Word: uselessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Useless Fears by Joseph Wolpe...
JOSEPH WOLPE, author of Our Useless Fears, sets himself a lofty goal. You would never know it from the cover: the inch-high purple letters hailing "the world's foremost authority on anxiety" immediately remind one of the rash of self-help books so abundant during the last few years. But in opening paragraph of his preface, Wolpe assures us that his book is not of that genre, revealing his true motive in a voice filled with profound eloquence: "These offshoots of behavior therapy are like the uppermost branches of a tree, visible above a mist." He expounds further...
...overcome such "useless fears," Wolpe advocates a method called "systematic desensitization" or, less technically, "graduated calming." The essense of the procedure is to have a deeply relaxed patient imagine a slightly fearful object of situation for a few seconds at a time. With each repetition, the amoung of fear lessens, finally dropping to zero. Then successively more fearful images are treated in the same way, until even the most fearful lose their fear-arousing power...
...firmly resisted the idea of writing a popularly comprehensive book," Wolpe writes, "for I felt myself firmly committed to scientific work." However, having at long last decided to produce the definitive work of poppsychology, the author goes to great lengths to clarify his theories. He begins by defining a useless fear; "If walking through a park, I come upon a snarling tiger, the fear is appropriate because there is a real danger. But if, instead of a tiger, I see a small mouse and am terrified by that harmless creature, the fear is useless." For readers who have no difficulty...
Masquerading as a self-help book, and claiming to be a scientific treatise, Our Useless Fears is more like a guided tour of the San Diego zoo. The human menagerie paraded across its pages might benefit from Dr. Wolpe's theories; but for the average reader--neither traumatized by sunrise nor terrified by frogs--the book is as useless as the fears it describes...