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.