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Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Irish Times
Jung at Heart – Frank McNally on the Irish legacies of a Swiss psychologist
The psychologist Carl Jung, who was born 150 years ago this weekend, seems never to have visited Ireland. But he loomed large in the lives of two of our greatest writers, for very different reasons. He and James Joyce shared a city – Zurich – for a period during and after the first world war. Unfortunately, they also shared a deep, mutual scepticism, exacerbated by the attempts of third parties to bring them together. Here's Joyce, writing to his patron Harriet Weaver in 1921: 'A bunch of people in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually going mad and actually endeavoured to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr Freud) amuses himself at the expense…of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled with bees in their bonnets.' One of that bunch was Elizabeth McCormack Rockefeller, a Jungian disciple and philanthropist who subsidised Joyce for a time, but wanted him to undergo analysis and suspended funding when he wouldn't. READ MORE Jung, for his part, believed Ulysses was evidence of the author's latent schizophrenia, which he also thought explained Joyce's heavy drinking. Asked to write the preface for a German edition, he suggested among other insults that the book could be as easily read backwards as forwards. When the publishers showed that to Joyce, according to biographer Richard Ellmann, he telegraphed back a terse response in German, 'Niedrigerhangen', meaning: 'Ridicule it by making it public' (yes, they have a word for that too). Jung later repented by publishing a more respectful version and, in a letter to Joyce, admitting that difficult as he found Ulysses to read, 'I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it.' As for the author, family tragedy eventually forced him to relent in his scepticism enough to allow Jung treat his daughter Lucia for the actual schizophrenia with which she was diagnosed in her mid-20s. 'I wouldn't go to him, but maybe he can help her,' he wrote. Jung thought Lucia had the same madness as her father, without the genius to channel it, and famously likened them to two people going to the bottom of a river: one diving and the other drowning. Ellmann thought Jung was fundamentally wrong about Joyce's supposed self-medication against mental illness, in part because of his unfamiliarity with Irish drinking habits. 'It was not easy for Jung, who had been brought up in a 'fanatical anti-alcoholic tradition', to understand Joyce, whose rearing was diametrically opposite,' he wrote. The writer drank at night only, Ellmann pointed out, and with a combination of 'purpose and relaxation'. He enjoyed company but also used it to study human behaviour and to unburden himself of anxieties. In summary: 'He engaged in excess with considerable prudence.' By contrast with Joyce, Samuel Beckett had only one encounter with Jung, but it brought a shattering insight that changed his life. When he attended a lecture by Jung in 1934, it was at the suggestion of his psychiatrist Wilfred Rupert Bion, who had been treating Beckett for depression. Some of that related to an intense relationship with his mother, an austere woman from whom he inherited his tall, thin frame and hawk-like features, but not her narrow worldview. Relations between them were exacerbated by Beckett's apparent prenatal memories of a claustrophobic life in the womb. In the lecture, Jung recalled the sad case of a pre-teenage girl he had treated years before. She was troubled by recurrent dreams, which the psychologist thought (but didn't say) were premonitions of imminent death. And she did indeed die soon afterwards. But the bit that astounded Beckett was Jung's one-line summary, added as an afterthought. For Beckett, that explained a lot about his own life. Bion thought so too and went on to develop theories involving 'psychological birth' in the womb, a result of which was that 'biological birth did not necessarily bring mental separation from the mother'. Beckett gave up therapy the same year. But he often referred to Jung's story in conversation. And a 20 years later, he put it in the mouth of Maddy Rooney, the main character in his radio play All That Fall (which I had the strange experience a while back of hearing at Tullow Church, Foxrock, in the Beckett family pew, among a blindfolded audience). All That Fall is the most localised of his works, set along Brighton Road on a race day in nearby Leopardstown. Mrs Rooney goes to meet her blind husband off the train, which we later learn has been the scene of a tragedy involving a child, never explained. On the way home, she remembers something she heard in a talk once, from 'one of those new mind doctors', that had 'haunted' her ever since. She goes on to retell the story Beckett had heard, about the 'strange and unhappy little girl' and recalls the doctor's conclusion, which he had found so mind-blowing: 'The trouble with her was that she had never been really born'.
Irish Times
8 hours ago
- Irish Times
Rare sighting of humpback whale in Donegal Bay caught on camera
Locals in Dungloe have nicknamed a local abandoned housing estate as "the Titanic", as it has been sinking since being completed in 2007. Video: Joe Dunne
Irish Times
9 hours ago
- Irish Times
Homeless numbers hit new record high of 15,915
The number of homeless people in the State has reached another record high and now stands at 15,915. There were 10,957 adults in emergency accommodation, including 4,958 children in 2,320 families, during the last full week of June, according to figures published by the Department of Housing on Friday. This represents an increase on the record 15,747 people living in emergency accommodation a month earlier. The numbers, counted during the week of June 23rd to 29th, do not include people sleeping rough, couch-surfing and in domestic violence refuges. Unaccommodated asylum seekers are also excluded from the total. READ MORE In Dublin, where the crisis is most acute, there were 7,755 adults and 3,666 children in emergency accommodation. [ 'I sleep easier here': The makeshift homeless community under the M50 Opens in new window ] The figures also show the majority of adults in emergency accommodation are aged between 25 and 44, with 5,846 people in this age bracket. The Salvation Army has warned that the childhoods of thousands of young people are being 'suppressed' by the homeless crisis. Erene Williamson, the charity's homeless services Ireland lead, said: 'Part of a normal childhood involves inviting friends to your home, play dates and sleepovers. 'But these things that so many of us take for granted are not enjoyed by children in emergency accommodation.' [ The homeless university lecturer: 'There's a sense of shame around it' Opens in new window ] Sinn Féin's housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin said Government failures were 'normalising homelessness'. 'We need funding for vital homeless prevention schemes like tenant-in-situ restored and increased,' he said. 'Without an emergency response from Government the homeless numbers will continue to rise with ever greater number of adults and children forced to live for years in emergency accommodation.' Social Democrats housing spokesman Rory Hearne said the figures were 'another shameful milestone and an indictment' of the Government. 'These numbers are the direct result of policy choices made by the Government,' he said. 'This is what happens when you do not protect vulnerable renters, or prevent them from becoming homeless.'
