Looks like Dr. Jamf’s been by to see your little thing today, hasn’t he?

—Neil Nosepicker’s Book of 50,000 Insults,
§6.72, “Awful Offspring,”
The Nayland Smith Press,
Cambridge (Mass.), 1933

PUDDING: But isn’t this—

POINTSMAN: Sir?

PUDDING: Isn’t it all rather shabby, Pointsman? Meddling with another man’s mind this way?

POINTSMAN: Brigadier, we’re only following in a long line of experiment and questioning. Harvard University, the U.S. Army? Hardly shabby institutions.

PUDDING: We can’t, Pointsman, it’s beastly.

POINTSMAN: But the Americans have already been at him! don’t you see? It’s not as if we’re corrupting a virgin or something—

PUDDING: Do we have to do it because the Americans do it? Must we allow them to corrupt us?

Back around 1920, Dr. Laszlo Jamf opined that if Watson and Rayner could successfully condition their “Infant Albert” into a reflex horror of everything furry, even of his own Mother in a fur boa, then Jamf could certainly do the same thing for his Infant Tyrone, and the baby’s sexual reflex. Jamf was at Harvard that year, visiting from Darmstadt. It was in the early part of his career, before he phased into organic chemistry (to be as fateful a change of field as Kekulé’s own famous switch into chemistry from architecture, a century before). For the experiment he had a slender grant from the National Research Council (under a continuing NRC program of psychological study which had begun during the World War, when methods were needed for selecting officers and classifying draftees). Shoestring funding may have been why Jamf, for his target reflex, chose an infant hardon. Measuring secretions, as Pavlov did, would have meant surgery. Measuring “fear,” the reflex Watson chose, would have brought in too much subjectivity (what’s fear? How much is “a lot”? Who decides, when it’s on-the-spot-in-the-field, and there isn’t time to go through the long slow process of referring it up to the Fear Board?). Instrumentation just wasn’t available in those days. The best he might’ve done was the Larson-Keeler three-variable “lie detector,” but at the time it was still only experimental.

But a hardon, that’s either there, or it isn’t. Binary, elegant. The job of observing it can even be done by a student.

Unconditioned stimulus = stroking penis with antiseptic cotton swab.

Unconditioned response = hardon.

Conditioned stimulus = x.

Conditioned response = hardon whenever x is present, stroking is no longer necessary, all you need is that x.

Uh, x? well, what’s x? Why, it’s the famous “Mystery Stimulus” that’s fascinated generations of behavioral-psychology students, is what it is. The average campus humor magazine carries 1.05 column inches per year on the subject, which ironically is the exact mean length Jamf reported for Infant T.’s erection.