“This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.”
– Sigmund Freud on the Irish
I find this quote strangely vindicating.
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“This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.”
– Sigmund Freud on the Irish
I find this quote strangely vindicating.
heehee. What was the context he said it in? Are we too tweaked to benefit? Or too complex to be analysed?
I think I prefer the later.
From the introduction to a book of Irish short stories – intro written by Anthony Burgess (this is where I originally came upon this quote from Freud – which I had never heard before) –
“One of [Freud’s] followers split up human psychology into two categories – Irish and non-Irish. The Irish, like the Neopolitans, are not sure what truth is, and they have a system of logic which defies logic. They have something in common with Chekhov’s Russians, and it is no accident that many of the stories here will seem Chekhovian. I was taking a bath in a Leningrad hotel when the floor concierge yelled that she had a cable for me. ‘Put it under the door,’ I cried. ‘I can’t,’ she shouted. ‘It’s on a tray.’ There is a deep logic, or epistemology, there which is far from absurd. The Irish and the Russians have one way of looking at entities (the entity in this instance was a cable-on-a-tray) and the rest of the world another.”
There is a sense that Freud had, too, that the Irish, when in psychic trouble, go to poetry, go to storytelling, go to escapism – they have no interest in picking apart their own brains.
Funny, though. I have a couple of friends who are big Freud freaks – read all of his books, etc. I’ll ask them if they can elaborate on this.
I, for one, feel WAY too complex to ever be analyzed.
I wish I would have known this prior to pouring thousands of dollars down a rat hole.
I always suspected there were things we Russians and you Irish could see eye-to-eye on that the rest of the world just didn’t get. The anecdote confirms it.
Except for the fact that we thought to kill two birds with one stone by actually making our potatoes INTO alcohol. ;-)
Hey, Freud was also the guy who suggested all adolescent males want to sleep with their mothers. Not exactly operating on all eight cylinders, if you ask me.
Twenty bucks says he made some big, burly Irish guy spill his Guinness, and got his ass wupped. ;)
I thought it was a fact that there are only the Irish and the non-irish and the Russians were cousins or something.
You know the only reason God invented alcohol was so we couldn’t rule the world.
Well, yes, Jim, but we actually still tried anyway (thank God we failed!), and therein lies a difference that probably signifies something, though I really don’t know what.
Mr. Lion –
I don’t know … Freud may have been off base with a lot … but I have dated a couple of guys who were complete Oedipuses.
Maybe Freud was thinking about the Catholicism of Irish people – and how Catholicism has viewed any kind of psychiatry (historically, I mean.)
Jim – I had heard that quote before about why God invented alcohol. i think it’s hilarious.
“that the Irish, when in psychic trouble, go to poetry, go to storytelling, go to escapism – they have no interest in picking apart their own brains.”
I’ve always felt my brain couldn’t be picked up apart – that it runs some sort of Celtic emitional instinct that defies analysis and can only be understood by the way it expresses itself creatively – whether that be writing, drawing , art etc or simply telling a story over a pint.
i have gotten much more therapeutic value from laughing over pints with friends, or romping about with my nephew – than from psychiatry.
Ah well. To each his own.
I always thought pints=therapy.
I don’t think it has much of anything to do with Catholicism, Sheila: most of Freud’s patients in turn-of-the-century Hapsburg Vienna would have been Catholic, even if he wasn’t. That actually reminds me, as a Russian Jew who grew up in Boston, I’m also particularly fond of this quote:
“Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.”
–Brendan Behan
I suppose that must mean that the tiny remaining community of Irish Jews is doubly cursed…or blessed depending on how you look at it.
To tie back to the original quote, it’s probably Freud himself who desperately needed to have his head examined. Stick with your cigars, Siggy: I always found Jung a lot more interesting. I mean, I don’t know if I buy any of what he had to say either, but comparative mythology and collective unconsciousness sound a little less stuffy even if they’re just as bogus as penis envy.
Dave: I love Jung’s theories. I don’t think they’re bogus at all!
And were Freud’s patients in Vienna IRISH Catholic? Or Catholics from Austria and around? I don’t know the answer – I’m just asking.
There are stories from my family, 2 generations back, having to do with the Catholic Church (the Vatican, actually) and psychiatry – and it ain’t pretty.
If you have a problem in the head – you go to church, you go to confession. End of story.
Things have changed quite a bit since then, obviously.
I don’t think I said that quite right the first time. I didn’t mean that I think Jung is as bogus as Freud (I don’t), just that his theories would be more interesting even if they were.
As to the nationality of Freud’s patients, I can’t say for sure (it’s probably been six or seven years since I read The Interpretation of Dreams or The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and even then I’ve only read each book once), but I would think the answer was largely no. His patients were mostly the upper crust of Austrian society, maybe one step down from the hangers-on at the Imperial court. But it seems so audacious even for him to make a sweeping statement like that about the Irish without having had one or two Irish patients to attempt to psychoanalyze that maybe there were a few.
I am definitely going to ask my friend who reveres Freud to give me some information.
In a way, though, I like the guessing at what Freud meant – as opposed to knowing.
You know, I know EXACTLY what you mean. I think. ;-)
The decline in participation in the Sacrament of reconciliation is directly proportional to the rise in the use of psychiatry. Or so I’ve read somewhere. I’ve nade us eof both and Confession was always the best. Compassion. Objective forgiveness. Humility. Something other than self. Grace.
Patrick – totally agreed. “objective forgiveness”. Beautiful.
But I don’t think schizophrenia could be healed by confession. Perhaps by a miracle. Schizophrenics need drugs and therapy.
I dated a schizophrenic. A Catholic schizophrenic. In his moments of lucidity – he was one of the most beautiful profound mens I have ever known. He could recite The Waste Land. I loved him. His Catholicism haunted him – the schizophrenia manifested in him in visions of eternal hell, and also grandiosity – visions of grandeur.
Without his drugs, he was out of control. Suicidal. I have no idea what ended up happening to him. I had to break it off with him because I wanted a lover and a boyfriend – not someone I had to take care of.
We would go to church together. His experience of God was very personal, very everyday, very one-on-one. I was glad he had that comfort. I would say to him, “God will forgive you. God has already forgiven you for your sins. He loves you. He knows you are doing your best. Don’t worry. You’re a good man. God loves you. God loves you.”
He just couldn’t believe in that. I wished he could.