An Irishman's Diary

YOU'LL HAVE heard the line about Sigmund Freud singling out the Irish as the only people for whom, as a rule, psychoanalysis was useless. It features famously in Martin Scorsese's 2006 film, The Departed, when quoted with approval by a member of the Boston-Irish mafia – a notoriously anti-Freudian group who, instead of seeing shrinks, work through their psychological problems by shooting each other.

Before that, the line also featured in Thomas Cahill's best-selling 1995 book, How the Irish Saved Civilisation. There, Cahill adds the detail that Freud had once "muttered in exasperation" that only we were impervious to his methods.

Somewhere between those two aforementioned works, the quotation even merited mention in a short (and rather less best-selling) book, The Xenophobe's Guide to the Irish, written by, er, me. Here's how I put it, in a chapter on the national character: "Sigmund Freud once claimed that the Irish are the only race who cannot be helped by psychoanalysis. The Irish don't know what exactly he meant by this, and at the rates he was charging, they were afraid to ask."

It’s one of Freud’s more popular quotations, clearly. So it was very annoying that, when I went looking for an original source again recently, I couldn’t find one anywhere. Worse still, I discovered that doubt has arisen in Freudian quarters as to whether he said it at all, or whether this is just another urban myth that somebody somewhere invented and that became a truism.

Certainly, it sounds like a thing Freud might have said. And the writings by and about him are so voluminous that the original citation may be out there still, just beyond the reach of search engines. But if any readers know its exact whereabouts, suffice to say that we in the incident room would love to hear from you at the e-mail address listed below.

WHAT SENTme digging for the quotation again was a very entertaining recent row in the New York Review of Books. The row threatens a resumption of the so-called "Freud wars" of the 1980s and 1990s, which saw pro and anti factions bitterly disputing his reputation and the worth of psychoanalysis generally. Since when there has been an uneasy ceasefire, with occasional skirmishes such as this one – violent enough in the December issue to spill over into two pages of letters.

As in previous conflagrations, the spark was lit by a man named Frederick Crews. An author, critic, and retired English professor, Crews is a former supporter of psychoanalytic methods, who has since become an extreme sceptic on the subject. His latest broadside focused on Freud’s well-known use of cocaine during the late 1890s, the years in which he made his apparent breakthrough with the treatment.

Essentially, Crews suggests that the Freud of this period abandoned proper scientific research in favour of “ungrounded psychological guesswork, insulated from disproof”. And that furthermore, his self-proclaimed epiphanies were, in fact, the worthless products of cocaine-induced euphoria.

Psychoanalysis won Freud “short-cuts to fame”, says Crews, even though “its false therapeutic claims, its indefiniteness, its circular demonstrations, its revolutionary tone, its pretensions to limitless insight, and its recourse to bluffing and slander in place of evidence all pointed to a break with the scientific ethos and a surrender to grandeur on Freud’s part”.

But in damning the man himself, Crews also damns his disciples. After all, since psychoanalysis “went astray from the outset”, he argues, “ ‘psychoanalytic knowledge’ immediately became an oxymoron; and it remains so today, because post-Freudian claims are as anecdotal and unconstrained as their predecessors”.

ALTHOUGH CREWS'Sopinions were already well known, their latest ventilation attracted, in his own description, "many apoplectic blog posts from members of the dwindling psychoanalytic community". The response in the NYROBletters page was more restrained, although the German word gefütterthas been bandied freely and, citing Freud's less-disputed achievements, one indignant defender suggested they were "hardly the work of a deranged cokehead".

The pro-Freudians have scored some minors hits, one of them involving that word, gefüttert. It means "fed", more or less, and Crews had cited Freud himself using it in a letter to his fiancée, when promising that the next time they made love, not only would he be using cocaine to boost his performance, he would have her take the drug too.

Crews chose one of gefüttert's meanings – "to be given fodder, like an animal" – as evidence of Freud's coercive approach to the relationship. Whereas in a more benign meaning – as one pro-Freudian pointed out – the word can also denote feeding a baby or a sick person. Fair enough, maybe, although in the circumstances, it's still not much of a character reference.

As a disinterested (though highly amused) observer, I have to say that Crews was well ahead on points after the last exchanges. Indeed, if it were a boxing match, the referee might have stepped in before now to save the Freudians further punishment.

But of course, if their man really did exempt the Irish en masse from his methods, this is another modern-day conflict on which we should maintain neutrality.

On the other hand, if the psychoanalytical Freud was as big a charlatan as his critics claim, it would be all the more disappointing to find out he never said any such thing about us. Flattering as the supposed quote already is, in a back-handed way, it would be even better if it finally emerges that the emperor of psychoanalysis had no clothes, and that we had been the first to notice.