A foundling in Dr. René Spitz’s film, Grief: A Peril in Infancy

In a grainy, black-and-white film from 1947, Jane, an infant girl, lies in a crib looking up at the smiling face of the man looming over her. She beams at him, gesticulating, touching his cheeks. There’s no sound in the film, but you can see that she’s babbling with joy. Her eyes are fixed on him. He has her complete, ecstatic attention.

Next we see Jane a few weeks later. A week before this next footage was shot, circumstances had forced Jane’s mother to leave the baby with strangers. Now she looks subdued, despondent. The man who had brought her such happiness the week before tries to cheer her up. But this time, she bawls hysterically while rocking on her back, kicking the bars of her crib. He strokes her head but she cannot be consoled. “Jane did not scream while weeping,” words on the silent screen explain, “she only moaned.”

The short film, which documents the despair of five children at a foundling home, was made by Dr. René Spitz. He showed it to doctors at medical conferences around New York City. The point he was trying to make, from today’s perspective, is so self-evident it’s astonishing anyone ever had to argue it: that children need the comforting touch of their parents. At the time, however, that claim was not just novel; it was heretical. Dr. Spitz’s peers reacted to his message with open hostility.

The scientific consensus in Dr. Spitz’s time was that children did not need to be shown affection from adults. Experts strongly discouraged hugging, kissing, cradling, rocking, and cooing to your kids. That kind of pampering, they warned, would shape them into irresponsible, needy adults of weak character. Dr. Luther Holt, who wrote an enormously influential book on how to properly raise children, argued against the “vicious practice” of picking up your baby when she cries.

These experts did not purport to speak merely as clinicians with years of relevant experience in the field. They were speaking as scientists conveying findings that had been firmly established in laboratory research. Outside of a handful of fringe dissidents like Spitz, their claims were not controversial among their peers. They were affirmed and applauded at the highest levels of the discipline. This was not just the conventional wisdom or the latest research: this was proven scientific knowledge.

The better part of a century later, it’s clear not just how wrong they were, but in terms of human impact, how catastrophically wrong they were. Sometimes it takes the distance of time to see through the mystique of authority. And there is no authority more mystical than Science.

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The doctors who championed this frigid philosophy of child development, led by James B. Watson, were cut from the cloth of the Progressive Era. The crusading reformers of that time recognized no human problem that could not be solved by the tenacious application of scientific expertise. This neo-religious faith in the healing power of science fueled a surge in new technocratic social engineering philosophies, from the “scientific” management of workers on assembly lines to the sanitization of populations through eugenics. It turned every economic, cultural and political problem into an object of scientific inquiry.

Psychology was a fledgling science back then, as in many ways it still is. In this time of fetishization of technocratic authority, the field was riddled with professional status anxiety. Academic psychologists were desperate to prove that human behavior could be observed, measured and predicted as precisely as a moving object in space or a chemical reaction in a test tube. They pined for the credibility of their colleagues in the natural sciences, and strove mightily to earn it.

Emulating the natural sciences required regarding human actions as predictable phenomena subject to natural laws, which lent itself to a conception of human beings as fundamentally mechanical objects. Behaviorism provided just that model. In the eyes of behaviorists, humans differed from animals only in their level of complexity, and animals were soulless biological machines with no intelligence or emotional life. Every action, whether by an animal in a lab or a human in the world, could be accounted for by “conditioned response,” the same mechanism that caused Pavlov’s dogs to drool at the ring of a bell. There was no need to entertain the concept of a soul, a will, or an inner life. It was all action, reaction.

The institutions tasked with treating the sick and the vulnerable reflected these behaviorist assumptions. In foundling houses, to control the spread of germs, infants were kept in the most sanitized of conditions — clean sheets, sequestered spaces — but were rarely picked up, held, or spoken to. In asylums, those with the most severe mental illnesses were locked in back wards for years or decades, observed and attended to by psychiatrists and orderlies in a doomed effort to re-condition them into sanity.

Like those institutions, the family household, too, was regarded by mainstream psychologists as a glorified Skinner Box. Children were the rats pushing the levers, being rewarded for mimicking the correct response or punished for deviating from it. Parental love was a mushy, unscientific concept that had no role to play in this tidy, rational arrangement.

Plenty of parents, of course, paid no attention to expert advice. But those who did — typically the educated moms and dads of the professional class — were made to feel selfish, irresponsible and negligent for succumbing to their instincts to show love to their children. And many of their kids, never knowing the security of unconditional love, grew into emotionally stunted adults.

And then the theory was proved wrong.

At the cost of subjecting rhesus macaque monkeys in his laboratory to some of the most unspeakable suffering imaginable, the famous experimental psychologist Harry Harlow, at the University of Wisconsin, demonstrated that maternal love was not just good for child development, it was as vital as food, shelter, and modern medicine. And he did so with the kind of meticulously collected data that the hard-nosed behaviorists could not ignore.

The findings Harlow derived from his maternal deprivation experiments on macaques were not so much a scientific breakthrough as a correction. Various medical sciences — psychology wasn’t alone in its culpability — had contrived the fantasy that humans were, effectively, organic machines that required material sustenance and behavioral conditioning but not love or connection. Harlow, who prided himself on how much his discoveries accorded with common sense, proved that this was an intellectual delusion.

At roughly the same time that Harlow was demonstrating the intellectual bankruptcy of behaviorism, psychology was falling short of its aspirations to emulate the natural sciences in its most famous institution: the asylum. Asylums were places of healing, or at least they were supposed to be. And some who suffered from mental illness did indeed receive life-changing care at state psychiatric hospitals. But those patients with the most severe diseases, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, proved impervious to psychological treatment even after languishing for years or decades in their back wards. The stubbornness of their sicknesses became an embarrassment for the discipline of psychology, showing that its clinical application was limited and, perhaps, its insights specious. As their beds filled with the most hopeless cases, asylums degraded into filthy dungeons of cruelty, negligence and despair. Freshly minted psychiatrists began to avoid them, going into private practice instead. Psychological counseling became a therapy for the “worried well” rather than the truly sick. The asylums were shuttered, and the only effective treatment for the most severely afflicted came not from psychology but from biochemistry: psychotropic drugs. Little has changed for schizophrenic patients since the discovery of Thorazine in the 1950s.

Today, most of us understand that Psychology will never be a “hard” science like Physics, nor will its medical application likely ever achieve the specificity and concrete efficacy of practices like cardiology or oncology. But in 1947, when Dr. Spitz made his film, its limitations had not yet been reached. Its practitioners still believed, or at least wished to believe, that their knowledge was every bit as authoritative as that of a molecular biologist or a cardiovascular pathologist. They spoke of their psychological theories as if they were laws of nature.

Of course, scientists are allowed to be wrong. Indeed, flawed scientific consensuses are part of the structure of Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions. Scientific theories are meant to be challenged, disproved, and replaced by better ones; that’s how science progresses.

But if Kuhn was correct about the contingent “paradigms” of science, then so was Michel Foucault. Like Kuhn, Foucault understood that science was not just an act of revelation, but a discourse between human beings. That discourse could reflect objective reality, but it could also shape it. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault described the scientific invention of the homosexual, which served as a means for the state to insinuate its control into the intimate relations of the household.

But unlike Kuhn, Foucault traced a connection between these scientific and other technical discourses to the administrative needs of the state, which is to say, to the exercise of political power. His concept of “power/knowledge,” though horribly named, is indispensable to seeing through the many spell-binding disguises that cloak raw power in the legitimizing costume of authority. The state ultimately wields power through its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, but rarely is it called upon to deploy force directly, or even threaten to do so. Instead, it exerts control over individuals by laundering it through intellectual disciplines that expand the ideological authority of those at the helm of the social order and justify their intrusion into every layer of society: macroeconomics, environmental sciences, public health, urban planning, critical race studies. Those who seek to resist that consolidation of power are forced to do so by critiquing its rationalization within those same discourses, forming dissenting schools of thought within every discipline and sub-discipline. Thus every discourse becomes a battlefield, almost always with the dissidents on the downhill side.

It’s hard to think of a clearer example of the physical expression of this discursive power than newborn babies sequestered in orderly rows of sterile cages, handled on a routine schedule by professional staff. This was the recurring pattern of the industrial age, seen in everything from public education to mass manufacturing to factory farming. In the era of mass industrial competition, the power of the state was a function of the mechanical efficiency and precision with which societies were organized. In the Soviet Union, Marxism provided the intellectual basis for the rationalization of this social re-ordering. In the United States, it was Taylorism at the level of the shop floor, and among the professional classes, it was the technocratic governing philosophy that emerged from the Progressive era.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Harlow’s research on love emerged in the 1960s, when that industrial paradigm was breaking down under the strain of its internal contradictions. The most visible expression of that breakdown was the political foment and countercultural resistance of the Baby Boomer generation, whose rebellion was not so much “leftist” in orientation as anti-conformist and individualist. The New Left adopted the aesthetics and rhetoric of socialism, but in its loathing of “The System” and its valorization of individual freedom and expression, it was firmly in the tradition of American frontier libertarianism, a legacy of the Scots-Irish. In violently rejecting the organization of American society on industrial lines, far from being agents of outside forces, the youth of the ‘60s were acting as antibodies expelling a foreign pathogen.

Scientific management of society failed because it was always a fantasy. Communist utopia did not spring forth from the clash between the industrial proletariat and the bourgeoisie because the world is not a giant Rube Goldberg machine and history cannot be explained by scientific laws. American free market capitalism collapsed in the 2008 global financial crisis because the self-regulating global marketplace is as much a fairy tale as Dialectical Materialism. The asylums failed to heal the severely mentally ill because one cannot re-engineer the human brain through response conditioning. James B. Watson did not produce a new generation of well-adjusted, happy, functional adults because a baby isn’t a tiny humanoid in a laboratory.

We are now entering a new era of post-industrial society, the age of Artificial Intelligence, and already you can feel the discursive apparatus of power shifting its gears to meet it. Suddenly, all talk of apocalyptic climate change has vanished, as governments scramble to “10x” the energy output of our electrical grids to feed the bottomless pit of data center demand. I expect that soon we will start to hear “scientific” arguments that humans don’t actually need to learn new things, that work is bad for you, and that a human-centered world is a suboptimal one.

I’m not a “postmodernist,” whatever that means. I believe that science, at its best, reflects an objective reality, and that over the course of generations, it advances incrementally closer to the truth. But science is also political, and it is especially so when it comes to its most conjectural parts, like the “science” of raising a child, creating a prosperous society, or managing an ecosystem. It is funded by vested interests, and it tends to operate within a received set of parameters and assumptions that reflects establishment thoughts and beliefs. It is deployed to rationalize ideology and it eventually becomes inseparable from it. It is there, in part, to enchant you, to make you believe that choices that are ours to make are not choices at all, but are immutable properties of nature itself. It speaks with authority, and beneath authority is power. And power is a different thing from truth.

Recommended reading:

Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection (2011), by Deborah Blum

The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America’s Mentally Ill (2011), by Gerald N. Grob