At first, Harlow and his graduate-students couldn't figure out what the problem was. They considered factors such as diet, patterns of light exposure, even the antibiotics they used. Then, as Deborah Blum recounts in a fascinating biography of Harlow, “Love at Goon Park”, one of his researchers noticed how tightly the monkeys clung to their soft blankets. Harlow wondered whether what the monkeys were missing in their isolettes was a mother. So, in an odd experiment, he gave them an artificial one.
In the studies, one artificial mother was a doll made of terry cloth; the other was made of wire. He placed a warming device inside the dolls to make them seem more comforting. The babies, Harlow discovered, largely ignored the wire mother. But they became deeply attached to the cloth mother. They caressed it. They slept curled up on it. They ran to it when frightened. They refused replacements: they wanted only “their” mother. If sharp spikes were made to randomly thrust out of the mother s body when the rhesus babies held it, they waited patiently for the spikes to recede and returned to clutching it. No matter how tightly they clung to the surrogate mothers, however, the monkeys remained psychologically abnormal.
In a later study on the effect of total isolation from birth, the researchers found that the test monkeys, upon being released into a group of ordinary monkeys, “usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by ... autistic self-clutching and rocking.” Harlow noted, “One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days later”. After several weeks in the company of other monkeys, most of them adjusted — but not those who had been isolated for longer periods. “Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially,” Harlow wrote. They became permanently withdrawn, and they lived as outcasts — regularly set upon, as if inviting abuse.
The research made Harlow famous (and infamous, too — revulsion at his work helped spur the animal-rights movement). Other psychologists produced evidence of similarly deep and sustained damage in neglected and orphaned children. Hospitals were made to open up their nurseries to parents. And it became widely accepted that children require nurturing human beings not just tor food and protection but also for the normal functioning of their body. We have been hesitant to apply these lessons to adults. Adults, after all, are fully formed, independent beings, with internal strengths and knowledge to draw upon. We wouldn't have anything like a child's dependence on other people, right? Yet it seems that we do. We don't have a lot of monkey experiments to call upon here. But mankind has produced tens of thousands of human ones, including in our prison system. And the picture that has emerged is profoundly unsettling.
Among our most benign experiments are those with people who voluntarily isolate themselves for extended periods. Long-distance solo sailors, for instance, commit themselves to months at sea. They face all manner of physical terrors: thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness. Yet, for many, the single most overwhelming difficulty they report is the "soul-destroying loneliness," as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be screened for their ability to tolerate long stretches in tightly confined isolation, and they come to depend on radio and video communications for social contact.
The problem of isolation goes beyond ordinary loneliness, however. Consider what we've learned from hostages who have been held in solitary confinement — from the journalist Terry Anderson, for example, whose extraordinary memoir, "Den of Lions," recounts his seven yearsas a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Anderson was the chief Middle Last correspondent for the Associated Presswhen, on March 16, 1985, three bearded men forced him from his car in Beirut at gunpoint. He was pushed into a Mercedes sedan, covered head to toe with a heavy blanket, and made to crouch head down in the footwell behind the front seat. His captors drove him to a garage, pulled him out of the car, put a hood over his head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape.For half an hour, they grilled himfor thename of other Americans in Beirut, but he gave no names and they didnot beat him or press him further. They threwhim in the trunk of the car, drove himto another building, and put him in whatwould be the first of 2 succession of cellsacross Lebanon. He was soon placed inwhat seemed to be a dusty closet, large enoughfor only a mattress. Blindfolded, hecould make out the distant sounds of otherhostages. (One we William Buckley;theC.I.A. stationchief who was kidnappedand tortured repeatedly until he weakened and died.) Peering around his blindfold,Anderson could see a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling. He received three unpalatable meals a day – usually a sandwich of bread and cheese, or cold rice with canned vegetables, or soup. He bad a bottle tо urinate in and was allowed one five- to ten-minute trip each day so a rotting bathroom to empty his bowels and wash with water at a dirty sink. Otherwise, the only reprieve from isolation came when the guards made short visits to bark at him for breaking a ruleorto threaten him, sometimes with a gun at his temple.
He missed people terribly, especially his fiancé and his family. He was despondentand depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he rcalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There's nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”
He was stiff from lying in bed day and night, yet tired all the rime. He dozed off and on constantly, sleeping twelve hours a day. He craved activity of almost any kind. He would watch the daylight wax and wane on the ceiling, or roaches creep slowly up the wall. He had a Bible and tried to read, but he often found that he lacked the concentration to do so. He observed himself becoming neurotically possessive about his little space, at times putting his life in jeopardy by flying into a rage if a guard happened to step on his bed. He brooded incessantly, thinking back on all the mistakes he'd made in fife, his regrets, his offenses against God and family.
His captors moved him every few months. For unpredictable stretches of time, he was granted the salvation of a companion — sometimes he shared a cell with as many as four other hostages — and he noticed that his thinking recovered rapidly when this occurred He could read and concentrate longer, avoid hallucinations, and better control his emotions. “Iwould rather have had the worst companion than no compassion at all,” he noted.
In September, 1986, after several months of sharing a cell with another hostage, Andersonwas, for no reason, returned to solitary confinement, by this time in a six-by-six-foot cell, with no windows, and light from only a fluorescent lamp in an outside corridor. The guards refused 10 say how long he would be there. After a few weeks he felt his mind stepping away again.
“I find myself trembling sometimes for no reason,” he wrote. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to lose my mind, to lose control completely”.
One day, three years into his ordeal he snapped. He walked over to a wall and began beating his forehead against it, dozens of times. His head was smashed and bleeding before the guards were able to stop him.
Some hostages fared worse. Anderson told the story of Frank Reed, a fifty-four-year-old American private-school director who was taken hostage and held in solitary confinement for four months before being put in with Anderson. By then, Reed had become severely withdrawn. He lay motionless for hours facing a wall, semi-catatonic. He could not follow the guards’ simplest instructions. This invited abuse from them, in much the same way that once isolated rhesus monkeys seemed to invite abuse from the colony. Released after three and a half years, Reed ultimately required admission to a psychiatric hospital.
“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam — more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot sell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment”. And this comes from a man who was beaten rregularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery;and tortured to the point of havingan arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment inVietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.
And what happened to them was physical. EEG studies going back to the nineteen sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners alter a week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEC-like tests. The recordings revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.
ПРИЛОЖЕНИЕ 2.
СПИСОК ПРИМЕРОВ, ИСПОЛЬЗОВАННЫХ В РАБОТЕ, И ИХ ПЕРЕВОД.
1. It looks paradoxical that certain banking institutions receiving Federal aid look with a fishy eye at the new Home Owners Loan Corporation. (NYT*) – Парадоксальным кажется то, что некоторые банковские учреждения, получая федеральные субсидии, без энтузиазма относится к новой корпорации кредитования домовладельцев.
2. A bill creating a 'rainy day fund' to cover budget deficits in Nevada's K-12 school system was debated Monday by Senate Finance Committee members. (USAT**) – В понедельник члены финансового комитета Сената обсуждали законопроект о создании резервного фонда для покрытия бюджетного дефицита в системе полного среднего образования в штате Невада.
3. 1 million euro for a bottle of fire water – a Mexican businessman hopes to get that much for an exclusive bottle of tequila. (WSJ***) – Миллион евро за огненную воду – именно столько намерен получить предприимчивый мексиканский бизнесмен за бутылку с текилой.
4. It he is caught, there will be plenty of charges for him to answer and he will certainly get into hot water. (NYT) – Если его арестуют, ему предъявят много обвинений, и тогда-то он действительно будет в беде.
5. But when he stepped out of the dugout to speak to reporters, he was all smiles (NYT) – Нокогдаонвышелкрепортёрамсоскамейкизапасных, онвесьсиял.
6. Since the very beginning it was clear that a boy had a head for engineering. (WSJ) – С самого начала было очевидно, что мальчик хорошо разбирается в технике.
7. It was a brother-in-law of Nolan-Terence Quinn, peace to his ashes – who last represented the Democracy of Albany in Congress. (NYT) – Последним представителем демократической партии города Олбани в Конгрессе был зять Нолан-Теренс Куин, мир праху его.
8. You can take the horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. You can take us to water, too, but you can’t make us pay. (NYT) – Можно пригнать коня на водопой, но пить его не заставишь. Можно и нас на водопой пригнать, но платить вы нас не заставите.
9. At this point it's trying to beat a dead horse, the situation of trying to get into the playoffs takes the best effort Michael can give at this time, and it doesn't look like it's in his power. (USAT) – В данной ситуации это всё равно, что стегать дохлую лошадь: пытаясь попасть в плейоф, Майкл делает всё, на что он сейчас способен, но, похоже, это не помогает.
10. I am aware of the fact that I takeabearbythetooth right now, but I can't help myself. (WSJ) – Я понимаю, что подвергаю себя опасности сейчас, но не могу ничего с собой поделать.
11. He (Mr. Wilson) is their King Charles's head. They can’t keep him out of whatever subject they discuss. (NYT) – Он (г-н Уилсон) стал их навязчивой идеей. О чём бы они ни говорили, они неизменно возвращаются к нему.
12. Who’ll bell the cat? Creation of International Force to preserve the peace is not easy. (NYT) – Кто же возьмёт на себя инициативу в этом опасном деле? Создать международные силы по сохранению мира – задача не из лёгких.
13. IsleptlikealoganddreamtaboutEuropewinning. – Я спала как убитая и во сне видела, как выигрываю чемпионат Европы.
15. Mr. Sanger responded feelingly, when the gift was presented, declaring that he would "marktheday with a white stone", and that the occasion was the brightest spot in his business career.(NYT) – Растроганный г-н Сэнджер, получив подарок, сказал, что он «запомнит этот знаменательный день» и что это событие было самым ярким моментом в его карьере.
16. At a time when the ''financial supermarket'' model has come under attack because of the problems at Citigroup and Bank of America, you and your team managed to keep your head above water and prove that the model is actually working. (NYT) – В то время, как модель так называемого «финансового супермаркета» подверглась острой критике из-за проблем, возникших в корпорации "Ситигруп" и в компании "Бэнк ов Америка", Вам и Вашей команде удалось удержаться на плаву и доказать, что эта модель действительно работает.
17. At the conference in Brighton Mr. Campbell has painted the situation in bright colors. (WSJ) – На конференции в Брайтоне г-н Кэмпбел очень ярко описал ситуацию.
18. The interview was conducted in a very plain way and the newly proclaimed champion of the world was as open as the day. (NYT) – Атмосфера на интервью была очень сердечной, и новый чемпион мира был очень откровенен.
19. In the AFP he has a blank look. (NYT) – На встрече представителей Ассоциации финансовых профессионалов он выглядел так, словно ничего не понимал.
20. When you are somebody scared to death of your own life, how can you teach kids to be powerful? (NYT) – Если вы сами до смерти боитесь собственной жизни, как вы можете научить детей быть сильными и влиятельными?
21. The Republican papers are seeking with something akin to the desperation with which drowning men catch at a straw to renegotiate the conservative business vote on the ground that the Democratic Party has not in the past been sound on the currency question. (NYT) – Республиканские газеты ищут что-нибудь похожее, хватаясь за любую соломинку, пытаясь пересмотреть решение деловых кругов консерваторов на том основании, что в прошлом консервативная партия в вопросе валюты не была достаточно компетентна.