"Peter was 2 years and 10 months old when we began to study him. He was afraid of a white rat, and this fear extended to a rabbit, a fur coat, a feather, cotton wool, etc., but not to wooden blocks and similar toys"
About this Quote
A toddler’s fear, cataloged like lab inventory, becomes a quiet indictment of how easily humans can be taught what to dread. Mary C. Jones writes with the cool confidence of early behaviorism: start with a single stimulus (a white rat), watch fear “extend” across a family of soft, pale, tactile things, then mark what it does not touch (wooden blocks). The sentence isn’t trying to be lyrical; its power comes from its clinical compression. “We began to study him” frames Peter not as a child in distress but as a research site, a living diagram.
The intent is methodological: to map generalization, the way an emotion migrates from one object to another by resemblance. But the subtext is ethical and cultural. This is the early 20th century’s faith in measurable behavior speaking through a child’s body. Fear is treated as a transferable property, almost a contagion, moving across fur and feathers and cotton wool because texture and color rhyme. The list reads like a department store of softness, hinting at how everyday materials can be recruited into a psychology experiment and, by extension, how ordinary life becomes training ground for anxieties.
What lands hardest is the final clause: “but not to wooden blocks and similar toys.” It draws a bright line between the natural and the manufactured, the comforting and the inert, suggesting fear isn’t random but patterned by sensory cues. Jones is sketching the architecture of phobias while reminding us, unintentionally, how fragile the boundary is between observation and intervention when the subject is two years old.
The intent is methodological: to map generalization, the way an emotion migrates from one object to another by resemblance. But the subtext is ethical and cultural. This is the early 20th century’s faith in measurable behavior speaking through a child’s body. Fear is treated as a transferable property, almost a contagion, moving across fur and feathers and cotton wool because texture and color rhyme. The list reads like a department store of softness, hinting at how everyday materials can be recruited into a psychology experiment and, by extension, how ordinary life becomes training ground for anxieties.
What lands hardest is the final clause: “but not to wooden blocks and similar toys.” It draws a bright line between the natural and the manufactured, the comforting and the inert, suggesting fear isn’t random but patterned by sensory cues. Jones is sketching the architecture of phobias while reminding us, unintentionally, how fragile the boundary is between observation and intervention when the subject is two years old.
Quote Details
| Topic | Fear |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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