Farnsworth Eulogizes Mental Health Movement, But Suggests Nothing New

It is hardly fair to criticize a book for not achieving something its author never intended, but it is still impossible to avoid criticizing a book for being nothing at all. Dr. Farnsworth's book is as close to nothing as any book can be.

The title notwithstanding, this is not a book about the mental health of the college community. Dr. Farnsworth has nothing to say about the effect of academic values on emotional stability, the merits of intellectualizing all experience, the relationship between intellectual and emotional maturity, the optimum conditions for efficient learning, or the motives of those who turn to the intellectual life.

He is not concerned with the sociological role of the college and the concomitant strains which we should anticipate upon students who use institutions of higher learning for social mobility or the defense of an already established social position. Indeed, he does not even consider the fact that all intellectual activity is a reaction to some stimulus, usually some sort of infantile frustration or deprivation. Nor does he consider the possibility that mental health may exist only in a human being who resembles a vegetable.

The Mental Health Men

On the contrary, his book is a eulogy for the mental health movement, an exhortation to colleges to hire more psychiatrists and to consider their students as psychiatric cases as well as receptacles for ideas and information. But even those who, like this writer, sympathize with his aim, will not find his book very helpful in furthering his cause.

Dr. Farnsworth might have done well to consider a previous propagandist for mental health, Sigmund Freud, who was seeking a half century ago to bring psychoanalysis out of the wilderness. His success was based upon three things: his ability to produce concrete results by curing patients, his ability to produce intellectual insights into hitherto baffling problems, and his clear, concrete and precise exposition. Dr. Farnsworth's volume has none of these merits.

Concrete Evidence

Certainly he offers no evidence that organized mental health programs reduce the number of emotional disturbances, cut the sale of benzedrine and Miltown, bring achievement test scores closer to aptitude scores, improve collegewide grades, or raise the intellectual tone of academic institutions. The friends of psychiatry can well argue that such programs have never had enough support to achieve such comprehensive results. They justify their program by referring to the help they have given individual patients. But faith healers, religious missionaries, and Norman Vincent Peale, Inc. have had as many individual cures as the psychiatrists, a fact which should give us some pause before we swallow the life adjustor's bait.

No New Insights

But Dr. Farnsworth does not demonstrate that the psychiatric view offers us any new insights. He tells us to consider "the whole man", but this exhortation is neither helpful nor illuminating He notes that leaving home is often a traumatic experience, that exam period is a time of emotional stress, and that neurotic students often do badly since they cannot work effectively. Such insights are neither novel nor devastating.

Perhaps the most serious deficiency of this book is, however, its failure to conform to supposedly "aesthetic" criteria. This book is badly written, badly constructed, and shows no evidence of having been designed to communicate anything of significance to the reader. It is perfectly possible that the absence of content is due to Dr. Farnsworth's intention of acting as a popularizer. But a man who brings science to the people must tell these people something that they do not know, or he will be useless.

Verbal Confusions

There are two possible explanations for the unbelievably vapid prose. Either Dr. Farnsworth is incapable of rendering his experience into prose, in which case he should not have tried, or else he has substituted words for experience, in which case he should reexamine his words.

We may, for example, assume that he had something specific in mind when he penned the generalization that "If efforts of older persons can be devoted to helping the young person to gain a feeling of continuity and meaning, his personality structure may be strengthened thereby". But whether or not this meant anything to Dr. Farnsworth, the words as they now stand mean nothing.

We can perhaps ignore the grammatical ambiguity of whose personality structure will be strengthened, since a strong personality structure is only a rough technical equivalent for the good, the true, and the beautiful, and is therefore desirable in everybody.

Words Without Meanings

But what is meant by "continuity and meaning"? Does Dr. Farnsworth wish to give us a greater sense of the past, to convince the young that "time present embodies time past"? If so, how does he correlate this ambition with the fact that most psychotherapy involves freeing people from the past, teaching them to solve new problems with new tools instead of the old inappropriate tools they inherited from childhood. Just what kind of continuity does he want?

Presumably, he wants the kind of continuity which produces meaning. Now it is true that scientists have discarded the possibility that time is discontinuous, since they feel that it would make experience meaningless. But how, I wonder, does Dr. Farnsworth expect the older generation to remedy this? Psychiatric evidence confirms the long recognized truth that those who find life meaningless are those who cannot accept the ideals of society, that is to say, the ideals of the older generation.

Dr. Farnsworth's complicated statement must then mean that the young would be better off if they had faith in their elders, if they could find rules for today in the experience of yesterday. I refer the reader to the lives of the Hebrew prophets for further variations on the same theme.

Without questioning the validity of this description of contemporary problems, it seems necessary to say that Dr. Farnsworth's prescription is not much of a remedy. Dr. Farnsworth has merely clothed an old problem in a new vocabulary, which is no help at all.

Lack of Structure

If the language is bad, the structure is worse. The book not only clarifies nothing, but it goes nowhere. You are led towards something only to have it elude your grasp.

To develop and maintain an environment on a college campus that will encourage independence rather than dependence, curiosity rather than passive acceptance, high standards of thought and conduct instead of "getting by" and keeping out of trouble--one which takes account of whatever is known about the relationship between personality development and optimun intellectual functioning--is . . .

Is what? The reader, poised on the edge of utopia, expects the utmost. But Dr. Farnsworth's utmost is a bit anti-climactic. Such a development is only "a complex function", the implementation of which "requires much attention from all members of the college community."

Without taking exception to the nobili- ty of Dr. Farnsworth's ideal, we may wonder whether his observation is not self-evident We may even deplore his failure to render the one service to his ideal which might be expected from a college psychiatrist with two decades of diverse experience: a chapter of "what is definitely known about the relationship between personality development and optimum intellectual functioning." Unfortunately, this book bolsters the assumption that nothing is definitely known except that in some indefinite way the two are connected.

Life Adjustment

It is perhaps unfair to single out Dr. Farnsworth from the countless well-intentioned life-adjustors who daily offer the public new verbal panaceas and programs with no possible reference to human activity. Yet the failure of these men to realize the importance of language and form in the presentation of their work is perhaps the most important single blindness now retarding our effort to develop a new vision of human nature which will conform to our scientific predelictions and replace the mystical resignation of medieval religion.

This failure to consider aesthetic criteria is a romantic arrogance. Social scientists seem to believe that "truth" exists independently of their efforts to embody this truth in verbal or symbolic formulations. They further believe that they have direct access to this truth, and they therefore assume that if they make a statement which is not false, they are necessarily increasing human knowledge, no matter how inane, inarticulate, or inept their formulation may be.

The Historical Precedents

Nobody can seriously maintain such a proposition who has bothered to examine the observations of previous generations. Informal observation has added very little to our knowledge of human nature since the Christian revelation replaced Hellenism. A complete formulation must either be the by product of individual genius (which may be called Godly for lack of a better word) or else must come as a culmination to a long formal development which allows individuals to use the insights and visions of the past, as did the Greek dramatists.

Those of us who have faith in social science believe that this "modern" approach may eventually yield a new vision because it uses new technical and philosophical devices for organizing and formulating our insights into human nature. We cannot plausibly contend that a mere increase in the number of observers who can find publishers will expand this vision, unless social science can offer us a form which will give these multiple minor insights a cumulative effect. Without such a form, each insight will be returned to the society from which it sprang, without affecting that society or making possible a more significant future insight. Eventually we may succeed in making the complexity of written material identical with the complexity of experience, in which case we may as well burn all our libraries and start over again, since ideas will have ceased to simplify experience.

The Need for Content

This does not, of course, mean that everybody who clothes his findings in the bad-awful jargon-gibberish of the social scientists is contributing to the sum total of huamn knowledge by giving his insights form. He must also have something to say which is not intuitively obvious to his readers. The only possible excuse for this specialized vocabulary is that it embodies concepts which cannot be given the same precision in everyday vocabulary.

Unfortunately, Dr. Farnsworth is not doing this. His vapid sentences are not filled with specialized terminology but with the overworked nothing-words of the contemporary Mr. Fixit. They do not embody insights which can only be expressed in technical terminology, but rather obscure insights which any intelligent educator already has.

If Dr. Farnsworth's book is anything, it is a plea for intelligence. But as a plea for intelligence it fails to be an example of the utility of such intelligence. It gives neither evidence nor insight nor articulation to the psychiatric outlook, but instead requires the reader to explode a series of verbal bubbles