Freud and the Irish, How to Make That into a Book?
April 27, 2008
I have had so many hits on my blog because of this, I thought I should turn this into at least a story. Any comments on how to do this are more than welcome and when it gets published I will think of a great prize for you. (Now THERE is incentive)!:-)
Maybe Freud as detective? Then again, supposedly he cannot fathom the Irish (a case he cannot solve)?
Dear Readers, let me know what you think!
Freud said, “This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.” This does not imply, in any way, that he couldn’t psychoanalize an Irish patient or that he couldn’t figure them out if they were agreeable to it. What Freud meant was that in his practice he found the Irish posed a willful RESISTANCE to analysis and were uncooperative in that regard, which thoroughly negates the purpose of the process. If a patient refuses to consider or accept this kind of psychological exploration and what it uncovers they will not benefit by it. This is what Freud was referring to.
Hey Steve Feinberg! How do you know what Freud ment??
Maybe so tolearable to pain as a people that they could not express or aknowledge it.
It’s hard to know what exactly Freud meant by that.
And I think Freud’s methods and ideas were pretty questionable for all people. So much has been written on why many of his ideas just weren’t based on very good science, and why modern clinical psychology has discarded many of his ideas, even if he is credited with introducing new questions and ways of thinking about the mind.
Cultural narrowness was always a common criticism of Freud, and certainly this statement could be taken as an admission of just how narrow. But even Betty Friedan questioned their efficacy on modern Americans as of 1960.
Even so you have to question things like how many Irish people Freud actually knew, and if he ever tried to analyze any of them. I’m guessing that most of his contact was dealing with Irish nationals and people of Irish ancestry when he was in England.
I’m also guessing that since Freud was a hardcore lifelong Anglophile, with a raging hatred of Catholicism, that his attitudes towards the Irish were far from bias free. (Guess who is son “Oliver” was named after. It wasn’t Oliver Twist, and couldn’t have been Oliver Stone. But it was one of the Freud’s heros. Hint: This is about the worst possible answer from an Irish POV.)