Freud in Dublin? The Formation of Psychoanalysis in Ireland, c.1928–1993

On 26 June 1933, Samuel Beckett’s father, William, died of a heart attack, and during the following months, the 27-year-old writer began to suffer from panic attacks and depression. By the end of the year he was experiencing a range of physical problems including cysts and boils that did not respond to medication, and he woke frequently in the night with a pounding heart and drenched in sweat, an experience so disturbing that he was only able to sleep if his brother, Frank, slept in the same bed as him. The crisis became acute one winter afternoon, as Beckett explained:

Bion was nine years older than Beckett and, after qualifying as a psychiatrist from University College Hospital in London in 1930, he worked privately for two years before joining the staff of the Tavistock clinic as an assistant doctor in 1932. The Tavistock had been set up in 1920 to offer psychoanalytic psychotherapy to out-patients who could not afford to pay for private treatment, and J.A. Hadfield, Bion's own 'therapist' for seven or eight years, was a major influence on the 'reductive' analysis then in vogue at the clinic. The aim of the treatment was to use free association and dream analysis, but not transference, to discover the links between a symptom in the present and a traumatic inner experience in the past. Bion himself was critical in later life of his early training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, dubbing Hadfield 'Mr Feel-It-in-the-past' because he used this phrase whenever Bion complained of an unpleasant experience. 3 When Beckett was 'analysed' during 1934 and 1935, then, Bion was still a trainee who had not yet been analysed himself, and he probably practised a Hadfield-inspired psychoanalytic psychotherapy at that time.
Although Beckett and Thompson believed that psychoanalysis was illegal in Dublin in 1933, there actually was a practising psychoanalyst living just a few miles from Beckett's mother's house at Cooldrinagh on Kerrymount Avenue in Foxrock, at nearby 2 Belgrave Terrace in Monkstown. Jonty Hanaghan (1887Hanaghan ( -1967) was a native of Birkenhead, who had lectured at Fellowship of Reconciliation meetings on a visit to Dublin in the winter of 1917-18 and then moved permanently to Monkstown with his second wife, Mary Webb, and four daughters in 1928. Between 1928 and his death on Christmas Eve 1967, Hanaghan practised as a psychoanalyst from the consulting room on the first floor of his house on Belgrave Terrace and probably analysed about 200 people during his career. In 1942 he founded the Irish Psycho-Analytic Association, and he also gave numerous public talks on psychoanalysis in Dublin, often to the Philosophical Society at Trinity College, Dublin and to the 'Group' that he founded which met every Saturday night in Monkstown.
Unlike Bion, Hanaghan had been psychoanalysed by a recognized analyst, Douglas Bryan (1879-1955), a Leicester-born GP who had been analysed by Freud himself in Vienna, and was a founding member and honorary secretary (after 1930 treasurer) of the British Psychoanalytical Society between 1919 and 1937. By the early 1920s, Bryan was a psychoanalyst in private practice at 72 Wimpole Street in London. When in 1922 Jonty Hanaghan wrote to Ernest Jones (founder and president of the British Psychoanalytical Society 1919-44, and also at this point President of the International Psychoanalytic Association) asking to join the British Psychoanalytical Society, Jones recommended that Hanaghan undergo an analysis with Bryan. 4 Over the next few years Hanaghan had a two-year analysis with Bryan which -at that time -was regarded as sufficient training to become a practising psychoanalyst. Beckett did not realise it in the dark days of late 1933, but he could have had a Freudian psychoanalysis, five 50-minute sessions each day of the week (except the weekend) on the couch, from an analyst who had received a better psychoanalytic training than that which Bion had received (at that point), and for a fraction of the cost, just three and a half miles from his home in Dublin.
Beckett was not alone in his assumption about the absence of psychoanalysis in Ireland at this period, and indeed the same assumption might easily be made today. There is, as yet, very little written about the career of Jonty Hanaghan or about the history of psychoanalysis in Ireland. Psychoanalysis in Ireland is arguably as unknown in the historiography of twentieth-century Ireland, or the historiography of psychoanalysis, as it was when Beckett was seeking an analysis in Dublin in 1933. We find no mention of Ireland in Peter Kutter's 1992 edited collection, Psychoanalysis International: A Guide to Psychoanalysis Throughout the World. 5 There is one pioneering article on Hanaghan published by the Dublin-based psychoanalyst and writer Ross Skelton in The Crane Bag in 1983, which argues that Hanaghan 'was the first psychoanalyst to work in Ireland and the subsequent development of the science of psychoanalysis in Ireland must proceed with a good consciousness of roots and tradition.' 6 In the section on Ireland in The Edinburgh International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis, which he also edited, Skelton acknowledges Hanaghan as 'the founder of psychoanalysis in the Republic of Ireland'. 7 There are also a number of recent discussions of Hanaghan's theoretical contribution, especially in the work of Rob Weatherill and Helen Sheehan, and John Forrester and Laura Cameron's Freud in Cambridge includes an account of a series of lectures that Hanaghan delivered in Cambridge in 1921 (and this article follows the example set by Forrester and Cameron by exploring the dissemination of psychoanalytical ideas in a region of Britain and Ireland). 8 For other scholars, however, the decisive moment in the 'formation' of analysis in Ireland came much later. Barry O'Donnell, a Lacanian analyst in private practice and director of Psychotherapy programmes in the school of medicine at University College, Dublin, argues that psychoanalysis was not 'formed' in Ireland until the pioneering Lacanian analyst, Cormac Gallagher, brought Lacan to Ireland in 1974: Any discussion of psychoanalysis in Ireland has to give a central place to the work of Cormac Gallagher. He introduced Lacanian psychoanalysis into Ireland in the 1970s. Before this decisive action by Gallagher, the Irish Psycho-Analytic Association (IPAA) had been set up by Jonathan Hanaghan in the 1940s. . .Nonetheless, the Monkstown group, as it has come to be called, despite efforts to do so, cannot be said to have established enduring structures for the wider transmission of psychoanalytic teaching practice that compares with the effects of Cormac Gallagher's impact. 9 Unlike Hanaghan, Gallagher was an Irishman, born in Cork in 1938 and reared and educated in the city before joining the Jesuits in 1956. While attending a year-long course in Paris in 1969 to assess the psychological suitability of individuals for religious life, and guided by the senior Jesuit and Lacanian analyst, Louis Beirnaert, he began an analysis with Christian Simatos which changed the course of his life.
Rather than continuing his training as a clinical psychologist and beginning a doctorate at Fordham University, Gallagher undertook four years of intensive three times a week analysis on the couch with Simatos, while teaching at a secondary school in Paris. In 1974, he returned to Dublin and effectively brought Lacanian analysis to Ireland. Through many far-reaching initiatives over more than three decades, including working in private practice as a Lacanian analyst (still ongoing), working as a clinical psychologist at St. Vincent's hospital (until retirement in 2006), co-founding an MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at UCD in 1984, becoming a member of the Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in 1986, and founding the Association of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland in 1993, Gallagher has made a major contribution to the development of psychoanalysis in Ireland.
In this article I will explore the various initiatives of Hanaghan and Gallagher, compare their impact on the development of psychoanalysis in Ireland during the twentieth century, and consider what the arrival of Freud in Dublin might tell us about Ireland's relationship with its unconscious. In particular, I am interested in exploring the reception of psychoanalysis in Ireland in the context of the evolving influence of the Catholic church, which was at the high point of its power when Hanaghan arrived in 1928, and at the beginning of its long decline when Gallagher brought Lacan to Dublin in 1974. The kinds of work that Hanaghan and Gallagher and their followers were doing with their analysands changed as a result of the loosening of Catholic influence, especially over sexual behaviour and as priestly advice in the confessional was gradually replaced (for some) by psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the consulting room.
JONATHAN HANAGHAN AND THE MONKSTOWN GROUP, c.1928-84 Jonathan (always known as Jonty) Hanaghan was born on 20 April 1887 in Birkenhead to Reginald Thomas Hanaghan (1853Hanaghan ( -1939, a Birkenhead native whose father was Irish and mother was Scottish, and Jane Irving (born 1854), who was Scottish. 10 Jonty was the eldest son of nine, and he later recalled that his early life had been extremely difficult, telling Ludovic Kennedy in an interview for "Own Choice" broadcast on ITV on 26 June 1966: My father had been in the army for many years, twelve or fifteen years, and when he came out he was completely unfit economically to meet the tragic economic situation of unemployment. . .There were no skilled jobs, so he had to do the very best he could for a number of years, and the poverty was so great that, after his marriage when I was born, for example, they were compelled to live in one room, a very poor room, a cellar room, down in the dark, and frequently we were very short of food. . .sometimes for a day or two we didn't even have bread. 11 Reginald had served in the army between 1874 and 1886; in 1891 he was listed as a baker, in 1901 as a church clerk, and in 1911 as a school caretaker. 12 Jonty gained a primary education at a Church of England school, but by the age of fourteen had already left school and worked as an organ tuner. He was later awarded a scholarship to attend Fircroft College in Selly Oak, Birmingham, established by George Cadbury in 1908, which he attended for three years; during the Great War he became a conscientious objector and joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation to campaign for peace. As the son of an unskilled rank-and-file soldier who grew up in poverty, Hanaghan was, if not unique, surely one of very few analysts during the first half of the twentieth century from a working-class background.
In 1915, Jonty married Lillie Wood in Birkenhead, and his first daughter Lorraine was born in Manchester in 1918 -two days before the end of the Great War -while he was working as a postman. 13 Around the time of Lorraine's birth, Jonty also discovered psychoanalysis: I remember he came over and he gave this talk -this is before I was bornabout reconciling after the troubles here in Ireland -the War of Independence and all, you know, the Irish history. . .my mother was a Quaker and she went, I think with her mother, to hear Dad lecture and she went up and asked him a question afterwards and that's how they met. 17 After Lillie's death he met Mary again, and they were later married on 28 March 1923. By 1925, Mary and Jonty were living in London, where he worked as a carpenter; their first daughter Jean was born in Hendon in that year, and Runa, their second, was born in Barnet in 1927. 18 In July 1923, Ernest Jones wrote to Hanaghan suggesting that he undertake an analysis either with Douglas Bryan or John Flugel, and -at some point between the autumn of 1923 and 1928 -Hanaghan 'took two years with him [Bryan], an hour a day. And there I got the basic insight from the patient's point of view, in the meantime, of course, doing all the theoretical work.' 19 According to Jonty, Jones: said to me, 'I read your letter and I'll be frank with you. I'm a Gael and you're a Gael and when I read your letter I thought this was a chap who had genuinely been in this thing, who really understands it and has been really reading it, now will you take a training? It would be lovely if you could go to Ireland!' 20 Jonty had an Irish grandfather, he had visited Ireland, and he had an Irish wife, and now Ernest Jones -keen for psychoanalysis to be spread around the worldwas encouraging him to bring psychoanalysis to Ireland. It should be noted that this was how Hanaghan remembered it in 1966, but in fact Jones had encouraged Hanaghan to take a medical training first -which he opted not to do -and Jonty did not apply to do the formal training set up by the BPAS in 1926. 21 Between 1919 and 1926, anyone wishing to become an analyst with the BPAS would have to apply to become an associate member and if he or she wished to practice clinically would read a clinical paper to the BPAS; but Jonty chose not to do this. 22 In 1928, Jonty and Mary along with Lorraine, Lillie, Jean and Runa moved to the former Webb family home, 2 Belgrave Terrace in Monkstown (where a fifth daughter, Rosalind, was born in October 1930). Soon afterwards he began practising privately as a psychoanalyst from his consulting room on the first floor of the family house. I asked Rosalind if her father practised as an analyst during the 1930s: Oh gosh yes, oh gosh yes, all my childhood. . .He was doing it all my life. We used to let all the patients in. We didn't have anyone to open the door or anything. . .We used to know all the patients, you know. . .and the patients could drop in at any time. . .All the patients came to the house -we never had a plaque on the wall because mental illness was taboo, you know. 23 Hanaghan's psychoanalytic practice was clearly based on his own analysis by Douglas Bryan and his reading of Freud. Jonty explained his technique himself in 1966: 'Well, we get the chap to lie on a couch, to relax, to withhold all ordinary criticism and to tell us the free associations that come up into his mind. Through our training these free associations reveal the conflict that is in the mind, and then we get to work'. 24 Dennis Duncan -who later trained as a psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytic Society and was analysed by Freud's grandson, Ernst Freud, in London in the 1960s, but was first analysed by Jonty in the mid-1950s -recalled that: He had an ordinary psychoanalytic practice. . .He read Freud and he knew Freud. I mean, he knew his writings. . .So that his way of working was very much the way Freud would have worked, say, at the turn of the century or in the first decade of the century . . . If you remember, in the early days, Freud mainly recovered childhood memories and with the person's current narrative, in terms of the narrative of their childhood years, and that was the sort of analysis he did . . . [Hanaghan's] analytic thoughts, technique, knowledge would have stopped about the dream book . . . He was a good psychotherapist, he was barely an analyst in that he was pre-the transference. I mean it was around about 1910 that Freud started to realise that the various mediations between the past and the present went through the way that the patient was thinking about the analyst, what he was making of the analyst, now Jonty didn't have that, so a person could say that he wasn't an analyst because he didn't have access to the transference, but it would be fair to say that he was an analyst as Freud was before the transference became central. 25 Jonty's analytical practice, then, was essentially the kind of analysis practised by a member of the BPAS during the early 1920s, and very much like that of Freud himself during the first decade of the twentieth century in Vienna.
Hanaghan also held meetings of the 'Group' every Saturday night throughout the year in Belgrave Terrace, and later Mounttown House, where anyone could attend to hear a lecture about psychoanalysis and be offered a cup of tea and a piece of cake. Meetings were usually attended by thirty to forty people, and everybody was welcome, including -as we might expect -members of both the Protestant and Catholic middle class, but also more marginal groups: those traumatized by the recent Irish revolution (including Gerald Grimley, a member of the IRA, and Jack Maxwell, whose uncle, a Protestant landowner, was forced out of King's county by the IRA in 1921); artists and writers (including Patrick Kavanagh); men and women who were homosexual; survivors of industrial schools; members of the Dublin Jewish community; and black immigrants, many of whom were students. 26 Tolani Asuni, for example, who later became Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Ibadan, was a Nigerian member of the Group who was analysed by Rupert Strong in the 1950s, and has been described in The Psychiatrist as 'probably the first African analysand'. 27 Abdul Fatai Dabiri was another Trinity College, Dublin student who joined the Group and was analysed by Rupert Strong before returning to Nigeria to become a judge. All of Hanaghan's talks and lectures, as well as his artistic and cultural initiatives, meant that he became well-known in Dublin and beyond, and there was no shortage of analysands. When Jan Imich, who had survived the Holocaust as a child in Poland, moved to Dublin in the late 1950s for analysis because he could not afford analysis in London, he found that Hanaghan, who worked ten hours a day and six days a week, had no room for new patients. (Imich was analysed instead by Rupert Strong, to whom he paid £1 a session when the going rate in London then was £6). 28 Because of the appetite for analysis in Dublin, Hanaghan began to train some of his analysands as analysts in the late 1930s and early 1940s. By 1949, he had trained three men whom he had first encountered in the north-west of England, Rupert Strong (1911-84), Wilfrid Bowell (1910-83), and Gordon Fletcher (1912-77), and by 1963, he had also trained an American, Richard Cameron . 29 The training was rudimentary in comparison to what is now practised and was primarily based around the analysis of the individual. Dennis Duncan recalled that: 'There wasn't really a training. You got your analysis and then you started to take patients and that was all there was . . . There weren't even study groups'. 30 Hanaghan's training of the other Monkstown analysts took the same form as the analysis he had gone through with Douglas Bryan, but since Hanaghan's departure from London in the 1920s, there had been considerable developments in the training of British analysts. A formal training was introduced by the BPAS in 1926, based on the tripartite Eitingon model, involving personal analysis, supervision by a different analyst, and theoretical study. Hanaghan embarked on training the first generation of Monkstown analysts without adhering to these core ideas, and his training methods, while consistent with what he regarded as his own training in the 1920s, represented a departure from the evolving British psychoanalytical practice.
Although Hanaghan's early training of analysts was only of men, and usually based solely on their personal analysis, women were beginning to be trained by the 1960s, when Mary Miles, a native of Southampton who had been a member of the Salvation Army in Kenya, became one of what Hanaghan called 'the baby analysts'. 31 During the 1970s, other women were trained by Rupert Strong and Wilfrid Bowell, including Mary Pyle and Felicity Casserly. Even so, there was a prevailing patriarchal view, articulated by Hanaghan himself, that women were unable to tolerate negative transference in sessions. 32 This view set the Monkstown Group apart from their British colleagues in the 1940s, where women, notably Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, were the dominant members of the BPAS.
Hanaghan began to develop his own psychoanalytic ideas, based on a close reading of Freud and combined with his personal experience of Christianity (close to Quakerism); these ideas were eventually published in Evolution, Society and Revelation (Runa Press, Dublin, 1957) and Freud and Jesus (Runa Press, Dublin, 1966). In 1966, Jonty recalled that before the beginning of the Great War, he had a religious experience that changed his life. After attending a Church of England school as a child, he began to 'doubt religion' during his adolescence and when he was about twenty had 'what you now call a day-dream, but in ancient days they called it a vision' resulting in a life-long commitment to belief in God. 33 In Evolution, Society and Revelation Hanaghan integrated this spiritual experience into his understanding of psychoanalysis, developing the idea of an 'ego-ideal' within the self, which he described as a kind of 'innate inner light fore-reaching into the future and challenging the past'. 34 This ego-ideal or inner light represented an internalized God within the ego of each person, according to Hanaghan, and this theoretical innovation differentiated Hanaghan from Freud (and was based less on what Hanaghan discovered in clinical practice than on his personal belief). In terms of his actual practice of psychoanalysis, however, it would appear that Jonty's sessions were largely based on his own analysis by Bryan, and -according to Dennis Duncan -'every now and then [in sessions] he got chatty and when he got chatty he was chatty about his philosophy and prophecy and so on' after which Hanaghan would then return to the more Freudian work of listening to the analysand's free associations. 35 The Irish Psycho-Analytic Association (IPAA) was established in 1942 by Hanaghan and Rupert Strong, and three years later Hanaghan tried to affiliate the IPAA to the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS) and the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). Just before the end of the Second World War, Jonty met Anna Freud in London. According to Rosalind, Anna Freud allocated half an hour for her meeting but it went on for four hours, and this is the meeting where it is generally accepted that Anna Freud told Jonty that she regarded him as an important successor to her father. 36 Apparently, at this meeting Hanaghan requested Anna Freud to advocate for the Irish analysts to be accepted by the British Psychoanalytical Society, but Ernest Jones, president of the BPAS and the IPA, rejected this request. Jones's response to correspondence from Strong in 1945 suggests the nature of the differences between them: I should be very glad to learn more about the new venture. You will allow me to hope that your Society will pursue a less isolated course than we are accustomed to with other Irish proceedings since I am sure you realise that contacts in scientific research are all important in maintaining steady progress . . . Will you be good enough to send me another list [of members], and also to tell me how many, if any, of the members have acquired their knowledge by working with any recognized psycho-analyst. 37 It would seem that Strong was unable to produce an acceptable list of trained members. At the IPA's Zurich Congress in 1949, Jones stated that: 'An Irish Psycho-Analytical Society was founded in 1945. It appears to be doing some good work, but since none of its members have been analysed, let alone trained, we did not feel justified in recognizing them.' 38 This rejection -which did not acknowledge that Jonty had had an analysis with a member of the BPAS -marked a key turning point in the history of psychoanalysis in Ireland. Hanaghan and his colleagues were confronted with two options: either to be analysed and trained by the BPAS or to pursue their own separate path.
After 1949, the Monkstown analysts rejected the British Psychoanalytical Society -which had largely dictated their path up to that point -and began to develop their own distinctive practices and ideas. The BPAS did not make things easy for the Monkstown group, which was one of very few attempts to practice psychoanalysis anywhere in Britain or Ireland outside North London before the 1960s (Michael Balint established a psychoanalytic training in Manchester between 1939 and 1945; Ronald Fairbairn practised psychoanalysis privately in Edinburgh between 1924 and the early 1960s; and Melanie Klein practised at Pitlochry in 1940-41). Travel to London for further training and analysis would have been expensive, and none of the group were making a substantial income from analysis (partly because they were providing virtually free analysis to many people, and partly because Ireland was one of the poorest countries in Europe). Arguably, the Monkstown analysts had little choice but to pursue their own path after 1949. A key step on this journey was the establishment of the Mounttown House commune in January 1949, in which three of the analysts and their families lived together, partly in order to conserve their very limited financial resources (Gordon Fletcher never lived at Mounttown). For Hanaghan, the commune represented a 'beloved community' where each person would be encouraged to become their best selves (to be, as he put it, 'forth-giving') and where the sadistic, castrating super-ego of authority figures and institutions that he perceived in British and Irish society would be replaced by a much more benign and supportive communal environment. 39 Some of the members of the commune practised open marriages, and, at some point, each of the three analysts at Mounttown had a relationship with either the wife or adult child of one of the other analysts, or with the wife of one of the psychiatrists who were also members of the wider Group (although in Hanaghan's case this happened after he had left Mounttown). One of Hanaghan's distinctive ideas that developed alongside his psychoanalytic thinking was that people should be free to express their love in a sexual way with as many other consenting adults as they wished; but this idea caused serious problems at Mounttown. 40 By 1955, following the temporary breakdown of relationships between some of as an attempt to force psychoanalysis out of Ireland, and it was demolished so that a housing estate could be built. 41 The practice of open marriage that appears to have brought about the end of the commune as initially conceived does seem to symbolize some of the problems that began to develop with the Monkstown analysts. As the profession of psychoanalysis developed in London, with more emphasis on training, supervision, study groups and on the analysts' use of the transference and counter-transference, the keeping of boundaries had become very important. At Monkstown, where analysts and analysands frequently socialized together or met at the Group, and where patients gossiped with each other, boundaries were not kept. The blurring of the boundaries between their marriages seems to be a part of the way in which boundaries were not kept in their psychoanalytical practice either. In the early 1970s, for example, when Anne Fitzsimons was being analysed by a member of the Group, she felt that 'boundaries were not as secure as they might have been. . .with any of them. . .you could feel it leaking. . .People seemed to know things that were quite surprising about other people.' 42 The Mounttown House experiment could be regarded either as Hanaghan and the Monkstown Group deliberately withdrawing to the margins of Dublin society, or as a self-protective response to attacks on psychoanalysis by both the Catholic church and the Irish state by providing the analysts with a kind of safety in numbers. Rupert Strong told an Irish Times journalist in 1977, 'Jonathan Hanaghan was the constant butt of attacks by Catholic Churchmen, who saw Freud as an atheist Jew who sought control of innocent minds in therapeutic sessions. Advertisements for meetings of the [Irish Psycho-Analytic] Association were refused by the [news]papers and there were efforts to have Mr Hanaghan deported to his native England.' 43 In 1959, after one of Rupert Strong's analysands tragically committed suicide, the Dublin county coroner blamed psychoanalysis, which he described as 'a dangerous practice' and depositions were sent to the Minister 'to see whether any action might be deemed necessary' but none was taken. 44 Although some ordained members of the Catholic church were interested parties who discussed analysis with members of the Group, the Catholic hierarchy was strongly opposed to Hanaghan and the Monkstown analysts. Following a conference in Dublin on 'The Priest and Mental Health', the Reverend E.F. O'Doherty, Professor of Logic and Psychology at UCD, explained that 'a most important document has been issued by the Holy Office forbidding priests to practice psychoanalysis . . . In addition, the prohibition also extends to priests and religious seeking the aid of psychoanalysis'. 45 Hanaghan acknowledged that all of the Irish churches had opposed his work: 'I met opposition. I have had sermons preached against me from several pulpits and I heard about these sermons although I never attended them.' 46 When his close colleague, Rupert Strong, became engaged to Eithne O'Connell in the early 1940s against the wishes of her parents, Hanaghan provided a home for them and thereby incurred the wrath of the Catholic church. O'Connell's parents were determined to stop their daughter from marrying a Protestant (then completely unacceptable to some in Catholic Ireland), and Rosalind Hanaghan recalled that: He [Rupert] brought Eithne out to our house and my Mum was still alive at the time, I think, and she just came and lived with us while she was pregnant, you know. . .At any rate, the first thing that happened, her mother came up and she wouldn't go with her mother, she was afraid she would be put in an asylum, especially if her mother knew she was pregnant. So, then nuns came up, first of all, and Eithne wouldn't go with them and the next thing, I remember this vividly, priests came, about six priests came, and they stood on the doorstep and Dad stood at the door and didn't invite them in. . .I was both ashamed, embarrassed and extremely proud of him all at the one time. Eithne slipped out the back door. . .in case they pushed their way in. . .and Dad defied them. . .and in the chapel. . .in Monkstown, you know the local Catholic church, our home was said to be a den of iniquity. I never forgot that, and I thought they'd take Dad away, they never did. I have huge respect for him now standing up. 47 Hostility to psychoanalysis for religious reasons was an issue not just for individuals but across the medical professions. Dennis Duncan, who, as we have seen, studied medicine at Trinity College, Dublin and became a psychiatrist at Grangegorman in the late 1950s as well as being a member of the Group and a trainee psychoanalyst, recalled what the Dublin medical establishment was like at that time: In the 1950s and, my God, I can't imagine in the 1930s, Ireland was a medieval Catholic throwback . . . it was out of the middle ages so although it [psychoanalysis] wouldn't have been banned, it would have been a totally tabooed, forbidden philosophy . . . [When I was at] my first mental hospital [working as a psychiatrist] . . . the first staff nurse got chatting to me and he said 'I understand that you follow Freud' and I said 'yeah' and he said, 'You know what he said, he said that a little baby sucking on his mother's breast, that's sex, and he said that a little boy loving his mother, that's sex. He was a sex maniac.' Now he [the staff nurse] spoke for the way people thought, that was what was commonly thought, and what was more intellectually thought was that it was a challenge to Catholicism. Freud was very bad news for the same sort of reason in Vienna. It was a desecration of the innocence of childhood and this wasn't formalized in Ireland but it was the atmosphere in which the analysts worked in. They were bizarre outsiders and they were all English so they were outsiders. 48 It is also clear that the Catholic church exercised a great deal of control and influence over the medical establishment. On one occasion, early in his career, Duncan recalls: I was houseman in the big hospital in Grangegorman on night duty and my boss [a senior psychiatrist who was about to retire] rang me and said, 'There's been a woman brought in to be certified -she's living with a priest.' So, a woman came in and she was as sane as me, so I rang up my boss, 'cos I was quite new to the thing, and I said, 'This woman isn't psychotic in any way' and he said to me 'What do you mean she's not psychotic? She's living with a priest!' It is striking that a senior psychiatrist at St. Brendan's hospital -who would have completed a medical degree -could still assume that a woman cohabiting with a priest and in a sexual relationship with him must obviously be psychotic (although this could also be regarded as part of a wider assumption in Ireland at that time that mental hospitals were places where people -especially women -who were threatening conventional Catholic morality could be legitimately incarcerated). Duncan told me that the Dublin medical system of the 1950s 'was a hard place to be a Freudian in'. 49 In the years after Jonty's death in 1967, the IPAA became fixated on Hanaghan's ideas to the exclusion of any other psychoanalytic theories, including those of Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott, none of whom Hanaghan mentioned in several hundred lectures on analysis given to the group between the 1940s and 1967. 50 Mary Pyle remembers her analyst telling her that the only authors she needed to read were 'Hanaghan, Freud and Jesus', and she describes Hanaghan as 'a guru like no other' and that 'they all became gurus, all of them. [They believed] that they had the right idea, that they knew it all.' 51 Many younger trainees found this an inhibiting environment and, after the deaths of the senior Monkstown analysts -Gordon Fletcher in 1977, Wilfrid Bowell in 1983 and Rupert Strong in 1984 -some of the next generation looked for an alternative professional organisation to the IPAA. Rob Weatherill, one of the trainee analysts who emerged from the Monkstown Group in the early 1970s, recalls: Hanaghan became . . . more or less an embarrassment to the later analysts who wanted to be respected by, you know, analysts in Britain -the independent tradition -who came back and forth to Ireland quite a lot, and then, later, the French, Lacan and so on, all those French Lacanian analysts . . . Hanaghan was you could say killed off really . . . Then a younger generation which would be my age group and slightly older decided that they wanted to train, they wanted to practice, they were keen and they started to look elsewhere, they started to read other analysts, brought over people from Britain and . . . some of those people formed a separate group called the Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, the IFPP, and that group basically did not invite the Hanaghan group to join because they felt, with some justification, that they wouldn't be able to speak freely, that they'd constantly be told, 'Oh, but Hanaghan says this, Hanaghan says that. . .' 52 It was against this background that the Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy was established in 1986, and it quickly attracted many of the younger analysts to its membership. The founders of the IFPP were Mary Pyle, who had been analysed by Wilfrid Bowell; Michael Fitzgerald, a County Clare-born psychiatrist who had been trained as a psychoanalyst in London (his supervisors were Paula Heimann and John Klauber); Tom McGrath, an Irish Jesuit, who had been analysed at Innsbruck in German by an analyst from the Caruso school; and John Alderdice, a Belfast-born psychiatrist who had been analysed by Tom Freeman (1919-2002), the founder of psychoanalysis in Northern Ireland. The Irish Psycho-Analytical Association continued after Rupert Strong's death in 1984, and it still continues today, but it has become only one of a growing number of influential psychoanalytic organizations in Dublin. Cormac Gallagher also joined the IFPP and sat on the editorial board of its journal between 1986 and 1993; and it is to his life and career that we will now turn.

CORMAC GALLAGHER AND THE INTRODUCTION OF LACANIAN
ANALYSIS TO IRELAND, c.1974-1994 Cormac Gallagher was born into a prominent Catholic family in Cork city in 1938. His maternal grandfather was Cornelius Buckley, a county councillor, sportsman and the secretary of a Cork city hospital: 'a big figure', according to Cormac. As a young student in Cork, Gallagher excelled at school as well as playing Gaelic football for the Cork county minors' team. His facility with Irish led to one of his teachers encouraging him to study Irish at University College, Cork, where it was suggested he could become a future Professor of Irish. But at the age of seventeen Gallagher decided to join the Jesuits, leaving Cork to spend two years at Emo, near Tullamore, before embarking on a degree in Maths and Physics at University College, Dublin, which he completed in 1962. He then completed a degree in Philosophy at Louvain in Belgium, awarded by the Pontifical University in Rome, where he first heard of Lacan and also became fluent in French. By the mid-1960s, Gallagher was working as a Maths teacher in Limerick but, as a result of his developing interest in psychology, he enrolled on an MA in Psychology at Fordham University in New York which he completed in 1967.
In 1969, Gallagher attended an event at Birmingham for members of religious organizations who wanted to assess candidates' suitability for the religious life. At this event he met a Scottish Jesuit, Jim Christie, who was on his way to Paris to enrol on a year-long course organized by the Association Médico-Psychologique d'Aide aux Réligieux. This group had been established in 1961 by Louis Beirnaert, a French Jesuit, to help members of religious communities gain a better understanding of themselves. Gallagher then signed up for this course in Paris himself. During the course Beirnaert, who was Cormac's guide and mentor, suggested to him that he undertake an analysis, and he began analysis (in French) in 1970 with Christian Simatos (1930-2020), who had been in analysis with Lacan. Gallagher told me that Beirnaert had proposed Simatos as his analyst rather than Lacan, because Lacan would have cost double per session what Simatos charged.
After his return to Dublin in 1974 Gallagher began working as a clinical psychologist at St Vincent's Hospital, where he was welcomed 'with open arms' by the senior psychiatrist, Noel Walsh, a native of the West of Ireland, who had had an analysis in Canada, and was open to the influence of psychoanalytic ideas on the practice of psychiatry at the hospital. Gallagher also established two reading groups: one studying Freud's case studies, which was attended by the staff at St Vincent's; and a second group, reading Lacan in translation (translated by Alan Sheridan) which met at Gonzaga College from the mid-1970s onwards.
Gallagher became the superior of the Jesuit community at Gonzaga in 1974 (although not a teacher) and he was also the chairman of the interim management board of the school at that time; he was part of the team regarded as 'the second founders of Gonzaga college' who oversaw the expansion of the school in the mid-1970s. 53 During this time, Gallagher also began seeing patients privately in a room at Gonzaga.
Gallagher's relationship with Lacanians in Paris was sustained by weekly trips to Paris, which continued for many years after his return to Dublin in 1974; he later explained that his analysis with Simatos lasted 'for the guts of forty years'. 54 Every Friday morning, Gallagher took the 8 am flight to Paris, where he went to see Simatos for two sessions each Friday, and a third session on the Saturday. He met Jean Laplanche (1924-2012) who supervised his doctorate on 'Religion and obsessional neurosis' (completed in 1984), and gained clinical supervision from Claude Dumézil (1929-2013), as well as continuing with cartel work on Saturday nights -a kind of study group or discussion group -with a number of eminent Lacanian analysts from various parts of the world including Bernard Burgoygne (UK), Russell Grigg (Australia) and W.J. Richardson (USA). 55 Gallagher attended Lacan's seminars, held weekly, which were public events attended by many interested in following Lacan's teaching. He also attended Lacan's Présentations de malades at L'Hôpital Sainte Anne in Paris. These Présentations were attended by psychoanalysts and psychiatrists connected with the hospital. Gallagher says attending them had a profound impact on his developing ideas about psychoanalysis and psychiatry, because Lacan's clinical presentations: went well beyond the psychiatric model and like his seminar, took place on a weekly basis well into the 1970s. Though intended principally for psychiatric trainees they also drew other clinicians who were passionately interested in seeing the clinical applications of what they were hearing at the seminars in Paris-1. The 'beyond' element of Lacan's presentations consisted in his privileging to an extraordinary degree what the patient was 'saying' rather than the usual medical practice of using him or her to illustrate the features of a psychiatric condition. I recall an occasion when a man spoke of hoping to buy a "quatre-zero-cinq" which everyone in the room, except Lacan, immediately knew was a Peugeot 405. Unlike the rest of us he was puzzled by the phrase and encouraged the patient to elaborate on what such a bizarre expression might mean, thus leading him, step by step, into hitherto unexplored areas of his story. 56 Clearly, the experience of witnessing Lacan apparently not knowing that the man was referring to a Peugeot 405, which led to deeper investigation of the patient's thought-processes and subjectivity, had a lasting impact on Gallagher. This encounter deepened his commitment to both Lacanian ideas and the ways in which they could be applied to actual cases, and also to the importance of careful listening to everything that the patient expressed.
On one occasion during the early 1970s, Gallagher had a personal encounter with Lacan, and when I spoke to Gallagher in April 2022 I asked him about this meeting: It was the last big outing of the Lacanian school in Paris. It was in the Chemical school . . . it was one weekend, and there were about, how many, I suppose a thousand people at it, over a weekend, and I was, I remember, talking to a couple of people I knew and one of them said to me 'There's Lacan, now go over and introduce yourself because he loves people coming from abroad', so I went over to Lacan and said, 'Excusez-moi, Docteur Lacan, je viens de Dublin, pour vous suivre.' Lacan looked at me and said 'Vous suivez . . .', and that was me . . . This would be vintage Lacan. It didn't matter what he meant. It was the, just the word, whatever resonated with him and resonated with me . . . Obviously it resonated with me since I remember it after all these years . . .
Fergus: What did you take from that? Cormac: I took from that, that I'd better be a bit more independent in my thinking from him . . . I think that was what he meant . . . It's an intervention and you make of it what you can. 57 During the mid-1970s, as we have seen, Gallagher established a weekly discussion group that met at Gonzaga College to discuss Lacan's works. As Gallagher himself recalls: 'Lacan was known, if at all in Ireland, as an esoteric literary theorist. I began to translate his clinical texts -beginning with The Family -to introduce colleagues and students to the primary sources.' 58 Gallagher's translations of Lacan's seminars became the basis for much of the material studied on the MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy/Clinical Diploma in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy that Gallagher co-founded at St Vincent's hospital in 1984 (twelve students were enrolled on a part-time basis every two years). At the same time, Gallagher co-founded the School of Psychotherapy at St Vincent's hospital which oversaw the teaching of the MSc. He was the first director of the School, a position he held between 1984 and 2006.
The MSc at St Vincent's hospital was clearly a major development in the history of psychoanalysis in Ireland. It was the first formal academic programme established in Ireland to allow the study of psychoanalysis. By the early 1990s there were about 50 graduates of the St Vincent's MSc, and at that point Gallagher resigned his membership of the Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and established the first Lacanian professional organization in Ireland. The Association for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in Ireland (APPI) was established in 1993 as a learned society with the objective of advancing 'Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy'. 59 At the same time, with emerging psychoanalytic colleagues (including Patricia McCarthy, a psychiatrist who had completed the MSc and undergone psychoanalytical training), Gallagher established the Irish Lacanian journal The Letter. Both of these initiatives have had far-reaching effects. It is said that APPI had almost 150 members by 2007. 60 Since its launch in 1994, several hundred journal articles on psychoanalytic theory, many of which have emerged from conferences, study days and Irish Lacanian cartels, have been published in The Letter. Gallagher was also instrumental, with McCarthy and Rik Loose, in establishing the BA in Psychoanalytic Studies in LSB College in Dublin in 1993 -the first BA in the English-language world dedicated exclusively to the Freudian field. 61 By the end of the twentieth century it could be argued that the majority of practising psychoanalytic psychotherapists and psychoanalysts in Dublin (as well as many professionals working in medicine, education, social services and so on) had gained a Lacanian training that originated from Cormac Gallagher's introduction of Lacan in to Ireland in 1974.
It is striking that Lacanian analysts, who remain a significant minority in Britain, are the most influential psychoanalytic group in Ireland. In part, this is because of Cormac Gallagher himself, who brought Lacan as well as his own considerable teaching and organizational gifts to Ireland -and was fortunate to meet key collaborators like Noel Walsh -all of which led to Lacan becoming extremely influential in the Republic of Ireland. There may also be a resonance between Catholicism and Lacanianism. The French Jesuits were open to Lacan from the early 1960s, as is evident in Beirnaert's establishment of AMAR; and in Latin American countries like Argentina, for example, Lacan's is the dominant psychoanalytic theory. There is a more philosophical dimension to Lacanian theory -quite different to the more physical and bodily emphasis of, say, Klein -that might appeal to people from a Catholic background, whether they have become atheists or continued in their religious belief alongside their analysis (like Cormac Gallagher). The preoccupation of Lacan with language may also have a deep resonance with Irish people, whose ancestors spoke a language which most contemporary Irish men and women cannot speak. The alienation of Irish people from the ideas and assumptions embedded in the Irish language resonates with Lacan's idea that the unconscious is structured like a language; and perhaps this is another reason why Lacan has found such a receptive audience in the Republic of Ireland (although not in Northern Ireland, which has developed in a much more British-inspired direction). Finally, it is possible that the longstanding links between Ireland and France, going back as far as French support for the United Irishmen's rebellion against British rule in Ireland in 1798, and the deep connections that have been forged between Irish artists and France (Joyce, Beckett and McGahern all come to mind) mean that there is a historic sense of connection between the Republic of Ireland and France. All these elements may help to explain the positive reception of Lacan in Dublin.
PSYCHOANALYTIC LEGACIES Hanaghan and Gallagher brought their different versions of psychoanalysis to very different Irelands: the Irish Free State in 1928, and the (newly European) Republic of Ireland in 1974. When Hanaghan arrived in Dublin in 1928, the Irish Catholic Church was at the peak of its power (widely regarded as when Ireland hosted the Eucharistic Congress in 1932), whereas Gallagher's arrival from Paris coincided with -arguably -the beginning of its long decline. Vocations were already decreasing by the early 1970s, and many people were leaving religious orders at that time (including Cormac Gallagher himself in 1989). The decline of the Catholic church, then, meant that Irish society was more open to non-Catholic ways of thinking about the mind and the body, and this meant that Gallagher could sow psychoanalytic ideas in more receptive soil than Hanaghan had done. But the decline of the Catholic church also meant that there were many former religious who were seeking new careers where they could 'help' Irish people in a non-religious environment.
Given the deeper meaning of Catholicism in Irish culture and society, it could be argued that both Hanaghan and Gallagher were using psychoanalysis to address a different range of problems. Historians generally agree that after the Great Famine (1845-52), the Irish language -which up to that point had been the most important marker of Irish difference from English culture -fell into irreversible decline. The vast majority of the one million people who died, and almost two million who emigrated during the Famine and its immediate aftermath, were Irish speakers, and from the 1850s onwards, Irish effectively became a minority language in Ireland. 62 Following the enormous and traumatic loss of the language, historians have suggested that the main badge of Irish identity after the Famine -that defined Ireland as different to England -was Catholicism. During what Emmet Larkin calls the 'devotional revolution', the Irish Catholic church and belief in Catholicism replaced the Irish language as the main cultural marker of Irishness. 63 One of the hallmarks of post-Famine Ireland was an extreme piety, and a fear of sexual thoughts and feelings which manifested itself in the rigorous control of sexuality by the Catholic church and the imposition of arranged marriages (based on economic rather than emotional gain) by the dominant economic and religious groups in rural Ireland. 64 It has been suggested that much of the work of Hanaghan and the Group was on the long-term consequences of the 'devotional revolution' on the emotional and sexual lives of Irish people in the early years of the independent Irish state. As Ross Skelton explained, 'They battled against the sexual repression. In many ways it was one of their main tasks as analysts, the battle [against]. . .sexual repression, [they made the case that] sex is a beautiful thing, and so forth, you know.' 65 An equivalent Protestant morality developed alongside the Catholic devotional revolution which also troubled many of Hanaghan's Protestant analysands. Hanaghan and the Monkstown Group encouraged many people to realise that the repressed sexuality that was at the heart of the devotional revolution was also generating enormous problems in their personal and emotional lives. Many Irish people were undoubtedly helped by the Monkstown Group's promotion of a more psychoanalytically informed idea of sexuality and sexual expression than that advocated by the Irish Catholic and Protestant churches.
By the mid-1970s the sexual puritanism of Irish Catholicism was in serious decline, possibly partly because of the work of the Group, but also as a consequence of the second Vatican council and the fact that many Irish Catholics had begun to question 'the Church's authority over their private lives'. 66 Gallagher's psychoanalytical initiatives, by contrast, have taken place during the enormous crisis of identity in Ireland provoked by the decline of the Catholic church. If Catholicism became the primary badge of Irishness in post-Famine Ireland then the decline of the Catholic church from the 1970s onwards represented both a loss of faith and a loss of identity. The rigorous, theoretically-informed and clinically grounded work of Gallagher, which has attempted to bring a deep understanding of Lacan to Ireland, has provided an alternative space for some people to think about new ways of living and being in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century Ireland.
Hanaghan and Gallagher not only brought their versions of psychoanalysis to different Irelands (in 1928 and 1974); they also came from very different vantage points. Hanaghan was an Englishman and a self-professed radical Christian, who was closely associated with Quakerism (so that he was both literally and figuratively a dissenter), while Gallagher was a senior member of the Jesuits, an influential and well-respected Catholic religious order in Ireland. Broadly speaking, Hanaghan was an outsider and a kind of English colonizer, whereas Gallagher, who was Catholic and Irish-speaking, was clearly a native and an insider. In this respect, Hanaghan was always approaching Irish society from the outside, both because he did not have the insider's natural understanding of Irish culture or society (symbolically, he always mispronounced Eithne Strong's first name) but also because he was English and regarded as a foreigner. Gallagher, on the other hand, was able to make connections between Catholic Ireland and (Lacanian) psychoanalysis because he had a deep understanding of both (as is evident in his brilliant paper on Frank O'Connor and psychoanalysis). 67 Given the prestige and influence of the Jesuits in Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s (maintained despite the decline in the Church's authority), Gallagher also possessed enormous cultural capital, and was in a position to bring psychoanalysis into the university and the hospital in a way that Hanaghan, as effectively an English Quaker, would have been unable to achieve.
As this article indicates, both Hanaghan and Gallagher were immensely influential in bringing Freud and Lacan to Ireland; but it would be wrong to claim that they did so singlehandedly. Both of them worked closely with other key figures who were very important in promoting the development of psychoanalysis in Ireland, and it would be fairer to suggest that they were both leading figures in wider collaborative efforts. In particular, Rupert Strong, who co-founded the IPAA with Hanaghan in 1942 and who had lived in Dublin since 1937, was the driving force behind many of Hanaghan's initiatives, especially Mounttown House which he led after Bowell and Hanaghan left in the mid-1950s; this continued to provide support for many impoverished and troubled people thereafter, and became the venue for all of the Saturday night meetings until 1966. For Gallagher, his work with the Professor of Psychiatry at St Vincent's hospital and University College Dublin, Noel Walsh, and his registrar, Mary Darby, was crucially important. As a gregarious and charismatic man who was also an enthusiastic golfer, Walsh was skilled at making contacts and fund-raising, 'a wheeler dealer', and undoubtedly his influence in the hospital and in the university played a huge part in establishing the MSc  Fitzgerald then joined forces with other psychoanalytic practitioners from the IFPP and the Monkstown group, along with graduates of the MSc, to establish an alternative training at a suburban house in Ranelagh, which eventually became an MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Trinity College, Dublin. 70 This was closer to a contemporary British training, encompassing Freud, Klein and the 'middle group', and the MSc, which is still running, has had a profound impact on the development of psychoanalysis in Ireland, which I hope to explore more fully in future work.
One of Gallagher's major achievements was the introduction of a proper professional training for psychoanalysts in Ireland. As we have seen, the Hanaghan group did provide some training from the early 1940s when Wilfred Bowell, Gordon Fletcher and Rupert Strong became psychoanalysts, and this appears to have become more thought-through by the 1960s and 1970s when Dennis Duncan, Jan Imich, Mitch Elliott, John and Richard Cameron, Mary Miles, Rob Weatherill, Ross Skelton, Mary Pyle and Felicity Casserly underwent or began training. 71 Even so, the training retained something of an improvised quality -with personal analysis and supervision often conducted by the same analyst in the same session -and a discussion group was established 'with the blessing of Wilfred and Rupert around 1980' (co-ordinated by Mark Hartmann, a Chicago-born psychiatrist who had been analysed by Rupert), which the younger analysts attended on Saturday mornings at Hartmann's house but the senior analysts did not. 72 In contrast, the establishment of the MSc at St Vincent's hospital in 1984 provided the first proper training for prospective psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in Ireland. The MSc, alongside personal analysis, supervision by another analyst, and cartel work, provided a rigorous, theoretically grounded and clinically informed training that had not existed in Ireland before 1984, and which has laid the foundation for the training of many of the practising psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and other psychoanalytically-informed professionals currently working in the Republic of Ireland today. Given the problems that arose with the Monkstown Group particularly around boundaries not being kept (with the confidence of the analyst and analysand relationship sometimes being broken and patients' difficulties discussed with other members of the Group, as well as with the development of a sexual relationship between analyst and analysand in at least a small number of cases), the necessity for a much more theoretically, ethically and clinically-grounded practice was enormous; and Gallagher emphatically provided this in the form of the MSc, the School of Psychotherapy and the formation of APPI in 1993. In this respect, Gallagher, along with Noel Walsh and Michael Fitzgerald (as co-founders of the MSc), can be said to have founded professional psychoanalysis in Ireland.
On the other hand, it is also clear that many people who enrolled for Lacanian training in the 1980s and 1990s had previously received analysis and some form of training from members of the Monkstown group in the 1960s and 1970s. Although it is impossible to quantify, it is likely to be the case -given the hundreds of people analysed by the Monkstown group, the hundreds of meetings of the Group that were held from the 1930s onwards, and the various public lectures and publications of members of the Monkstown group -that many people who applied to the MSc or became interested in Lacanian analysis could well have had an earlier encounter with psychoanalysis as a result of one of the initiatives of the Monkstown Group. We simply cannot know how many of those who undertook training or analysis with Gallagher had already had an encounter with psychoanalysis. Certainly, Ross Skelton, Rob Weatherill, Olga Cox Cameron, and Tony Hughes, all now senior psychoanalysts practising in Dublin, had a first experience of analysis with the Group before going on to Lacanian analysis or enrolling in the MSc. It is significant, however, that Gallagher himself first heard of Hanaghan only 'after I came back to Ireland [in] 1974', as he explained to me: Hanaghan I had heard of, I had heard of this Group meeting on Saturday nights but . . . what did I think about that? . . . I didn't know Hanaghan in psychoanalytic circles and I sort of felt that he was running his own thing, an amateur in that sort of sense, which is true, I mean a gifted amateur, but an amateur in that sense, that was why I didn't go to those Groups. 73 For Gallagher, the lack of formal training of the Hanaghan group and their development outside the mainstream of psychoanalytic theory in both Britain and France meant that Hanaghan and the Group were not a 'reference point' for him.
We must conclude, then, that both Hanaghan and Gallagher have left profound and lasting legacies on the practice of psychoanalysis in the Republic of Ireland. Without Hanaghan, Freud would not have arrived in Dublin in 1928; without his work, many people would not have been helped, and it is likely that psychoanalysis would not have been heard of by many people. On the other hand, there were serious problems with the practice of psychoanalysis by Hanaghan and the Group which partly explain why it has been so difficult to acknowledge his contribution. But notwithstanding the ethical problems and the lack of a proper professional training, a form of Freudian psychoanalysis was practised in Dublin from 1928 onwards and, given the hundreds of analyses and lectures provided by the Group, it is likely that hundreds and perhaps thousands of people had an encounter with psychoanalysis as a result of Hanaghan's migration to Dublin in 1928. To some extent, Gallagher was able to build on some of the foundations established by Hanaghan's Group, as well as establishing his own new form of psychoanalysis in Dublin. His great achievement has been to create a psychoanalysis that is deeply theoretical and clinically informed alongside a rigorous and professional training that has provided the foundation for a significant proportion of the practice of psychoanalysis in Ireland today. Rather than selecting one of them as the founder of psychoanalysis in Ireland it is more accurate to suggest that Hanaghan and Gallagher, in their very different ways, and along with their important colleagues