Free Love at Goon Park by Deborah Blum

all—merely the hope of one.
    As a child, Watson had been dragged to tent revival after tent revival by his mother. He still remembered with revulsion the sweaty intensity of the faithful. He was determined to wash the remnants of spirituality and, yes, emotion out of his profession. “No one ever treated the emotions more coldly,” Harry Harlow would say years later. To his contemporaries, Watson only argued that a scientific psychology was the way to build “a foundation for saner living.” He proposed stringent guidelines for viewing behavior in a 1913 talk still known as the Behaviorist Manifesto.

    â€œPsychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science,” he insisted. Its goal was the prediction and control of behavior. “Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, and neither does consciousness have much value.” Psychologists should focus on what could be measured and modified. In the same way that animals could be conditioned to respond, so could people. The principle applied most directly to children. Watson’s psychology was in near perfect opposition to the intimate, relationship-focused approach that Harry Harlow would develop. Rather, he argued that adults—parents, teachers, doctors—should concentrate on conditioning and training children. Their job was to provide the right stimulus and induce the correct response.
    And that was what Watson argued, forcefully, in his 1928 bestseller , The Psychological Care of the Child and Infant. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell proclaimed it the first child-rearing book of scientific merit. Watson, he said, had triumphed by studying babies the way “the man of science studies the amoebae.” The Atlantic Monthly called it indispensable; the New York Times said that Watson’s writings had begun “a new epoch in the intellectual history of man.” Parents magazine called his advice a must for the bookshelf of every enlightened parent.
    From today’s perspective, it’s clear that Watson had little patience for parents at all, enlightened or not. Watson wrote that he dreamed of a baby farm where hundreds of infants could be taken away from their parents and raised according to scientific principles. Ideally, he said, a mother would not even know which child was hers and therefore could not ruin it. Emotional responses to children should be controlled, Watson insisted, by using an enlightened scientific approach. Parents should participate in shaping their children by simple, objective conditioning techniques. And if parents chose affection and nurturing instead, ignoring his advice? In his own words, there are “serious rocks ahead for the over-kissed child.” Watson demanded not only disciplined children but disciplined parents. His
instructions were clear: Don’t pick them up when they cry; don’t hold them for pleasure. Pat them on the head when they do well; shake their hands; okay, kiss them on the foreheads, but only on big occasions. Children, he said, should be pushed into independence from the day of their birth. After a while, “you’ll be utterly ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you’ve been handling your child.”
    Watson was a hero in his own field, hailed for his efforts to turn the soft-headed field of psychology into a hard science. He became a hero in medicine because his work fit so well with the “don’t touch” policies of disease control. The physicians of the time also considered that affection was, well, a girl thing, something to be sternly controlled by men who knew better. The Wife’s Handbook flatly warns mothers that their sentimental natures are a defect. The book’s author, Dr. Arthur Albutt, takes a firm stand against spoiling, which he defines as picking babies up when they cry, or letting them fall asleep in one’s arms. “If it cries, never