The Troubled Mind of Northern Ireland. Raman Kapur and Jim Campbell,  Karnac, 2004

Archbishop Desmond Tutu introduces this book, urging more responsible leadership and ordinary people to create a culture of humanity based on how they relate in everyday life. While he makes no explicit mention of South Africa, the decision to invite him to write the introduction is no doubt intended to draw attention to parallels between South Africa and Northern Ireland. He suggests that Kapur and Campbell provide a model for understanding human destruction that can be universally applied.

Kapur and Campbell's aim in writing this book is to apply concepts derived from Kleinian psychoanalysis to thirty years of troubles in Northern Ireland. This is apparently the first time this has been attempted. Interestingly, in this year's April/May issue of Fortnight Magazine, a local commentary on culture, arts and politics, Partridge writes about a paper presented by Ernest Jones to the British Psychoanalytical Society in June 1922, titled ‘The island of Ireland: a psychoanalytical contribution to political psychology’ (Partridge, 2005). This would have been shortly after the partition of Ireland. Jones is concerned with why England's relationship with Ireland should be more troubled than with Wales and Scotland and focuses on Ireland as an island and the unconscious association of islands with the virgin mother. This, according to Jones, brings the oedipal complex into play and that the quest for unity is also a quest to restore the ideal, unsullied unity of the ‘virginal’ mother-island.

This book has been written over eighty years after Jones' paper and focuses specifically on Northern Ireland and the impact of the ‘recent’ troubles. It draws mainly on Kleinian psychoanalysis. In their introduction the authors draw parallels with the holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda and the Middle East and the dehumanisation that has allowed murdered people to become mere statistics. Their goals are