BUSINESS MEN’S DINNER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22098, 31 October 1933, Page 5

BUSINESS MEN’S DINNER

ADDRESS BY DR MOORE | The third of a series of business men’s dinners was held in the Tudor Hall, Savoy, last flight. Mr WS. Jacobs preThe chairman said that he understood that those present were, members of the Business Efficiency Society, the Better Business Club, and the Selmore Club. All,' he believed, had the same aims. He, therefore, made the suggestion that tliey should amalgamate in, an effort to make their work more effective. Mr Robert Comrie, a Canadian authority, had said that business men were now more considerate of the people with whom they dealt. There was a higher standard oi business morality, a co-operative spirit, and greater justice and fair dealing, this, he believed, was due to the tstabhshment of service clubs. In England there existed a chain of “round table centies with the same objects as the‘‘clubs in New Zealand. The speaker suggested that something might be gamed it I the Dunedin clubs communicated with these entitled “A Woman’s Fate ” was given by Dr Stuart Moore. In nis opening remarks he said that the general public had a bizarre and distorted idea of what psycho-analysis was. inis was perhaps largely due to the, grotesque caricatures of its teachings, which were to be found in practically all modern novels. Popularly it was believed that psychoanalysis destroyed all the beauty in me, abolished all foundations of morality, and dethroned reason. Actually the facts were that psycho-analysis relied entuely on the accurate observation of facts ana the use of reason. The on y thing it destroyed was hypocrisy and lies, it established on firmer ground than ever the tact that, as Schopenhauer had claimed m 1830, compassion was an inherent human characteristic and the natural basis oi morality. The most convinced hedonist would regard a man without compassion as inhuman and unnatural, yet psychoanalysis showed that this view was consistent with belief that the human mind always sought its greatest good or pleasure according to its' lights. In regard to reason, he continued, the findings of psycho-analysis confirmed the view of Plato that all errors m thought were due to errors in observation, not in logical process. Thus it fixed reason firmly as a reliable compass on winch man could rely to guide him on the trackless stormy ocean of his life. _ He would illustrate how the findings of psycho-analysis could be applied to enable those present to understand more fully the nature of the tragic fate that seemed to dog the footsteps of George Sand, the French novelist. To-day this woman would be described as suffering from a fate neurosis—from an illness that presented itself only in the form of things she did and not in nervous symptoms. The lecturer then proceeded to show how George Sand, through forgetting what she hated most In her mother and grandmother, became, without knowing it, just what she forgot. In being these things she hated without being aware of the fact. She had no adequate voluntary control over her destiny. In spite •of herself her love life was a series of disasters, each of which was in essentials an exact replica of the preceding one. Put another way, it could be said that the masculine element in her, "though partly and with great success, turned into literary and other social achievement, in spite of all that, wrecked her search for happiness as a woman.