* Darrel Currie (above) of the Hobbema Indian Reserve at Edmonton is the youngest member
of a troupe of Canadian Indians now on an eight month tour of France demonstrating the
traditional dances of the Cree Indians.

BOOKS

New work restores heritage
of neglected Irish patriot

OW can we explain the labor
| pbbsiiied: amazing neglect
of James Connolly, Irish patriot
and leader of the Dublin Easter
Rebellion, who was executed by

the British government on May
t2, 1916?

“During his day Connolly was
not only the leading Marxist of

‘the English-speaking world, he

was widely recognized to be so.

Read Labor in Irish History
(New Books Publications), a
little book of 132 pages, and try
to think of something written
before 1903 which is its equal
for creative Marxist insight,

wide scholarship, and masterly
historical sweep.

Eleanor Marx, one of Connol-

_ly’s associates in the Socialist

League, would be the only com-
~petitor. But Connolly had spent
the preceding decade in two
main occupations — carter and
builder’s laborer.

He created his own opportun-
ities. He broke free from the
limitations capitalist conditions
imposed on his youth and soar-
ed above them, in 1892 asking
his wife to correct his spelling
and grammar, in 1907 translat-
ing from and speaking five lan-
guages !

PROVINCIAL LEADER |

LABOR PROGRESSIVE

PARTY

C.B.C. BROADCAST
May 21 at 10:15 p.m.

The product of this extra-
ordinary mind is worthy of at-
tention by every worker.

One of the first central com-
mittee meetings of the British
Communist party recorded with
interest that over half of those
present had been brought into
the movement personally by
James Connolly.

Labor in Irish History was
the first attempt to create a
theoretical basis for the tactics
of the struggle for Irish inde-

pendence. In preparing it Con-
nolly drew on the work of Marx,
Morris, Sketchly and above all

' Leslie.

lis style is militant and smells
of the powder of great controv-
ersies in the early nineties, when
the middleclass turned on
Charles Stewart Parnell and
the workers stood by him. Its
essence, extracted from the ex-
periences of 700 years, is that
in order to be successful, the
Trish struggle for independence
must be led by the working class.

As Charles Lever’s character
Darby (in Tom Burke) put it,
“the gentlemen ever and always
betrayed us.”

The publishers of this new,
well-produced and readable edi-
tion, with its striking cover,
deserve the warmest congratu-
lations. ’ ‘

C. DESMOND GREAVES

SCIENCE

ee) |

Freud’s weakness he
used self as subject

OT MANY scientists become

household words in their
lifetime, but Sigmund Freud,
who was born 100 years ago on
May 6, has not only become a
household word, he has become
an adjective as well,

“Freudian” is now an accepted
label for almost any rather rum
human relationship and for any
piece of conduct which seems
to have motives that do not meet
the eye.

Most people, if asked what
the name Freud brings to their
minds, would undoubtedly reply
“Sex.” And rightly, for the basis
of Freud’s ideas is that sex is
the main motive force behind
man’s actions.

Plenty of abuse has been
hurled at these ideas—those
whose own ideas about sex are

the nastiest usually being the »

first to shout “Disgusting!”
But none of the mud ever stuck
to Freud himself.

For the inventor of the “Oedi-
pus complex,” who believed that
all boys were in love with their
mothers and wanted to kill their
fathers, was a most modest,
virtuous and upright professor
of these startling views, a man
of profound culture and human-
ity, a model husband and a de-
voted father of his six children.

$03 bes %

Sigmund Freud was born in

imperial Austria on May 6, 1856,
in an orthodox Jewish family.
When he was six the family
moved to Vienna, and very soon
the little boy became conscious
of the vile atmosphere of anti-
Semitism. He died in London
in 1939, when anti-Semitism
seemed triumphant in Western
Europe.
- He has described ‘how, when
he was nine, his father “fell off
his pedestal,” through telling
him how some anti-Semite had
hustled him off the pavement
and knocked his hat off.

“What did you do?” asked
Sigmund. “I stepped into the
gutter and picked up my hat,”
answered his father simply and,

‘it seemed to the child, unhero-

ically.

After this, Freud says, he
burned with revolt against this
treatment of his people, and
identified himself with Hanni-
bal, the Carthaginian who swore
to defeat the conquering Romans
who killed his father.

The child grew up and became
a medical student, and the study
of the nervous system was his
first interest.

But soon he abandoned neuro-
ology for what is commonly
ealled “nerves” — the emotional
disturbances which became the
main concern of his life,

xt ot xt

In Paris, where he went to
study psychopathology, he be-
came interested in the use of
hypnotism for curing hysteria,
at that time regarded as a purely
feminine ailment.

From there he went on to de-
velop his method of phycho-
analysis, in which, by what
Freud called “free association,”
fhe patient is induced to fetch
up from his sub-conscious the
troubles of his childhood, and
is thus cured of present dis-
turbances of which these for-
gotten (repressed) hurts are
supposed to be the cause.

It was in the course of apply-
ing this treatment, and in the
course of self-analysis, that
Freud became convinced that
the origin of all these troubles
was sexual.

However, despite the enthusi-
asm of psycho-analysts and some

May 18, 1956 —

of their patients, there is still
no proof whatever that this
method cures anything that time
would not have cured.

It is a treatment, however,
for people with plenty of spare
time and money, although
Freud’s ideas are the basis of
much that it being done in child-
guidance clinics and medical
treatment of neurosis today.

¢ xt xt it

Yet Freud’s theories have
spread throughout the capitalist
world, and one cannot help

e Wondering whether they rang
the bell there so loudly because
they produced what seemed to
be scientific justifications for
what we may perhaps call “the
individualist conception of his-
tory,” in which what happens
within the individual becomes
the motive force.

His theory of the conflict be-
tween the basic sexual and ag-
gressive impulses and the con-
science is certainly not new,
but is all in the Old Testament,
which was part of his early up-
bringing.

His analysis of dreams and
_their symbolism, for instance, is
a very old idea, given new life
by the sexual interpretation

- Freud put upon them.

And his picture of the child’s
emotions and entanglement of
sexual love for the mother and
jealous hatred of the father may
well reflect the situation in a
Victorian patriarchal family,

Where mother
were both subjects of Papa, who
ruled with a rod of iron, but it is
not a law of human nature.

All these ideas are used to-
day in the United States in a
highly reactionary way — one
unusually self-critical psycho-
analyst has described his job
as “turning out well-balanced
bastards’”—where revolt against
existing society is often dis-
missed as a “failure of adjust-
ment” requiring psychological
treatment.

xt xt it

In fact, the fatal weakness of
Freud as a scientist is that, from
the beginning he himself was his
most deeply studied subject, and
from what he found within him-
self he generalised widely into
a universal law,

His autobiographical writings
show how much he based on
the analysis of his own dreams,
sufferings and fantasies as a
brilliantly clever, highly sensi-
tive and unhappy Jewish boy in
anti-Semitic Vienna. ,

Nevertheless we owe a good
deal to Freud — and to others
much less well known — for
their delvings into the human
soul, which have increased our
self-knowledge and therefore
our powers of objectivity and
self-criticism.

Above all, Freud played an
important part in creating a
more humane and understanding
attitude toward children — par-
ticularly when they are at their
least angelic and most un-
manageable.

But of his precise theories of
sexual symbolism, and his
method of treating mental ill-
ness, the best that one can say
is that they are still unproven.

Freud himself. said of the
movement he started: “I can say
that I have made many sugges-
tions. Something may come 0
them in the future, though I
cannot myself tell whether it
will be much or little.” A hun-_
dred years after his birth, w®&
still do not know. / :
NOEL BRIAN

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 8 _

t

and children