James Joyce's work has long held a fascination for psychoanalysts. Barbara Clinton previews a conference which will explore the link between his literature and the workings of the unconscious.
James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is, for many, the most difficult and inaccessible work, not just of Joyce himself but also of the entire canon of English literature. And yet the language used and explored in that book has, for the past 30 years, been instrumental in the quest to decipher what Van Morrison might describe as the inarticulate speech of the heart, or of the mind.
As part of that quest and to coincide with Bloomsday, around 200 psychoanalysts will converge on Dublin this month for a four-day meeting to examine The Joy(ce) of Language. Professionals from Ireland, Britain, France, the US, Australia and South America will ponder the psychological and literary influence of Joyce in understanding human action and thought.
Joyce was so successful throughout his work, but particularly in Finnegans Wake, at depicting the language of what psychoanalysis refers to as the unconscious, that he continues to be influential for psychoanalysts in trying to understand normality versus psychosis, for instance, where the person is overwhelmed by language.
The Dublin meeting marks the 30th anniversary of an address in 1975 in Paris by the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, in which he spoke of the link between Joyce's texts and language. Lacan met Joyce once as a young man.
"Lacan felt that Joyce's use of the English language, particularly in Finnegans Wake, is evocative of unconscious thinking," says Dr Patricia McCarthy, a member of the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland (APPI). The association, along with Analyse Freudienne from France, Argentina's Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires and the Brazilian Intersecção Psicanalítica do Brasil, is behind this year's Dublin symposium.
"Lacan felt Joyce provided another model for the nonsense of the unconscious - that which absolutely defies sense. Joyce had worked this out in his art and was ahead of us all in that regard."
Psychoanalysis is a relatively new discipline in Ireland but is attracting increasing interest from health administrators here.
The Department of Health is funding the Dublin Castle venue for this year's meeting, and Minister Tim O'Malley is hosting the official reception on Bloomsday.
Keynote speakers from the world of psychoanalysis, psychiatry and literature will address the meeting, including Prof Seamus Deane from University College Dublin (Joyce, History and Mass Consciousness: The Proteus episode in Ulysses).
From Trieste, John McCourt's address is entitled In Freudian Footsteps: Joyce in Triestine Mitteleuropa. Terence Killeen and Cormac Gallagher are also keynote speakers.
Among the themes to be explored over the four days are The Question of the Father, Writing and Language, Psychosis and Psychiatry and The End of Analysis.
"Psychoanalysis assumes that there is no such thing as a cure for the complications attached to living - extraordinarily difficult to convey in a quick-fix world," says McCarthy.
"We go against the tide in that very much and so we hold out for something very, very precious which is to do with the freedom possible to you in having, as Freud would say, negotiated your Oedipus Complex - a process about relinquishing your family of origin and taking up a place in the world in your own right.
"That is what analysis deals with. That is its promise.
"Psychoanalysis is for very few - for the person who has a question - why do I exist or, irrespective of my gender, am I a man or a woman - the big questions for us all. That's our 'specialism'."
One of the dominant symptoms of individual unhappiness in Irish society today is the high incidence of suicide, particularly among young men. Dr Kevin Malone, professor of psychiatry at St Vincent's University Hospital, Dublin, will explore this theme in a presentation.
Given Joyce's complex relationship with language it is not surprising that a number of South American countries, generally regarded as the home of magic realism, will be well represented in Dublin over the four days. But, according to Dr McCarthy, we Irish have strong claims to a similar heritage.
"Other cultures appear to embrace the unconscious much more readily than we do," says Dr McCarthy. "Perhaps our post-colonial inheritance still inhibits us a bit but we are much more in tune with the unconscious if you think of us as Celts and Gaelic. And, of course, our continental inheritance must be part of what made Joyce an exile in Europe."