Research

Academic Research to Date has Included:

“Am I Not Your Girl: What Does Cathy Mean When she Says ‘I am Heathcliff’ ?”
MA in Cultural Studies Thesis for the University of Sussex 1993.

“Breaking The Name:  Psychosis and Love in Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves”
Graduate Diploma in Psychoanalysis Thesis for LSB College 1998.

“The Lies, The Wish, and The Wardrobe: Homophobia, Homosexuality and the Closet on the Coach.”
MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Thesis for UCD/St Vincent’s Hospital 2002.

“The Last Seduction: Society, Paedophilia and the Bankruptcy of Childhood Sexuality”
MPhil in Gender and Women Studies Thesis for TCD 2006.

“Nommo-Sexuality: Naming Homo/sexual Desire: A Dis-story”
PhD with the School of Nursing at DCU, 2010-2015

Plans for Future Research

I am currently researching transgenerational trauma with a particular sociological emphasis on the nightmare of History from which, despite political independence, Irish society and the Irish psyche, cannot escape; a history dictated through desires of (m)Other church, (m)Other Ireland, as and in reaction to centuries of British Othering. Irish society is over laden narratives of suffering, passivity, hope that can only be incorporated within a dread-full history, a dread-filled present with the highest statistics of child abuse in the EU, endemic national alcoholism, suicide and depression. The national ‘shame’ around homelessness and yet the minimising of this reality by our Government and Taoiseach. The historical legacy inherited within Irish society, forged through narratives of suffering, but denying the trauma of transgenerational silence; the repetitious unspoken pain of Irish subjectivity. The Great Irish Famine is known in the Gaelic language as ‘An Gorta Mór’ evoking both the word gort, (crop/field) and more significantly gortaigh, (to wound/injure). Culturally and historically, hope in Ireland was traditionally only ever located in the next life, merely to be garnered through suffering in this one. True hope, clinically, individually and collectively can only be approached through a telling, a language, people that speak.

I am organising an international conference in July 2019 with the Committee on Gender and Sexuality of the International Psychoanalytic Association to be hosted at Trinity College Dublin. Rather than this being a strictly ‘academic’ psychoanalytic conference, this is being proposed as a space where any and all attendees could learn something about psychoanalysis as an informing discourse in considerations of gender/sexuality in a lived experience sociology rather than a cold dry theoretical academic discourse; but more importantly where psychoanalysts could learn/share/listen to/speak to lived social experiences from other attendees especially those who are not psychoanalytically trained; to really return to the art of listening, rather than reinforcing egos and imaginary positions/identifications of being ‘experts’ who know everything.

I am also researching the repetitions of and around Oscar Wilde and his father William; and the parallels in libels, sex scandals, maternal interventions and court cases that destroyed both their lives and reputations in a chapter entitled: “The Sons of the Father Fall on the Som: Wilde Trauma across Generations” to be published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press in a book entitled Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Sexuality.