Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary C. Jones

A rabbit should be the soft-focus symbol of childhood comfort. Mary C. Jones makes it a datapoint that refuses to behave. In that one clinical pivot - “even more marked fear responses” - she punctures the common-sense assumption that fear maps neatly onto objective danger. The rabbit is safer than the rat by any everyday metric, yet Peter’s body tells a different story. Jones is showing you that phobias aren’t rational arguments; they’re learned patterns with their own private logic.

The line also signals a methodological confidence that was radical in its era: fear can be elicited, compared, and measured across “test situations.” Jones is writing from the early behaviorist moment, when psychologists tried to drag messy inner life into observable form. “Revealed fears” is doing quiet ideological work. It frames fear as something latent, waiting for the right experimental setup to disclose it, not a story Peter invents or a moral weakness he should outgrow.

Subtextually, the rabbit-versus-rat comparison matters because it destabilizes any simple narrative about “trauma equals stimulus.” If the rabbit produces a stronger response, then the trigger is less about the creature and more about the association: earlier pairings, generalization, the way a child’s mind spreads alarm from one furry shape to another. Jones is building the case for intervention by implication. If fear can be produced and graded, it can be reduced and reshaped - a foundational premise for her later work in deconditioning and what we’d now call exposure-based therapy.