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I am reminded of an unforgettable moment in my London-based therapy, some ten years ago, when I announced I was considering taking up a lecturing post in Northern Ireland. My Jungian analyst seemed to jump out of her chair as she retorted: ‘You must be mad!’ It was a moment I have never forgotten although its meanings seem to multiply as the years go by.
A necessary if not sufficient condition for developing a psycho-analytic movement is, I suppose, a single psycho-analyst. That is what we have in Northern Ireland, a ratio of some 1:11/Z million. And we have been well served with Dr Tom Freeman who settled here - if that is the right word - in 1968 (Freeman 1988).
‘Let a man build a better mouse-trap than his neighbour and the world shall beat a broad path to his door, though he live in the heart of a deep wood’, my father used to say to me as a young boy, echoing his own father's words and those of Emerson.
I hope this is a not inappropriate metaphor to convey something of the position of those half-dozen or so of us, who slowly but surely have found their way to Dr Freeman's door since the early 1980's, determined to do what we could and can to make connections with the world of psycho-analysis, and to establish something of a psycho-analytic movement in Northern Ireland, our location and circumstances notwithstanding.
In short, we wish to connect but how? How are we doing it? What are the difficulties? What are the excitements?
It should be evident that our present problems are first and foremost ones of trainings and practical possibilities. Whilst it has been possible for a group of us to undergo a personal classical analysis, the opportunity of weekly supervision of two training cases in classical analysis by two different training analysts has not been possible to date. Our one analyst has both analysed us and supervised our first cases.
There are, of course, precedents for this system of training. As Dr Freeman puts it, with a glint in his eyes: ‘We follow the “Hu