised with surrogates, and some developed severe, permanent disturbance. Today the protocol would not be approved. The result, however, was decisive against the behaviourist thesis. The infant fed from the wire mother, because that is where the bottle was, and then went back to cling to the cloth one for hours. When something frightening was put in the cage, it ran to the cloth, not to the food, and from there, from her arms, began to explore. Harlow called it a base of security, the same observation Bowlby had made theoretically. The second result, less often quoted, is that cloth was not enough either: infants raised without playmates remained unable to mate or to raise their own young. Warm contact was necessary but not sufficient — reciprocity was also required, meaning someone who answers back.

   “Man cannot live by milk alone. Love is an emotion that does not need to be bottle-fed.”

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