"Isn't it nice!" someone once said of the Psychological Clinic, "Wisteria outside, hysteria inside." For the clinic on Plympton Street hides its work in a rambling vine-draped building which could easily be mistaken for a farmhouse. The interior is equally folksy: it feels more like the home of a large (and rather eccentric) family than the combined research center, clinic, and classroom building which it is.

To be sure there are psychoanalyst's couches in the offices, and one room has a one-way observation screen built on the wall, but other psychological gear is conspicuously lacking. "Mein Kampf" and a life of Daunier flank the psychology texts in the bookcase; there are Japanese prints and Winslow Homer watercolors on the walls as well as pictures of Freud. The Clinic even has a kitchen, and serves its own 40-cent lunch for the staff.

The Clinic was founded in 1926 by Dr. Morten Prince, a noted Harvard psychologist, amid rumors that it had been set up to analyze the Faculty. At that time the philosophy department was in charge of the strange new science: the thought of being held responsible for the antics of the maniacs they imagined were under care at the Clinic trouble the sleep of the philosophers for many years.

The psychologists did not attempt to cure the Faculty, however, and none of the Clinic's patients hit the headlines with axe murders. In fact, the new project's combination of therapy, teaching, and research turned out to be a very good one. The students made willing and interested guinea pigs, and the patients--sent to the Clinic by other agencies; the Clinic takes none directly--got the benefit of the staff's newest researches. The Clinic has built up a considerable reputation for its work, which ranged from research in hypnotism to experiments in the psychology of jokes. Since the war, research has lagged a bit because the staff's energies were diverted to the problems of teaching swarms of Social Relations majors. Next year, however, an expanded research program is planned, and the Clinic is expanding to meet it. The house next door will be annexed, and adjoining it, a small theater will be built for use in a radical new kind of group therapy, the psychodrama, where patients act out their problems in spontaneous playlets.

Quite early in its history, the Clinic began the practice of inviting visiting dignitaries and distinguished men from the University to come for the 40-cent lunch and talk with the staff. Julian Huxley, H. L. Mencken, and the psychologist Carl Jung are among the diverse visitors the Clinic has had. The late Robert Benchley also came. He arrived in the middle of the joke experiment. Benchley showed great interest in all the apparatus used to measure a person's internal and external responses to the jokes, and in a few weeks the Clinic staff was reading an elaborate parody of their experiment, which Mr. Benchley had written up for "Liberty."

Besides its official visitors, the Clinic also has unofficial ones. One was a little old lady who came in and demanded a Certificate of Good Conduct. She explained that the Devil kept accusing her of being sinful, that she wasn't, and that she wanted something she could show him to prove it. The Clinic obligingly manufactured a certificate. It evidently satisfied the Devil, because the little old lady hasn't been back since.

Visitors are not the Clinic's only problem. It also has to deal with all the crackpot mail that comes into the University. A couple of years ago an excited gentleman wrote in to report the discovery of 'the greatest psychological phenomena extant." He had discovered, he said, that he was being pursued by a group of tormentors with the "astounding, unheard of, utterly unbelievable occult powers" of projecting their voices like radio transmitters. It was quite a discovery, but the Clinic reaped the reward. That gentleman's case history is now required reading in a large psychology course.