Word: farnsworth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...