The Masculine Protest: Murphy and Watt

Abstract

After the death of Beckett’s father in the summer of 1933 and subsequent paralyzing psychosomatic symptoms, Beckett embarked on a course of psychoanalysis in London just before Christmas 1933.² Fifty years later, Beckett recalls the situation in Ireland: “Psychoanalysis was not allowed in Dublin at the time. It was not legal.”³ In his old age, Beckett remembers the conservative attitude toward modern medicine and science of the Free State in the early 1930s. Catholicism and Freudian influenced psychoanalysis have long been at odds with each other; even in the twenty-first century the conflict continues: the “prominent psychoanalysts from the great Viennese master down have often invited censure by their messianic attitude, by their harsh and crude condemnation of certain things commonly held sacred, by their loose and extravagant vocabulary, and by their pansexualist allegories.”⁴ In 1932 the Fianna Fail party won seventy-two seats in the Dail, and Eamonn de Velera was appointed President of the Executive Council. While Protestant Anglo-Irish citizens in the Irish Free State were already marginalized, 1932 marks an even greater effort to cut ties with its past in terms of its long association with Great Britain.⁵ Jack White argues, “as the shadow of Mr. de Velera loomed larger, Protestants found themselves increasingly hemmed in by the three orthodoxies—the republican orthodoxy, the Gaelic orthodoxy, and now the Catholic orthodoxy.”⁶

[F]or all the good that frequent departures out of Ireland had done him, he might just as well have stayed there.

Watt ¹