Introduction
It would be useful in my view to inaugurate the consideration of “Ireland in Psychoanalysis” by taking a look at what the provocative title phrase might be taken to signify, with what stakes and ramifications. And I thought to begin by puzzling the relationship of this suggested formulation to its chiasmatic (and more accustomed) counterpart, “psychoanalysis in Ireland.” Are we to gloss these rubrics as synonymous? Am I, in addressing the question of Ireland in psychoanalysis, expected to speak to the institutional presence, the methodological variation, and the sociocultural fate of psychoanalysis in Ireland? Left to wonder whether I should be identifying or differentiating these inverse formulae, and on what grounds, I came to imagine a rather unexpected distinction to be immanent in this pair of discursive/disciplinary constructs: psychoanalysis in Ireland is an object of history; Ireland in psychoanalysis is at bottom a literary proposition. The topic of psychoanalysis in Ireland poses relatively straightforward questions of genealogical fact—how psychoanalysis entered Ireland, how it developed there, how widespread was its influence at several points over the last century, and so on—although owing to the privatized nature of clinical practice in psychoanalysis, its focus on individual subjects in confidential settings, it leaves open, if not unanswerable, certain questions of social impact or cultural consequence. Ireland in psychoanalysis, by contrast, does not respect the regime of empirical fact, there being no collective subject, Ireland, who could be, as a literal matter, in…