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Griffin Daily News
Should Engaged Couples
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• No. 1 mean a fellow should not say to his fiancee:
"As long as we are getting married anyhow, this Is
what you ought to know about me.” And then he
goes into a long history of his adventures in ro
mance-land and also ticks off every bad habit he
has from ante-ing up too much at the office poker
games to zeroing in on the local saloon. Nor should
his fiancee confess.
There are many reasons to keep mum, but per
haps the most compelling ones are the most obvious.
For one thing, if the man and the girl know they
have these faults and idiosyncrasies, they should be
adult enough to realize that if the flaws need to be
told to the other person they should be corrected in
MIRROR OF YOUR MINO ♦ BY JOHN CON WILL
• Can sex survive in the theater ?
No. Os course, the proponents of the
freedom to perform sex in the thea
ter as well as to show more and
more nudity cling to that tired, old
cliche: “What would you rather see
for your entertainment money: love,
war or violence?” On the surface,
naturally, everybody will vote in
favor of love, since the immediate
reaction is that there really isn’t
a choice.
Yet, this is a false premise. While,
as Shakespeare has said, all the
world is a stage and we are merely
players, when we become theater
goers we want to get away from
the reality of life.
When we see violence on the stage
or in films, that doesn’t necessarily
mean that we approve of violence or
war, or whatever. The reason that
we can find a theater experience
satisfying even though the play may
be a violent murder drama is that,
if the actors know their job, we are
being entertained. No matter how
realistic the bloodletting, we know
that after all it is only a play, and
aU the actors —regardless of how
the first place. And if a fault is corrected, there is
no necessity to confess it. If the fault isn’t really a
fault but something that has happened in the past,
then there really is no need to confess that either
unless it has some bearing on the engaged couples'
relationship. In longer courtships or engagements,
of course, in which the couples can get to know each
other more completely, there is hardly any neces
sity for anyone to have to worry about having to
give accounts of character and behavior.
Confessing faults or telling about past indiscre
tions is rarely done to enlighten the other party.
The man, for instance, by confessing, is trying to
wiggle out of being responsible for his actions and
violently some of them may be
killed on stage -are going to be
able to take a curtain-call.
Portrayals of explicit sex and nu
dity on the stage are another mat
ter. What the audience is seeing on
the stage is what is actually hap
pening. What the audience is paying
to see is not make-believe entertain
ment. Sometimes, under the encour
agement of show press agents and
with the aid of mass hysteria, the
audience may even participate by
stripping off their clothes.
Because of the novelty of sex and
nudity on stage—and the curiosity
in seeing "just how far they will
go”- -increasing numbers of people
are being drawn into the theater.
But the pendulum of interest in this
type of theater will soon swing the
other way—pushed not by an outcry
of public Indignation, but by bore
dom. After all, theater-goers will
continue to buy tickets to see a
troupe of sex performers “doing
their thing” for just so long before
they get tired of being part of an
audience of paying “peeping Toms.”
■'X‘ i'thMt’thh'thW
• psychology de-hunked the writer ?
By "the writer” I am sure you mean
the important creative craftsman
who enjoys an imperishable place
in the literary firmament of all
time. And, as more and more of the
immortal writers are examined
by psychologists, it is increasingly
clear that their works will stand.
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Dos
toevsky, and so on—they knew hu
man nature and they knew how to
capture it in words. Take Dostoev
sky, as Dr. Rollo May, the noted
psychologist, does in the introduc
tion to his book, “The Human Di
lemma” (Van Nostrand). The re
markable insight of Dostoevsky and
his ability to delineate character
are pointed out by Dr. May to stress
the fact that the one pitfall that
psychologists should seek to avoid is
oversimplifying man and forgetting
that he is a man and not merely a
subject for scientific study. Dr. May
tells of the debate between Dostoev
sky (naturally, it had to be post
humously on the Russian novelist’s
part) and Dr. B. F. Skinner, the
eminent Harvard psychologist. The
his "ancient history.” He is in effect saying: "Look,
this is the way I am” or “This is what I did” and he
puts the burden of the situation on his fiancee. He
is informing her that he isn’t about to change his
ways, and if she still wants to go through with the
marriage, then she should be willing to overlook
any of these faults when they manifest themselves
after the wedding. In fact, he is asking her for
"carte blanche” to accept whatever way he happens
to behave in the future.
He may even be using the confession technique to
try to escape any commitment he may have made,
for he may now be getting second thoughts about
whether he should marry at all.
debate dealt with Dostoevsky's
statement that “man will play you a
dirty trick, just to prove that men
are still men and not the keys of a
piano . . .” Dr May criticizes Dr.
Skinner’s labeling Dostoevsky’s
statement as a “neurotic reaction,”
likening it to “disposing of an op
ponent by psychopathological diag
nosis, an error of which we psycho
therapists are generally accused...’’
Reminding us that Dostoevsky is
the writer who “gave us the breath
takingly profound characterizations
in ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ and
the marvelously subtle picture of
psychological development in 'Crime
and Punishment’ and who is by com
mon consent one of the greatest
students and portrayers or human
experience in all history,” Dr. May
says that “long after our present
psychological methods are relegated
to dusty archives and replaced
again and again by new methods,
Dostoevsky's work will go serenely
on, revealing to generation after
generation its profound wisdom
about human experience.”
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