'Ireland, Mother Ireland': An Essay in Psychoanalytic Symbolism

On June 21 1922, as the Irish War of Independence was tipping over into the Civil War, - two months later Harry Boland, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins would all be dead - on the longest day of 1922 then, Ernest Jones read a paper to the British Psychoanalytical Society entitled: The island of Ireland: a psychoanalytical contribution to political psychology'.[1] In it, he argued that the geographic fact that Ireland is an island has played an important and underestimated part in the idea that the Irish have formed of their own country.…