Life among the Thobbers

A thobber is a person who prefers guesswork to investigation and reinforces his beliefs by asserting them frequently.* All who use pseudo-science as a short-cut cure for troubles, especially mental ills, are thobbers to some extent--e.g., those who apply to astrologers, numerologists, graphologists, self-styled psychologists with fake degrees (Ps.D., Ms.D.), spiritualists, hypnotists, some beauticians and gymnasium proprietors and advice-to-the-lovelorn editors.

Psychologist Patient. A psychologist has been studying this group of quacks and thobbers for the past twelve years. Small, quick Mrs. Lee R. Steiner, who has degrees from the University of Minnesota and Smith College, and training in psychotherapy from Pioneer Alfred Adler (TIME, Sept. 10), read classified ads, went calling on palmists and swamis who hung out shingles. Sometimes she took a friend along as "patient," sometimes she described a neurotic husband (actually she is a widow) or a hypothetical maladjusted, discharged veteran called Junior. What she found out is described in her book Where Do People Take Their Troubles? (Houghton, Mifflin; $3).

Some Steiner reports:

P: With a friend she went to see "Doctor" Pierre A. Bernard, formerly Oom the Omnipotent, at his handsome Clarkstown Country Club in Nyack, N.Y. He is an ex-barber who found there was money in "sex worship" and later took up Yoga, the Hindu art of controlling mind through muscle--(he trained Prize Fighter Lou Nova for his bout with Joe Louis). Oom said he could help Junior for a "membership fee" of $125. His method: "We kid people out of being grouchy."

P: She wrote to Dorothy Dix, Anne Hirst, Beatrice Fairfax, et al., to ask what to do about a boy of eleven who was unstrung, disobedient and disrespectful, who stole and refused to do homework. (She took these symptoms from an actual case, whose real trouble, she explains, was that he was unloved.) Some suggested punishment or a stiff school far from home. Beatrice Fairfax sternly warned against psychiatry. Elsie Robinson (author of I Wanted Out) gave what Mrs. Steiner considers the only ethical answer: "The problem of a disobedient child is far too delicate and complicated to be solved by 'remote control.' " (Apparently none of the columnists knows how their advice turns out, Mrs. Steiner says. Their advice is therefore guesswork.)

P: At a well-attended seance of a Mr. & Mrs. Themelis (he was Irish, judging by his accent), Mrs. Steiner heard a spirit guide named Pat tell her to say hello to her husband. "Hello, darling," said she obediently. Mr. Steiner replied in an Irish brogue.

P: A "Doctor" Holmes W. Merton of the Merton Institute in Manhattan offered to teach her "the only scientific method of charting the face" for $75, so that she could become a practitioner herself.

P: Manhattan's Elizabeth Aldrich, dean of U.S. astrologers, cast a horoscope for Mrs. Steiner's husband. The stars did not tell her he was dead.

P: Consultation fee of John J. Anthony (formerly Lester Kroll, taxi driver) of radio's Original Good-Will Hour was $25, but people who could not afford the fee might arrange to have their troubles aired over the radio. Mrs. Steiner asked Mr. Anthony his qualifications. He said he had "studied all the psychiatrists' work" and claimed that he had advised Vassar College on an Institute of Marital Relations (which Vassar does not have), and that Princeton had asked him to start an "experimental station." Nowhere to Go. Wherever she went, Mrs. Steiner saw people needing and paying for professional help, but not getting it. She does not think the church is the answer, since she believes that the clergy often lack the right training. She would like to have the Government move in on the business, setting up mental hygiene facilities for civilians comparable to those in the Army & Navy.

*Grammarian Charles Henshaw Ward, who taught at the University of California in the '20s, coined the word from the phrase: thinking out the opinion that pleases one and believing it.

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