Giving voice to Irish culture, psyche
Throughout its more than three decades, Boston College’s Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies program has never been strictly limited to the academic realm. Burns Scholars have included librarians, artists, human rights activists, and notable public figures.
This semester, the Burns Scholar program—a collaboration between the Irish Studies Program and University Libraries—has again broken new ground in hosting Eve Watson, an expert in psychoanalytic practice, training, education, and research who co-directs a Dublin clinic and is a practitioner and clinical supervisor.
Watson will present the fall Burns Scholar Lecture on November 12 in the Burns Library Thompson Room at 6 p.m. (preceded by a 5 p.m. reception). The event is free and open to the public.
Burns Scholars typically spend a semester—in some cases, a full academic year—at BC teaching courses, offering public lectures, and working with the resources of the Burns Library in their ongoing research, writing, and creative endeavors related to Irish history, art, and culture.
Although Watson understands that her field might seem an unusual fit for a Burns Scholar, she points out that psychoanalysis readily lends itself to the interdisciplinary approach valued by the program.
“Psychoanalysis since its inception engages with a multiplicity of fields and specialties, including philosophy, theology, critical thinking, and literature, among others,” said Watson, a native of Limerick whose doctorate from University College Dublin was an interdisciplinary mix of psychoanalysis, film and literary analysis, and sexuality studies. “This helps to build a repertoire with which to approach human existence and thought and provides a means with which to query your own discipline. If you look at Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacon, arguably the architects of psychoanalysis, their approach was interdisciplinary: They read widely and thought widely. That is a necessity now more than ever, to keep up with a world that is changing faster and faster.”
Her talk, “Giving Voice to Irish Culture and Psyche: Psychoanalytic, Cinematic, and Literary Reflections,” reflects the interdisciplinary lens she wields in her scholarship, drawing upon history, art, culture, as well as psychoanalysis to examine how the Irish in recent years have revisited, and confronted, darker aspects of Ireland’s past.
She will touch on the writing of authors Anne Enright and Claire Keegan, whose novella Foster was the basis for the 2022 film “The Quiet Girl,” one of several Irish films of the past decade or more Watson also will discuss—others include “Song of the Sea” (2014), “The Banshees of Inisherin” (2022), and “That They May Face the Rising Sun” (2023). These works contain some familiar elements of Irish culture and psychic life, she says—bucolic rural scenes, for example, or the Irish struggle for independence—but these are depicted in more complex, and less romanticized, fashion.
“I want to discuss what makes returning to the past and remaking it so important. Psychoanalysis offers ways to consider exile, exclusion, trauma, and repression and why it is difficult to let these go," says Watson. (Caitlin Cunningham)
This artistic trend reflects a national reckoning on the part of Ireland, according to Watson, in the wake of such momentous events as the collapse of the so-called Celtic Tiger era of economic expansion, revelations of the Magdalene laundries and mother-baby home scandals that revealed systemic mistreatment of women, and the centenary celebration of the 1916 Easter Uprising. Voices from many different sectors have expressed concern over Ireland’s failure to protect the country’s vulnerable and neglected populations, or even acknowledge their perspectives in the country’s history.
“Ireland modernized very quickly, especially in the past 15 or so years, becoming one of the most liberal social democracies, and among the more secular,” said Watson. “But there was a sense of shame about the harm that had been done, how and why it could’ve happened. So, these films—set four or more decades earlier—exemplify how we’re trying to figure this out.
“I want to discuss what makes returning to the past and remaking it so important. Psychoanalysis offers ways to consider exile, exclusion, trauma, and repression and why it is difficult to let these go. Our complicated relationship to language and the ever-changing nature of culture plays a vital role in forms of representation and identity expression.”
Watson is pursuing a similar of line of inquiry and exploration in her course, Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Explorations of Irish Culture and Psyche, which also utilizes films and literature—in this case, she said, to provide an Irish context in considering a radical engagement with the nature of being and subjectivity, and debate paradoxes of freedom, desire, morality, knowledge, sexuality, and culture.
“Recently, we discussed the importance of fairy tales, and I asked each student to bring in their favorite,” she said. “What tends to be overlooked about fairy tales, at least as they were originally told, is that they are an outlet for the inhuman, monstrous side of people—they include some pretty awful stuff, like death, abandonment, and hardship. This can be a great help to children in navigating these difficult themes.
“Also, our family history is often expressed in fictional narratives: We are told stories about how our ancestors lived, the challenges they faced, and that they ‘lived happily ever after,’ and this is not always the case. Films are useful ways of using myths, fairy tales, stories, fictions, and memory to find ways of getting to the truth.”
Watson also is browsing through the collected papers of the late William Richardson, S.J., a renowned philosophy scholar who taught at BC for 25 years and authored a groundbreaking study on philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time was regarded as a central philosophical work of the 20th century.
“BC was not an unknown to me: I’ve visited before and have a number of friends and colleagues here,” she said. “But I feel very fortunate to be here as Burns Scholar and enjoy this community of scholarship and learning.” Her Irish Studies colleagues have made her feel especially welcome and she finds the program’s slate of events and seminars to be “invigorating and brilliant.”
Watson has published numerous essays on psychoanalysis, sexuality, film, culture, and literature, and lectures on various programs in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and health, while overseeing research projects at graduate and undergraduate levels. She has co-edited three books and next year will publish a collection on James Joyce’s writing and her own book on psychoanalysis and film. She is the academic director of the Freud Lacan Institute, and a member of the editorial boards of Lacunae, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and the European Journal of Qualitative Research in Psychotherapy.