Remember Maria / by John G. Howells.

  • Howells, John G.
Date:
1974
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Remember Maria / by John G. Howells. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    74 REMEMBER MARIA OF MONKEYS AND MEN There is merit in looking at this issue in detachment. An excursion into animal studies provides just such an opportunity and supports the findings that the damaging agent is deprivation and not separation. Harlow's early work on the monkey behaviour is well known. Its recent extension has great relevance to our discourse, as a brief sketch will show. In the first part of their work Harlow and his colleagues were able to produce neurotic infant monkeys by deprivation consequent on separation. The infants were separated from their parents and became neurotic. The workers, mistakenly, thought that this was the result of separation. However, had the monkeys been placed with foster parents following separation, then the neurosis would not have appeared, i.e. separation would not have led to deprivation. It was not separation per se that did the damage, but the fact that it led to deprivation.'The truth of this emerges again in a moment. In the second stage of their experiments, the neurotic infants were allowed to become adults, were mated, and these disturbed mothers produced neurotic infants. These infants became neurotic because they were rejected by the mother, i.e. they were not separated, but they were deprived. The deprivation did the damage. (Similarly, a battered child is not separated from his family, but he still receives gross depriva¬ tion.) Then there was a dramatic intervention. The monkeys had to be rescued to prevent deprivation continuing to the point of death. And what was the intervention? The employment of separation! The infants were taken away from the depriving mother monkeys and placed with non-depriving adult humans. Separation was employed therapeutically to prevent deprivation and death. (Might not the battered child merit the same rescue?). The first two stages of the work confirm that separation is not synonymous with deprivation. Deprivation is the noxious agent. Deprivation can occur with non-separation to the point of death. Separation saved the life of the infant monkeys. In the third stage of their work, Harlow and his colleagues were looking for a therapist for the disturbed neurotic infants. Behaviour therapy was tried, but was not effective. So stable, young monkeys were employed as companions to the neurotic monkeys, i.e. the depriving negative parents were replaced by positive non-depriving young monkeys. The negative forces were replaced by positive forces. The neurotic monkeys improved. (I mention this piece of research work because it has lessons for us in the treatment of emotional illness produced by damage in the home.) The young monkey had no knowledge of psychiatry and yet achieved improvement in his fellow monkey. If we understood what went on between these two monkeys