Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

The role of the mother was long denigrated in psychology, but
development and well-being. Harry Harlow’s famous studies with
baby monkeys demonstrated that from a young age, caring was deeply
Carol Gilligan worked under Lawrence Kohlberg, whose work on moral
development led to the result that men were more likely to reach the peak of
ethical reasoning. Gilligan proposed a picture of two different approaches to
morality, one based on contracts and another based on care. These advances
led to a reconceptualization of the role of women and the meaning of
interpersonal relationships.
The fact that mothers seem to play a crucial role in child
development might lead us to believe that psychology would focus
on the effects of mothering. But up until the 1950s, that wasn’t the
case. Freudian psychology saw the mother, at most, as a source of
mental illness, and for behaviorists, mothers were primarily a food
source—suppliers of positive reinforcement.
In the 1950s, Harry Harlow began his work with rhesus monkeys.
Harlow was studying learning and, therefore, needed to isolate
young monkeys in an environment where he could determine which
stimuli were the most effective and expeditious in skill acquisition.
But Harlow found that the monkeys’ mothers were teaching them,
too, a fact that contaminated his experiments.
When Harlow separated newborn monkeys from their mothers, he
noticed that the nursery-raised monkeys were more emotionally
fragile than other monkeys. They would cower or quickly become
aggressive, and they were not properly social. This observation
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