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