Word: complexity
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Psychiatrically, the picture appears valid. Although the unusual problems of a neurotic veteran with a guilt complex and an analyst who can't swallow his own pills seem always consistent and never phony, I couldn't help wishing that "Mine Own Executioner" had dug a little deeper into some of the most interesting, though less spectacular cases, that popped up here or there. The picture was designed to create suspense, and it looks like the writers slipped in justification for the tense climax afterwards. The suspense is there all right, but you've seen that part before...
...Taft-Hartley Law. The ban on jurisdictional strikes is justified if only on the grounds that nobody gets anything out of them, and that annual plant elections, while not eliminating these strikes, can at least cut them down. But the prohibition of secondary boycotts is a more complex matter: some of these are justified by the necessity for cohesion in the labor movement, while some wreak unfair harm on an employer who may have nothing to do with a dispute in another plant or industry. One thing is clear: if Congress presumes to handle the secondary boycott...
...Sigmund Freud studied the Oedipus myth and came to a shocking conclusion: Oedipus, like most sons, was in love with his mother, and, as many a son would like to do, killed his father to get her. The Oedipus complex, said Freud, is an all-too-common ailment of mankind-"the essential part in the content of neuroses...
That, says Fromm, is the real Oedipus complex-the rebellion of every son against patriarchal authority. It is rooted in "man's legitimate striving for freedom and independence." That striving, when thwarted, results in a "destructive passion" which must be suppressed. The suppression, in turn, often leads to neuroses in later life. Freud believed that the mother-son Oedipus complex was inevitable. Fromm thinks that there is a way to avoid the father-son Oedipus complex: let parents be less domineering, and let them have more respect for a child's rights...
Undoubtedly, the election was a complex event, the product of enough variant factors to cloud any inherently clear meaning for the press. Most reputable middle-of-the-road journalists nevertheless agree that, while the Truman victory doesn't admit to pat analysis, the basic reportorial error, attributable to whatever primary cause, is quite uncomplicated in its implications. Correspondent James Reston wrote to his own New York Times the morning after that "we were wrong, not only on the election, but, what's worse, on the whole political direction of our time." Richard Lee Strout of the Christian Science Monitor...