Lecture by Dr Margaret Lowenfeld

Report of the second in a course of eight lectures on the “Common Difficulties in Normal Children” arranged by the Institute of Child Psychology and delivered at the Friends’ House, Euston Road, N.W.1 on Wednesday, November 14, 1934.

You will find if you look round the world of to-day that there is hardly any question which is more burning for nations as a whole than to make up their minds and to come to some idea, some at any rate reasonably corporate conclusion as to the nature and the function of the question of obedience. If you consider the various countries in Europe you will realize that the question of obedience has, so to speak, sprung to life in a way that forty years ago no one could have conceived. You see whole nations building their total national life upon the question of obedience. You see obedience to the State, obedience to an ideal, being erected once again as it was in the very early days of the Christian Church as a central problem, a central motive, of human character.