Harlow Attachment Theory

The rise of Attachment Theory in the 20th Century tries to explain the behaviors typical of young children. A securely attached child is “likely to have advantages in most cultures studied” (Music, p. 69). Childhood Attachment can be best thought of as the methods and manners in which infants and caregivers connect with one another. This presumes that the caregiver and infant have at least one mechanism of connecting with one another. In a family without physiological or mental impairment, this is typically touching, visual clues such as smiling and eye movement, and auditory method such as words and laughter. The hypothesis is that normal attachment requires unimpaired connection methods. This paper examines the specific case that normal
Harlow believed that “the need for affection created a stronger bond between mother and infant than did physical needs (food)” (Schultheis). One of Harlow’s experiments was to provide infant monkeys reared in isolation from their biological mothers with a surrogate wire “mother” that provided food and a cloth “mother” that did not. When surprised, frightened, or needing comfort, the infant monkeys tended to go the cloth version, despite the fact that the cloth monkey provided no food (Schultheis). Harlow’s groundbreaking experiments with wire- and cloth-based surrogate mothers showed that monkey infants that had never known their biological mothers were much more likely to “[spend] a greater amount of time clinging to the cloth surrogate” (Kimble). Harlow’s approach was very scientific and objective, despite doubts that his approach was ethological and “under natural conditions” as he artificially separated the infant monkeys from their mother. While not conclusively applicable to human behavior, his results piqued the interest of John Bowlby, who was just starting to examine what he called
His work on Attachment Theory, started as an examination of spatial and behavioral manners of infants with regards to their mother. He then moved to examining more general human infant interactions with their caregivers (typically, the mother) in the 1940’s. Bowlby rejected psychoanalytic explanations for attachment and saw attachment as the infant’s desire to be in close proximity to the caregiver and the social interactions that reinforced the relationship between infant and caregiver (smiling, touching, vocalizing,