Barry O’Donnell – What Is Anxiety
 
Issue 64 Spring 2017 (Pages 1-13)
 
In his comprehensive and scholarly Hearing Voices, The History of Psychiatry in Ireland Professor Brendan Kelly writes ‘In the early twentieth century, the preeminent intellectual movement of the day, psychoanalysis, conspicuously failed to grab the imagination of psychiatrists in Ireland as much as it did elsewhere.’  I argue here that we do not have to make the same mistake twice, that psychiatry and mental health work in Ireland, in the early twenty first century can make it their business to draw from the well of psychoanalysis with the confidence that it can provide an understanding of, and a clinical technique for, the handling of aspects of mental life that otherwise escape attention and care.