Deprivation of Physical Affection as a Main Cause of Depression, Aggression and Drug Abuse. A good website. I read some things like this when I was into Wilhelm Reich. I like his stuff but I still don’t know what to make of his orgone theory.
This site also has the famous Time-Life documentary Rock a Bye Baby (1970):
The Time Life documentary “Rock A Bye Baby” describes the influence of different practices in infant treatment and child rearing on emotional development, both in humans and in monkeys.
In the beginning, it is noted that the contact of the child to the mother represents the first socio-emotional interaction the child experiences and lays the fundamentals for its later behaviors. We learn that social animals isolated from their mothers and receiving no nurturing physical affection develop severe depression and can die from such deprivation. In addition, maternal-infant isolation that leads to sensory deprivation can cause developmental brain damage. These facts show that mother love has a neurobiological basis that is essential for life.
Next we are introduced to Harry Harlow’s experiments with surrogate mothers which have shown that monkeys raised alone in an environment without mother and peers prefer to be with a cloth-covered mother surrogate without a milk bottle rather than with a wire-cage surrogate mother that provides a milk bottle, even when hungry.
They even cling to their cloth-covered wooden dolls when they are frightened and they experience the same emotional stress other social animals experience when isolated from their surrogate mothers. These experiments show that the need for a loving relationship (percepted, in this case, by the “fur”) is stronger than the mere need for food even when hungry. Thus, love-hunger is stronger than food-hunger.