Imaginary Therapy

I’m often asked how I came to specialize in the treatment of imaginary patients. It began when I was an intern at the University of Wisconsin’s Student Counseling Center. Once a week I held office hours in one of the large undergraduate dorms. Students could drop in or they might be sent to see me by their floor advisor. The students I saw in the dorm were usually having more difficulties than the ones who came to see me at the Counseling Center.

One night, there was a soft knock at the door. Opening it, I looked down and saw a small rhesus monkey scamper right past me into my office. He ran straight to a corner of the room and huddled there with his arms wrapped around his chest. As he sat there, he chewed on the tip of his tail.
“You know, you look familiar,” I said.
His tail came out of his mouth and he said, “You’ve probably seen my movie, if you stayed awake in class that day. I’m one of Harry Harlow’s monkeys.”

Harry Harlow was an internationally renowned professor of psychology. Not only was he one of Wisconsin’s most distinguished faculty members, but television and magazines constantly asked him for advice on child-rearing. I had never met him, but I’d heard he also could be a very difficult person.
“Does Dr. Harlow know you’re here?” I asked. I had visions of my internship coming to a swift end.
“Let me be more accurate. I used to be one of Harry Harlow’s monkeys. He’s through with me now.”
“And?”
“You’ve never heard of nonverbal communication? I have to spell it out for you?”

It took me a few seconds. “You were raised by a wire mother!”
I was pretty proud of my insight. Dr. Harlow conducted experiments raising baby monkeys with either warm cloth or wire surrogate ‘mothers’. He proved that a mother’s physical contact was critical to an infant’s development, even more important than providing food. Unfortunately, the monkeys raised on wire mothers became very disturbed.

The little monkey giggled. “You really don’t want to trade mother jokes with me.”
“But the way you’re holding yourself. It is just like in the movie.”
“You’re a few years behind the times, which is not a good sign for a graduate student. Wire mothers were just the beginning.”
Without real mothers or playmates, the baby monkeys often became socially inept, or at least very irritating.

“So what happened to you?” I asked.
“I had a monster mother,” Harlow’s monkey told me.
“What do you mean, ‘a monster mother’?”
“Almost-a-not-really-a-doctor, let’s do a little experiment right here. Close your eyes and imagine that you’re a baby again. You go to your mother for a little cuddle. You just need a little love and affection. But as soon as you climb up on her lap, she starts violently shaking you. I mean she shakes you so hard that you hear your teeth rattle. As you’re being shaken, you try harder and harder to just hang on to her. But she’ll have none of it and she throws you across the room.
“So, here’s the question,” he continued. “What would you do?”

Harlow’s monkey waited expectantly for my answer. I wish I had told him I would organize a protest to stop the baby monkey experiments. Or talk with Dr. Harlow directly. Or at least complain to someone in the psychology department. I didn’t, and at the time, neither did anyone else.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“She was my mother. I went back to her. I always went back to her.”

In the ensuing months, I was determined to help the wisecracking little monkey get over his malevolent upbringing. I soon learned that the monkey’s sarcastic comments were nothing compared to the aggression he turned on himself.
“You look patchy,” I told him.
“I’m going bald.”
“No, I think you’re pulling your hair out.”
“I get in fights. Then I pull my hair out.”
He lived with several former experimental subjects of the lab. None of them knew how to get along with each other. He’d get in a fight, then retreat to a corner and start pulling out his hair.
“Does it hurt to do that?” I asked.
“It’s worth it. Eventually I’ll have enough to make you a monkey-hair sweater.”

It took me a while to figure out that he also would steal whatever he could from my office. If I confronted him, he would never deny it, or ever willingly give the stuff back.

We needed to work on many problems. He was depressed, angry, fearful, sarcastic, aggressive, inappropriate, self-mutilating and isolated. All obviously came from a rage against a rejecting mother. But he was also charming and intriguing. It didn’t take much to know that the push and pull of his personality mirrored his early history.

We talked a lot about his experiences growing up in the lab.
“I guess,” the monkey said, “what Harlow learned is that monster mothers have monster children.”
“Do you think of yourself as a monster? You know, you did have a real mother once.”
“I wouldn’t know. Hey, maybe she would’ve been a worse mother. Maybe I was lucky to have been raised by a monster mother. Maybe they took me away from my real mother because she was even worse.”

One session, in the spirit of ‘in vivo desensitization’, I asked if I could hold his hand.
“You’re my therapist. You’re not supposed to touch me.”
“I just want to hold your hand.”
“That’s how it always starts. First the hand, then who knows what happens.”
I was persistent, but he was adamant that it wasn’t going to happen.

I hoped that perhaps he could see his early experiences differently, that he had been part of something larger than himself.
“Some good did come out of those experiments. People learned the importance of touch and love early in life. It’s helped a lot of kids, and you were a big part of that.”
“Good for the kids. Bad for me,” the monkey replied.

I wanted him to see his sarcasm as a defense against getting closer to others.
“I’m only sarcastic here,” he told me.
“I have trouble believing that. I have to assume what you do here is what you do everywhere.”
“If I wasn’t sarcastic, with half the things you ask me, I’d scratch and bite you. Would that be better?”

I tried to help him focus on the abilities he had, rather than concentrate on his disabilities.
“You know you have a pretty good sense of humor. A lot of comedy comes from bad early experiences.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. With a few more years of therapy I could be the Woody Allen of monkeydom.”
I tried to be more practical. “Maybe you could use it to stop some of the fights you get into.”

I once suggested he bring some of his roommates to our therapy sessions. We could have some group therapy sessions.
“A self-help group for Harlow’s monkeys? You have no idea what you’d be getting into.”
“I’d do it, if it would help you,” I said.
He described how he lived. It was a constant maelstrom of anger and chaos, with the only relief coming from retreating into isolation.
“Thanks, but if any of them knew I was coming here, they wouldn’t ever leave me alone about it.”

I even suggested alternative treatments. “There’s a new kind of therapy I just heard about. It’s called Primal Scream Therapy. If you want, I can give you a referral.”
“I’ve heard Primate Screams all my life. I don’t think that’s what I want.”

I thought if he could find just one other monkey to have a relationship with, it would do wonders for his emotional growth. I coached him on how he could approach a female monkey.
He said that all the girls he knew were themselves graduates of Harlow’s experiments.
“They’re even more screwed up than I am. I don’t even want to think about what was done to them.”

There were moments of progress. Once in the Spring, we took a walk around campus together and stopped at the faculty-housing playground, where he actually let himself have some fun. Another time, he did use his sense of humor to stop a fight with the other monkeys.

But he never did let me hold his hand.

At the end of the year, I finished my internship and left Wisconsin. We arranged for him to move to a ‘monkey island’, a new kind of rehabilitation hospital specifically for experimental primates. I hoped that with intense care, Harlow’s monkey could find some peace and comfort in his life.

Harry Harlow’s work changed a lot of child-rearing practices. It led to unlimited parent visits when kids were in the hospital. In a dramatic way, pictures of the mistreated, disturbed baby monkeys raised awareness of the importance of hugs in the lives of children.

But all that is forgotten now. Harry Harlow is the poster child for the need for drastic changes in animal studies. Almost no one in psychology cites his research anymore, or wants to be associated with his work. Everyone agrees that his experiments couldn’t ethically be done today.

For myself, Harlow’s monkey taught me about some of the possibilities and some of the limits of psychotherapy. He also led me to my specialty. After leaving Wisconsin, I went into practice and soon found there was a great need among imaginary patients to get help with their problems.