You imagine, because you have been told, that you live in a society in which certain standards of logic and decency protect all equally, and something called common sense can be relied upon to safeguard you from stupidity and lunacy. You go about your business and life in a cocoon of complacency because of what you have been led to believe. Then, one day, it is shattered for ever.
Several years ago "John" and his wife "Liz" took their young son, "Alan", to see a social worker, a counsellor in the private sector. They had become concerned by a trend of behavioural problems, mainly that Alan was exhibiting aggressive tendencies towards his mother.
Alan attended the social worker over a period of months before she informed John and Liz their son was being sexually abused. She offered as evidence the "hidden meanings" of a number of drawings which Alan had carried out under her supervision: the funnel of a steam train, she explained, was a penis, the steam was semen; a balloon coming out of a car window was a condom; a drawing of a one-eyed man was a representation of a penis.
The social worker then accused John of raping and sexually abusing his son. She said the evidence indicated he had used a condom. Thus began a nightmare, in which a family was torn asunder and a child's innocence destroyed. John was woken up one night by gardai, who took him to the local station in a squad car. He was interrogated for several hours and told he had buggered his son and might as well admit it.
It took five years and tens of thousands of pounds to clear his name. In the end, an independent psychiatrist acting for the family's local health board concluded there was no evidence whatever of abuse. John, now separated, has sole custody of his son. Those involved in making allegations against him have never been called to account for what they did.
John wonders how many more families they, or others like them, have similarly destroyed. He wonders how many men are in prison because of the Freudian "interpretations" offered by such people as a science of child abuse detection.
In the present climate of hysteria about sex abuse, more and more unqualified people are setting themselves up as "counsellors", "therapists" and "psychoanalysts", and routinely going about the destruction of the lives of parents and children through their fanatical adherence to the lunatic, drug addict, occultist and repressed homosexual charlatan, Sigmund Freud.
Such people are called in on a daily basis to assess families and give evidence in court proceedings. But the in camera rule which governs all family matters coming before courts in this State ensures these people and their activities - which are gaining an increasing hold on the consciousness of this society - remain a secret.
From anecdotal evidence, the number of such "experts" is growing rapidly in a sector with minimal regulation and virtually no requirement for qualifications. Anyone tired of their job can set up as a dream therapist, provided they have enough connections in the counselling, mediation or social services sectors to have referred to them unfortunates who have not the faintest idea what they are getting into.
The problem is that the level of awareness in the courts, police and other agencies is inadequate to resist the lure of Freudian voodoo. Because these ideas have no basis, their implausibility is assumed by the uncomprehending as being to do with their profundity and complexity, rather than because they are dangerous claptrap. Anyone querying this nonsense will receive a quizzical look and a question along the lines of: "What are you trying to hide?"
The ideas of Freud are as a secular religion - a self-contained, hermetically sealed ragbag of gobbledygook and cockeyed symbolism, slavishly parroted by followers who refuse to entertain the possibility that what they believe is utter nonsense.
In the US in the 1980s, it is now emerging, Freudian notions about "recovered memory" resulted in the wrongful conviction of hordes of innocent people on trumped-up charges of sexual abuse. In Ireland we face a similar epidemic of injustice into the next generation unless something is done to control the infestation of crackpots giving counselling a bad name.
Freudian "symbols" can be anything and everything. One of Freud's most eminent critics was H.L. Mencken, who resumed: "To Freudian writers the entire language is made up of two groups of symbolic words, half meaning the male, the other the female genitalia. If any words happened to be left over they stand for incest, rape, anus, or faecal association, or the fornicative, generally speaking."
So, if your child brings home from nursery school a picture he or she has drawn of a tree or a spaceship or a mushroom or a lamp-post, put it on the fire without delay, before some expert puts your children into care and you in jail.
Liz, on one occasion, having come under the influence of such theories, attacked John for giving a bottle of Coke to their son, saying the bottle was a coded form of sexual innuendo. This level of insight would be sufficient to qualify her to adjudicate on the difficulties of other families.
Although the drug-addled, sewer-minded, crackpot Freud has long since been rumbled in the US, where most of his ramblings have been discredited, he is only beginning to penetrate the Irish market, so to speak.
His ideas dominate several departments at leading universities, and are promoted by people generally regarded as sane. Such people, reading this, will be puzzled as to why anyone would not immediately see that a child's drawing of a balloon is a representation of a condom. To their minds, only profound ignorance or some malign motive could explain such inability to grasp the "obvious".