Bringing it all back home: Time for reparation in Northern Ireland

Abstract

In 1988 I returned to Belfast after working for nineteen years in London. Eleven of those years were spent training and working as a psychodynamic counsellor and as clinical director of communitybased counselling and psychotherapy centres. I felt as well prepared as I could be for the return. I had specialized in working clinically with Irish women, I had spoken about that work at conferences, presented papers, one on the effect of an external peace process on the internal world of a Northern Irish client and, most recently, constructed a psychoanalytic critique of the prison protests and hunger strikes of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In addition to my clinical work and writing I maintained contact with Northern Ireland and returned, as most exiles do, three or four times per year. Therefore my work, and my personal and social contacts with what has always been thought of and referred to as ‘home’, facilitated the development and holding of what Edward Said has described as a ‘double perspective’. Since moving back, I have attempted to hold onto, and to expand, the double perspective and to apply it to the rapidly changing and emerging political scene in Belfast. Here I have been continuing to do what I most enjoy doing: apply PSYCHODYNAMIC COUNSELLING 6.3 AUGUST 2000