Animal Models: Dr. Harlow’s Escapees
2023, Acrylic on canvas 36” x 36” $2100
Among all the commentaries I had to draft here, this one imposed on me the most daunting control of affect. Unfortunately the methods used by this mad scientist, whose “research” justifies the use of so-called “animal models” under the pretense of serving the betterment of the human condition, continue to be carried out everywhere where medical, pharmaceutical or, more generally, anthropocentric investigations take place. Researchers often compete for grants that allow them to “discover” the obvious. Such was the case of Dr. Harlow whose name is associated with psychological questions concerning the attachment of offspring to their mother; questions that can be answered simply by looking at the rhesus monkey mothers, part of his cohort of detainees, holding on to their babies, or the babies seen here clinging to their mother’s breast; questions that have been endlessly addressed in literary, theological, philosophical texts going back to the dawn of writing, if not of time. But humanities studies be damned! The absurdity of this researcher’s inventions, torture chambers and instruments that include the “pit of despair,” and “rape rack” to use his own terms, designed to prove that babies barely a few months old, whom he had torn from their mothers and isolated for long periods of time, in unfathomably cruel conditions, would lose all possibility of contact with the outside world, are utterly mind numbing.
What is even more troubling is that such “methods” have not lost any of their appeal for students and practicians of psychology to this day. Imagine the thousands of young people taking the well- liked Introduction to psychology 101 course today, and discovering that Harlow’s research, a “classic” in behavioural science, represents the foundation of how serious, correct research is to be conducted. Voices raised in opposition to such unalloyed sadism being practiced in the name of science are few and far between. It is no surprise that the major criticism formulated in Harlow’s day came from a distinguished professor in the Humanities, Harold Bloom, for whom such research did nothing beyond stating the obvious at a shocking moral price. Is this kind of criticism of scientific methodology what ultimately led to the agony where the humanities linger today? Possibly so. And so here we are, nevertheless, still trying to hang on today.
In their pretence of bringing down psychoanalysis, which, it should be said, never produced this sort of suffering through its practice, Harlow and his students (who carried out his work while he struggled out of control with alcoholism and depression), thought that the young’s need for warmth and affection from their mother (rather than her just being a source of food for them), needed to be scientifically demonstrated. Psychology had not yet been issued its letter of accreditation as a science - in fact, it is yet to hold it as we speak -, but its chosen means of acquiring it came through the exploitation of animals, freely available for the taking and whose abuse, in the mind of its so-called scientists, did not raise ethical questions. My painting of the two rhesus monkey mothers and their babies is the result of the pain, regret and rage I feel for all the animals tortured, then and now, mindlessly, in the human quest for empty knowledge.