Eavesdropping Urns

Bypassing the sensational, Harvard's Psychological Clinic houses neither white rats nor pink elephants. Only a few experimental rooms and unique decorations distinguish it from the average Cambridge frame house. Sprawling across the corner of Mt. Auburn and Plympton Streets, the laboratory now includes three antique houses and a garden fenced off from the road.

The Clinic moved to its present quarters, formerly a two-monthly dwelling, in 1929. Its first symptoms of psychology appeared a few years later; many walls were wired for sound and a portable table lamp equipped with a microphone filled in the gaps. All microphones fed into a huge recording machine in the basement, while a drum on the library wall conceals a separate sound system. The "bamboo room," now used for seminars, was then an observation chamber for Cambridge children at play. Behind a one way mirror, a psychologist could record his impressions of them.

Although the Second World war made "walls with ears" a national cliche, it also cut the supply of recording disks, and the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere left the Clinic for good. The observation roof was wall-papered and the audio-lamp disappeared. Only the dining-room recorder, now covered with dust remains.

In 1941 the University gave the Clinic a second boarding house to equip for research. Connected by a corridor, these two houses look like one unit, hap-hazardly thrown together. While Clinic officials knew that their laboratory was old, they never believed it was feeble. But in 1948, a University inspector found that the wooden pillars supporting the house were rotting away.

Classes and meeting moved to Sever, and Psychology waited for the crash. But after prolonged waiting, the building failed to oblige, and the University replaced termited wood with steel girders. That same year, in the name of research the University gave the Clinic its last two additions: the house on Mt. Auburn St. and the Psycho-drama theater. The latter is a room with a one-way mirror at one end and a stage at the other, where people can bring their problems and act them out. Theory has it that this form of therapy can soothe the subconscious better than interviewing techniques.

But the Clinic's most striking feature is its decoration. In this cold setting of stucco walls is a collection of oriental art more fitting for a museum than a scientific laboratory. The spoils of wanderlust have filled almost every room with exotic gifts. An undergraduate who stopped at the wreck of the old Parker House after its demolition in 1926, brought in he first decoration, a silver an gold cornice above the library's front window. One student donated two Alaskan gods sculptured in a style combining prehistoric and ultra-modern art. They stare at each other across the library and supposedly symbolize diseased minds. On another wall hangs a Chinese painting of a banquet, given the Clinic as a Christmas present. And throughout the house, Oriental art covers the walls, providing an exotic background for the laboratory's mental therapy.