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Anna Burns' book Milkman felt astoundingly relevant when it was published in 2018. It tells the story of a young woman growing up amidst the Troubles in Northern Ireland during the 1970s and is a brilliant depiction of how the strains of a traumatized society impact the psyche. Since then, the novel has won the Man Booker Prize and the world has tumbled even further toward the fraught polarization the book captures. In particular, Brexit threatens to awaken the light sleep of the Troubles and rekindle the conflict the novel recounts. This is a horrible prospect: a 2008 study found 39% of Northern Ireland's population experienced at least one traumatic event during the Troubles, with the legacy that the country has the highest rate of psychiatric illness in the UK, 25% higher than any other country in that region (Bunting et al., 2012). This is a country that desperately needs healing, not more trauma. Another terrible irony is that the same type of polarization that tore the country apart is on the rise throughout the world. As the Northern Irish poet and novelist Nick Laird writes in a recent New York Review of Books article: “we already did identity politics in Northern Ireland: it didn't work out so well. And while we were waiting around for Northern Ireland to become more like the rest of the world, the rest of the world turned into Northern Ireland: partisan, oppositional, identity-focused” (2020, p. 52).
As the world becomes increasingly polarized, and environmental devastation due to climate change amps up the stakes, many more communities mimic the stultifying dividedness Burns so vividly describes. The strains inherent in these communities, and the pressure that places on individuals' psyches becomes increasingly relevant. As analysts and therapists in this world, we need wise, articulate guides—like Burns' unnamed narrator of Milkman—to inform us about the experience of our patients and indeed ourselves. We all need to ask and strive to answer: how do we ad