HA Overstreet – Journal – Jan 19, 2001

HA Overstreet – Journal – Jan 19,  2001

The Mature Mind by Harry A Overstreet – 1949 – 1959 – WW Norton and Co, NYC – Large Type Edition by Watts (Grolier), NYC

From the Preface to the Tenth Anniv Edition:  p –9 “When this book was first undertaken, I had the good fortune to come across a sentence that seemed to me to go straight to the center of our human concerns.  It was by Dr G Brock Chisholm, Canadian psychiatrist, later the distinguished head of the World Federation for Mental-Health.  The sentence reads, ‘So far in the history of the world there have never been enough mature people in the right places.’”

I ordered this book from the Bookmobile because, even though I quoted from it and commented on it in One Lifetime, I wasn’t sure I knew what was in it.  As it turned out, I didn’t.

I never realized that his focus was on emotional maturity.  P 14 – He speaks of ‘the master concept of our time.  This is the concept of psychological maturity.’

P 40 – Speaking of the immature person: “Where new facts have been thrust upon his reluctant consciousness, he has quickly robbed them of their irritating quality by wrapping them in a platitude and denying them any authority over his behavior.”  I am afraid this is what I have done when I incorporated the quote from Diderot.  What I did was to incorporate my own bitter comment, without trying to see what Overstreet was getting at.

P50 – “The human being is born irresponsible.”  Why did it take 50 yrs to get this notion through my head?

Like KH he stresses that our ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ should be understood as ‘mature’ and ‘immature’.

P 86 “It will mean much to our confused and hostility-ridden world if and when the conviction begins to dawn that the people we call ‘bad’ are people we should call ‘immature’.”

“The chief job of our culture is, then, to help all people grow up.” [to mature emotionally]

Recall that I once said that our problems are so vast that it requires two (at least) specialists to tackle them: First a problem-recognizer, one who can recognize and clearly present a problem; and second, a solution-‘proposer’. One who can develop solutions to the problem as presented.

Here we see Overstreet as a problem-presenter.  Since a problem clearly stated is a problem half-solved, he has also gone a long way toward developing a solution.

P 88 “A mature truth told to immature minds ceases, in those minds, to be that same mature truth.  Immature minds take from it only what immature minds can assimilate.”

A counselor once said to me, “You sound a little defensive.”  My response was, “What do you mean, defensive?  I’m not defensive.”  The immature mind could not grasp what the mature mind was saying.

A person with an immature mind cannot be helped with ‘advice’ or ‘mature truths’.  Freud discovered this in his time – I in my time.  I only hope that my experience will help the next person who finds himself or herself in this bind.  Just wanting to doesn’t make it.

I notice that studying this book intently – with a single-mindedness of purpose – tends to create an inner tension that I call restlessness – relief from which is ordinarily obtained by eating or drinking or some other tension-breaking act.  With my new ability to switch to the serenity channel, I should learn to take a 30 sec break and back-off.  I must not forget that escape route.

This is the book that impressed me so much 50 years ago.  Yet, I have forgotten the whole thrust of it.  If a book is that important, one should buy it and re-read it every 10 years or so.  Well!  I didn’t, and it’s too late for me to do that, but what I can do is to incorporate this ‘message’ into my next book, tentatively called ‘The Bonus’.

The Minimum Book Shelf

I had toyed with the idea of including some modern books into a category that I called ‘modern scripture’.  This sounds a little sacrilegious, but it is meant to stress that some books are head and shoulders over other books in importance.  I am tempted to complain about the sea of trash out there, but that would be being judgmental.  The human experience will eventually separate the wheat from the chaff.

Get this book and read it and assimilate it, and re-read it every ten years.

Right now I think of a third book which should be in every home, and which should be read every ten years or more often:  That book is Pollyanna.

The first book, I assumed, would be the bible, but as I think about it, I realized that the bible alone is about as useless as would be the original Hebrew and Greek versions to the average person.  What one would need would be a good, modern, one-volume commentary on it.

They call the Presbyterian Confession of 1967 ‘a bible-scholar’s confession’.  I would call it a Modernist’s confession.  It would be a start and it should be on that bookshelf.

On the other end of that shelf I would put Renan’s Life of Jesus.  Published in 1863, the English Trans was described by Joseph Henry Allen, famous scholar and church historian, as “The one great literary monument of a century of NT criticism.”  John Haynes Holmes says in his Intro, “This book was one of the world-shaking books in a world-shaking epoch.”

Holmes puts it beside Origin of the Species and Das Kapital.  Presumably, these two would be on his shelf.  I have not read either – am I missing out on something?

The Family Bookshelf

We need to bear in mind that the first books children read are usually from their parent’s bookshelf.  We need to provide for that.

Another thing to remember is that practically the entire vast store of human knowledge and experience is in books.  We won’t have all of the important books on our shelf, but we do need to show that they are out there somewhere, if not in the local public library.

I am not a fiction enthusiast, but I recognize its importance in our culture.  There should surely be some excellent examples of it on our bookshelf.  I have described how Morte d’Arthur affected me, but that does not mean that it should be on our shelf.  I will focus on the bare minimum.

I told Jack that I had considered the Merck Manual, but would have to add, ‘Current Edition’.  He then proposed a First-aid Manual, but realized there was no definitive work.  I then suggested the Scout Manual.  When I was in Scouting, both as a boy and as a leader, there was one edition that I knew of.  It may be different today.  In any case, I would see nothing wrong with the edition we used 50 years ago.