Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary C. Jones

The chill in Mary C. Jones's sentence is how calmly it turns panic into a progress report. "Almost complete terror" sits beside "more or less regular steps" with the composure of someone inventorying a lab result, not describing a mind in crisis. That tonal restraint is the point: Jones is writing from inside early behaviorism, where fear is not a mystery of the soul but a phenomenon that can be tracked, graphed, and, crucially, altered.

The phrase "reading over the notes for each session" foregrounds procedure. Improvement is not a sudden breakthrough or a narrative arc; it's a recordable drift, validated by documentation. Even the modest hedge "more or less" is revealing. It signals scientific caution while still claiming a reliable pattern: fear recedes in increments. The rabbit isn't just an animal here; it's a standardized stimulus, a stand-in for the broader claim that emotions can be conditioned and unconditioned.

Subtextually, the line sells a new kind of authority. If terror can be reduced to "steps" and "sessions", then experts can promise relief without appealing to confession, insight, or moral willpower. "Completely positive response with no signs of disturbance" reads like a victory lap, but it also exposes the era's faith in observable behavior as the final court of truth. Disturbance is defined by what can be seen; inner experience is, at best, implied.

Context matters: Jones is often linked to early demonstrations of counterconditioning, pushing back against fear conditioning stories like Watson's. The intent is not just to describe change, but to prove that change can be engineered.