Freud In Dunedin

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 59, 9 August 1940, Page 4

Freud In Dunedin

T is pleasant to know that there is one branch of the Returned Soldiers’ Association possessed of a strong sense of public duty; and a very true sense. Most of us | think that our duty in war-time is to be serious. In Dunedin they know better. A | heresy hunt in the University having ended | without any victims, a psycho-analyst has | suggested that a Royal Commission should be appointed to "inquire into the relationship of our whole educational and library systems and services to loyalty to the Crown and the Empire." That is Dunedin at its best. It would terrify Wellington, stampede Auckland, perhaps even alarm the humble in Vienna, where Freud fought the Devil for fifty years. But to call Freud to the assistance of the University of Otago is something that only Scotsmen would risk. The University will survive it because the University is tough. Dunedin will survive it, because Dunedin has long since ceased to settle problems by fasting and prayer. But if Dunedin did not know its Dr. Stuart Moore neither the Crown nor the Empire might have survived its wrath. Dunedin does know Dr. Moore, and the returned soldiers of Dunedin know him. They know too that the loyalty that stays in the heart begins in the head, and that what Dr. Moore is trying to do is to put every questioning head into a bag. His Royal Commission would measure the heads, and also, we must suppose, test the bag. Reading would be limited in case the heads grew. Teaching _would be controlled in case the pupils learnt to think. Money would be withdrawn in ‘case it paved the road to liberty. And when we had all been conditioned into safe Moorish reflexes it would not matter very much whether the lion or the unicorn carried off the crown, or whether both ran off at the bark of the little dog. Only Dunedin could have done it -the Dunedin that once crucified a professor for questioning God’s mercy and to-day worships the author of Holy Willie’s Prayer. But it is a little rough on the rest of us that we should be made to watch all day and pray all night in case Dr. Moore should enter our subconscious minds and discover that we have been harbouring dangerous thoughts.