CRITICISM

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

This is a delayed response to Mr. Jencks' scathing review (published in your issue of Dec. 14) of Dr. Farnsworth's recent book entitled "Mental Health in College and University." Although criticism generally should be absolutely free, with no holds barred, a publicly stated adverse criticism of the director of psychiatry in one's own college raises special problems. There are a good many Harvard students who, regularly or occasionally, apply to our psychiatric staff for guidance and treatment. Such treatment requires for its effectiveness complete confidence on the part of the student in his psychiatrist. Criticism in this area is a matter to be handled with great delicacy; here assertion becomes action--action which might destroy the necessary confidence. I have found Dr. Farnsworth's book most sensible and even wise. But although, as a teacher, I have had some experience with emotional troubles in students, still I speak only as a layman. I will therefore urge your readers to withhold any judgement on this book until they read it for themselves, and to ignore Mr. Jencks' highly irresponsible statements.

Indeed they are irresponsible. I am shocked at the outrageous smugness of your reviewer. I am willing, for the sake of argument, to grant that Dr. Farnsworth knows nothing of the field in which he has been trained and in which he has had considerable practice; but, not for any argument's sake, am I willing to grant that Mr. Jencks knows everything. His article is neither review nor criticism but self-exhibition,--a long-winded parade of half-baked psychiatry and sociology. He piles up platitude upon platitude like Pelion upon Ossa--for instance, "all intellectual activity is a reaction to some stimulus" (high school learning); there are the three things upon which--as he tells us--Freud's success is based (why three rather than thirty?) and so on. Where are the CRIMSON'S standards when it can publish such pretentious blown-up stuff? I am concerned about Harvard too.

Socrates' job was to engage clever young men in discussion; they thought they knew everything, but after being subjected to the Socratic treatment, they began to realize that there were a few things they did not know. I had imagined that Harvard education consisted in an application of the Socratic method, but now it seems to me that we of the Harvard faculty fall down on our job, else how explain that a student can spend three or four years at Harvard and not have at least some of his "know-it-all" dogmatism rubbed off?

It is possible for a student to get a degree without getting an education (I am now speaking of college generally, not of Harvard only). For education is primarily a matter of attitudes. By an educated man I mean one who has achieved a self-knowledge of his ignorance and consequently has waked up from his dogmatic slumber; one who has a sense of wonder leading to active inquiry--and here I have in mind a concern for the truth, rather than showing off one's cleverness. Finally, education should give a man the most rigorous methods and standards, thus ensuring that his inquiry is disciplined and effective. Great aims involve great risks; independence may turn into arrogance, glibness be mistaken for understanding, showmanship replace truthmanship. Raphael Demos,   Alford Professor of Natural Religion,   Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity