re context for Pointsman plus V as "well of despair"

[pynchonoid]

[...] Slater's most ethically troubling chapter,
however, is about research not on humans but on
animals. Slater describes how Harry Harlow deprived
infant monkeys of their mothers to study the effects
of maternal deprivation. Then, because he wanted to
know what the effect of an ''evil mother'' might be,
he designed a mechanical surrogate mother that he
called the Iron Maiden. When the infant monkeys tried
to cling to it, this mechanical monster would, on
command, shoot out sharp spikes or blast the babies
with cold air that threw them back against the bars of
their cages. In his later years Harlow -- who at this
time was, in the words of one of his research
assistants, ''a terrible drunk'' and ''always, always
intoxicated'' -- devised new ways of tormenting
monkeys. Since the maternally deprived female infants
grew up into neurotic adults who would not allow a
male to mate with them, he constructed a ''rape rack''
-- his term -- so that he could tie them down while
males mated with them. Then, Slater tells us, he
constructed an isolation chamber ''in which an animal
was hung upside down for up to two years, unable to
move or see the world, fed through a grid at the
bottom of the V-shaped device.'' This he called ''the
well of despair.'' Roger Fouts, who has done research
with chimpanzees, feels strongly, Slater reports, that
what Harlow learned from these experiments was ''not
only obvious but derivative.'' [...]

...from:
Opening Skinner's Box': Adventures of the White Coat
People
By PETER SINGER
Published: March 28, 2004
<http://nytimes.com/2004/03/28/books/review/28SINGERT.html?pagewanted=1>

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