A seven-year-old boy, Robert, whose mother was addicted to cocaine, has been in six foster homes and hospitalized several times for out of control behavior. At school, he regularly erupts in violent rages, which scare his teachers and peers. The school demands something be done. Various therapies and medications are tried. When all other interventions fail, Robert is sent to live with Mama P., a large powerful woman. When Robert goes into one of his rages, Mama P. swallows him up in her arms, rocks him in a rocking chair, and rubs his back until he falls asleep. Under her care, Robert thrives and eventually his rages stop completely. Robert is able to go back to school and to learn, no longer a threat to others.

A woman who suffers from Alzheimers is visited weekly by a special friend. At first the friend is able to communicate with simple words and gestures, but as the woman’s disease progresses, she seems increasingly locked away in a world of her own and attempts to communicate with her only seem to agitate her. The friend searches for ways to connect. She begins to bring fabric swatches of different textures with her when she visits. She hands them to the woman one at a time and talks about what they might have been used for—pieces of flannel for baby blankets, satin for wedding gowns, wool tweed for a husband’s jacket. She guides the woman’s hands to the fabric, gently strokes the fabric across the woman’s cheek. Emotions play across the woman’s face—joy, sadness, affection—and for the first time in a long while the woman smiles at her special friend. Across what seemed an impenetrable divide, a connection has been made.

A woman is dying from ovarian cancer. Alone in the world, she has no visitors except for the student hospital chaplain. The woman is on heavy pain medication but still her heart races, her breathing is rapid and shallow. Gripped with uncontrollable anxiety, she trembles with fear. The student chaplain tries to calm her, talking to her, praying with her. Nothing seems to help. Finally, in desperation, the student chaplain, against all the rules, lies down on the bed next to the woman and cradles her in her arms, caresses the woman’s arm with long, soothing strokes. At long last, the woman’s heart rate returns to normal and she breathes an extended sigh of relief.

Touch. It is the most primitive of the senses—and in some ways the most powerful. Nothing communicates like touch—to express joy and affection; to heal and soothe, to ease one’s sorrow or pain.

Our experience with touch begins even before we are born. The neural pathways that respond to touch are the first to develop in the human fetus. During the months when we are in the womb, our skin is constantly stimulated by the rhythmic movements of our mother transmitted through the amniotic fluid. At birth, uterine contractions intensify the tactile experience, providing an essential massage which stimulates the baby’s internal organs so that they will function autonomously after birth.

As infants, touch is necessary for our very survival. In the thirteenth century, the German emperor Frederick II conducted an experiment to discover what language children would speak if they were raised without hearing anyone talk. He took newborns away from their parents and gave them to nurses who were forbidden to talk to them or touch them. The babies all died long before they reached the age of speech. An historian of the time wrote of these babies, "They could not live without petting.” It was a barbaric experiment, but it wasn’t until after World War II, that doctors began to understand the necessity of touch. In the late 1940s, Dr. Rene Spitz struggled to find a solution to the unexplainable deaths of infants in his care. At that time, mortality was almost 100 percent for infants raised in orphanages. The babies were diagnosed as dying from "marasmus", which means "withering away and dying of no apparent cause." Spitz discovered that not medicine, nor good nutrition, nor cleanliness had any impact on the tragic outcome. Only what Harry Harlow was to later call "contact comfort" proved to be the "cure" for the excruciating deaths of these children.

Harry Harlow should properly be called the "father” of touch research. Prior to his work, the bonds that develop between mother and child were assumed to be a result of the mother providing food to the infant, but Harlow showed this was not the case. Harlow isolated newborn monkeys from their mothers and deprived them of maternal and social touch, of all "contact comfort"; but, in every other way the monkeys were very well cared for. The touch deprived monkeys were each put in a large cage with two crude dummy monkeys constructed of chicken-wire. One dummy was just bare wire with a full baby bottle attached. The other dummy had no bottle but was wrapped in terry cloth. Harlow found that the infant monkeys quickly attached themselves to the cloth wrapped dummy and would continue to cling to it even as they grew increasingly hungry and distraught. It became apparent that the young monkeys would starve before abandoning the terry cloth surrogate mother. Harlow’s studies clearly demonstrated that there is a hunger more powerful than the craving for food. It was science’s first view of the pervasiveness and intensity of “touch hunger.”

On the day of our birth, we entered the world with an intense need to touch and be touched. Moments after we’re born, before we can even see, we instinctively begin touching. Touch receptors in the lips make nursing possible; clutch mechanisms in the hands begin to reach out for warmth. As we grow, touch also teaches us the difference between I and other, that there can be someone outside of ourselves—our mothers, fathers, caretakers. Normally mothers and infants do a tremendous amount of touching. And forever after, loving touch will evoke this primary bond, remind us unconsciously of the time when our mothers held us and we felt safe, enthralled and perfectly loveable. But, if something goes awry in this primary bond and if children don’t receive sufficient hugs and caresses, children literally stop growing, even if well-fed. Lack of adequate touch also causes cognitive deficits and emotional impairment. Without touch the brain simply does not develop as it should.

But it is not only children who need touch. A growing number of studies show that affectionate touch is an essential "nutrient" to normal brain functioning throughout the life span—that if our skin fails to receive affectionate touch and send those signals to our brain, permanent brain damage results. Sufficient touch has been linked to our physical and emotional well being in a host of ways; it’s lack has been linked to a number of diseases and compromised immune responses. Pleasurable touch is associated with enhanced learning and improved IQ in adolescents; with enhanced memory and improved physical health in the elderly. Nurturing touch has also been found to be helpful in treating depression, dermatitis, diabetes, eating disorders, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, posttraumatic stress disorder, psoriasis, and a variety of other conditions. Patients recover more rapidly from physical injury and burns if touch needs are met. Merely touching someone’s hand or arm lowers their blood pressure. Even in comatose and paralyzed patients, people who presumably cannot “feel” touch, affectionate touch can, nonetheless, improve heart arrhythmias and blood cell counts.

Touch is a biological necessity and yet our need for touch goes beyond the purely biological. No other sense has quite the same ability to communicate care and affection. When we are lonely or hurt or afraid, when words fail us, the touch of another’s hand, another’s embrace, tells us we are not alone. All of our lives we are in need of the kind of loving touch that echoes our mother’s initial embrace. Deprived of such touch we are isolated, bereft, even sick unto death.

Solo: Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

Touch is a biological necessity. In touch lies the origin of being itself. Life could not have evolved at all without touch - that is, without chemicals touching one another and forming bonds. And if touch didn’t feel good, there would be no species, parenthood or survival. If we didn’t like the feel of touching and caressing one another, we wouldn’t mate. A mother wouldn’t touch her baby in the right way unless she felt pleasure doing it. Those animals who did more touching instinctively produced off spring which survived, and their genes were passed on and the tendency to touch grew even stronger. We forget that touch is not only basic to our species, but key to our very existence.

Touch gave birth to life. And touch also gives rise to the sense of self. Touch helps us define our boundaries, to know where we end and other begins. Touch fills our memory with a detailed map as to how we are shaped; touch receptors on the surface of our skin keep us informed about where we are in space. Without touch, when we looked in a mirror, what we saw would be utterly nonsensical to us. Touch, by clarifying and complementing what we see with our eyes, teaches us that we live in a three dimensional world, that life has depth and contour. As the painter Rembrandt described it, touch is “the embodiment of sight.”

Our sense of touch is essential for our survival; key to a sense of self. And we all have touch hunger, a hunger which if not adequately satisfied, has deleterious effects, on our physical, emotional, and spiritual well being. And yet we live in a society in which touch is circumscribed by so many taboos that I am beginning to think that all Americans may be more than a little touch deprived.

Of course, we need to acknowledge that touch can hurt and wound as well as soothe and heal. And we need to respect one another’s boundaries; need also to be able to distinguish between friendly touch and invasive touch. But have we become so afraid of inappropriate or abusive touch, that we have lost something not only necessary to our survival, but something precious and wonderful as well? There is evidence to suggest that the fear of misinterpretation of demonstrations of affection has made so many parents and teachers paranoid about hugging and touching children, that children in the U.S. are increasingly touch deprived.

How much touch does it take to not be touch deprived? It’s not an easy thing to quantify, but consider one study that compares the rates of touch in different cultures. Sets of American, French and Puerto Rican friends were observed in a coffee shop over the course of an hour to determine how frequently physical contact occurs. Puerto Rican friends touch the most—180 times an hour; and French friends touch 110 times in an hour; but U.S. friends tend to touch each other an average of only twice in an hour. Consider also a study in which college students were placed one at a time in a small room, with padded walls and ceilings, and totally dark except for a tiny red light over the door. The subjects knew they would be separately escorted from the room afterwards—they would never meet the other participants in the light. Within thirty minutes, conversation had stopped. Almost 90 percent of the participants touched others. Nearly 50 percent hugged another person. Many kissed. In that darkened room with anonymous strangers, there were many behavior alternatives, yet almost all of the participants shed the usual societal restraints and chose to touch, to be close and affectionate, rather than communicate with words.

Ironically, our strictures about touch may lead to the exact opposite effects we desire. Children who do not receive enough affectionate touch from parents and teachers are more vulnerable to pedophiles and their affectionate initial overtures. Touch deprivation in teenagers may be linked to sexual acting out. As parents and teachers increasingly limit physical closeness with teenagers, because of fears of sexualizing the relationship or of fostering homo-philic feelings, teenagers are more apt to engage in sexual activity in order to satisfy their touch hunger. Many teenage girls will say that it is not sex they want so much, as physical closeness. And teenage boys may have it the hardest in this culture, taught as they are, that the only acceptable touch is either sexual touch or the rough and tumble of sports. Further, cross cultural studies show a correlation between touch deprivation in children and levels of violence in a culture. Cultures that exhibit minimal physical affection toward their young children have significantly higher rates of adult violence, and, conversely, those cultures that show significant amounts of physical affection toward young children have virtually no adult violence. Studies also show that touch deprived teenagers have more violent tendencies, are more likely to use touch in hurtful rather than loving ways. Moreover, studies show that the more people give and receive affectionate touch, the more they are likely to do so; and, that the less people give and receive affectionate touch, the less they touch. Touch is a reinforcing activity, for good or ill. The more that warm expressions of touch are culturally conditioned out of us, the less frequent they will become.

Teenagers may be one of the most touch deprived groups in our society, surpassed only perhaps by the elderly, many of whom live alone. More than one elderly widow or widower over the years has told me that the hug they receive on Sunday going through the line, is the only touch they receive all week long. In nursing care facilities, touch is dispensed all to often only in perfunctory ways as an adjunct to other care. Happily, recent studies on touch are beginning to reverse these tendencies. But we still have a long way to go in recognizing that our need for touch never ceases. On our death bed, touch is the last of the senses to leave us.

Touch is a biological necessity; an emotional and physical need that endures from cradle to grave. And, I would argue, it is a spiritual necessity as well. Stop and think. There are only three times in life when our bodies are potentially completely accessible to another’s touch—when we are an infant cradled in our mother’s arms; when we give ourselves over to a lover’s embrace; and, when after death, our body is entrusted to those who will perform the last ministrations. Birth, sex, death—in each of those liminal, transcendent moments, touch is key.

Touch is the foundation upon which life evolved and without touch life could not continue. Thus, touch bespeaks the interdependence of all life. As Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist, says, “When you touch one, you touch many, and when you touch many, you touch one.”

Could we redeem touch? Perhaps we might if we could recapture the sacredness of touch—if we could recognize that we touch God, the source of all Being, in one another.

In that spirit, I invite you to into a final meditation.* As you are comfortable doing so, I invite you to move so that you are sitting next to one another. If you are not comfortable doing that, that’s okay, too. Now, if everyone would, hold out both your hands, palm up in a gesture of openness, of receptivity. Keeping your left hand open, with your right hand, place your first and second finger on the wrist of the neighbor on your right, over here on the side a little and under the thumb. If you are sitting on an aisle, hold your hand open and feel the touch of the air on your skin. If you are sitting by yourself, feel your own pulse.

I invite you to close your eyes. Breathe in and out slowly in meditative fashion. Feel the pulse of life which flows in and through you, in and through your neighbor, in and through everything that is. Feel the pulse of being which unites us all. Feel how touch is affirming, how touch embodies acceptance, how touch brings us into contact with the life force itself. Cherish this touch for you touch not only your own, but all other life as well. Sit for a moment in this silence, in this grace. And know that your touch has the power to give and bless life. (Amen.)

And, now let us join in singing our closing hymn, #298, Wake Now My Senses.

Sources

Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Random House, 1990.

Phyllis R. Davis, The Power of Touch: The Basis for Survival, Health, Intimacy, and Emotional Well Being. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 1999.

Robert Hatfield, Touch and Human Sexuality, http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/PS2010/html/Touch%20and%20Human%20Sexuality.htm

Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of Skin. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.

Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Web site of the Touch Research Institute: http://www6.miami.edu/touch-research/about.htm

Web site of Touch is Great Campaign: http://www.touchisgreat.com/index.html

*Meditation inspired by “Holy Vision”, a sermon preached by Ron Phares, August 16, 2009, at
First UU Church of Austin