Mental Pushups

THE GREAT ENTERPRISE (332 pp.)--H. A. Oversfreet--A/or/on ($3.50).

The boy who stood on the burning deck was a moron, Professor Harry Allen Overstreet once told a child-study group. "He did not have the intelligence to adapt himself to a changing situation." In 1939, convinced that modern man is a boy on the burning deck of the aoth century, he quit his philosophy post at Manhattan's City College and turned to writing and lecturing. Author Overstreet soon gathered a new class bigger than any teacher's dream.

Nearly half a million Americans bought The Mature Mind. Its psychological nostrums and all-too-truisms gave its readers the heady sensation of doing mental pushups by the dozen.

In The Great Enterprise, the self-help school is back in session. Even sleepy students will recognize the first half of the book as a rehash of The Mature Mind. Entitled "Equipment for Maturing," it might be subtitled "First Aid for the Ego." Twisted into neurotic shapes by parents, bosses and competitive tensions, the modern ego is forever ailing, Overstreet suggests. The big trouble is that modern man is in an introspective rut. The cure: "We must, so to speak, go beyond ourselves in order to find ourselves . . . Mental unhealth ... is to be overcome by the overcoming of faulty interpersonal relations."

Why have interpersonal relations bogged down? Author Overstreet says, in effect, that love is the four-letter word modern man has forgotten. After casting a topical eye on race riots in Cicero and South Africa, on hot & cold wars, on McCarthyism and anti-McCarthyism, Overstreet concludes that just as love casts out fear, so fear casts out love.

Overstreet's remedies verge on the fatuous ("If we could grasp what other persons are saying ... the major hostilities of life would disappear") and the contradictory ("It is out of the vast amount of sheer unbalance in the economic life that the major hostilities of men have arisen").

During summer months, these green dicta issue from an ivory bower, a rustic, century-old house near Bennington, Vt. (winter headquarters: Mill Valley, Calif.). Carrying his 76 years lightly, Professor Overstreet is up at 4 on most mornings, dawdles over breakfast till 5:30 a.m. From then till 1 p.m. he writes in his barn. Afternoons are spent puttering about the garden and feeding a pet chipmunk. Since the nearest neighbor is half a mile away, the professor pretty much limits his interpersonal relations to his wife, with whom he spends the evenings studying a new enthusiasm, the mandolin.

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