Sir, – I read Frank McNally's entertaining article (An Irishman’s Diary, February 7th) on Freud and the origins of the quote that the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis. The article mentioned that Freud had apparently split his psychoanalysis into two categories: the Irish and non-Irish.
Many years ago I did a student exchange in Kollegium Kalksburg in Vienna, where I was improving my German. One morning while speaking to my Austrian friends in class about things Irish people liked to do, I referred to "Die Iren" which I understood to mean "the Irish". For reasons unknown to me at the time, this caused a lot of laughter among my classmates.
It was finally explained to me that "irre" in German means mad or crazy and that my pronunciation was more like "die irren", which in German means the lunatics or the madmen.
It seems to me that Freud’s distinction was most likely between the “mad” and the “non-mad” rather than “Irish” and “non-Irish” but of course, the big joke for my classmates was that to them, the term was interchangeable! – Yours, etc,
KEVIN LYNCH,
Iona Avenue,
Drumcondra, Dublin 9.