THE TROUBLES AND THE TRAUMA
Balsam, Rosemary H.
BOOKS THE TROUBLES AND THE TRAUMA ROSEMARY H. BALSAM Irish Blood DENNIS J. CLARK Kennikat Press, $7.95 Children in Conflict MORRIS FRASER Basic Books, $8.95 Society under Siege RONA M....
...This book should be of great interest not only to IrishAmericans, but to English, Northern Protestant and Dublin politicians who panic with fantasies of massive American support for those who are solely bent on the bombing and destruction of Ulster...
...His ideas on desegregation of the schools from their Protestant and Catholic encampments are constructive and shared by others in Ulster...
...Fields is obviously a woman of courage and has played an important role in objectifying the evidence...
...America in the sixties and early seventies was surfeited with its own struggles about Civil Rights, the blacks and the Viet Nam war...
...Acute symptoms occur more often in areas where there is an expectancy of terror rather than in the rioting district...
...Hugh Carey all spoke up suggesting the withdrawal of the English troops and inviting wider debate of the issues to "stay England's rough hand in Ulster...
...He identifies two groups of children at risk...
...Meantime there is no such person, but fairminded students of Ireland like Dennis Clark and Morris Fraser can pave the way towards more creative and rational outlooks for those directly participating in politics and education...
...One can argue that analysands form a "sick" population, but in an ordinary social sense these are often people who function normally enough...
...Does it exist, and if so what is its contribution...
...Fraser spells out the personal terror underlying such behavior which is subjugated to the gains of peer approval and the tacit approval of the grown-ups...
...Clark's book about Irish-American support for the Protestant paramilitary groups to Northern Ireland...
...But similar influences come to bear on those at the periphery...
...Some events increased support...
...the appearances of the able Bernadette Devlin McAliskey with her original Civil Rights issue, (although some of her more radical ideas were hard to absorb here...
...Trans-sectarian organizations like the Women's Peace Movement, mixed Catholic and Protestant Associations like "The New Ulster Movement," political parties as the Alliance Party or the Social Democratic and Labour Party need every breath of support they can draw from the democratic world lest they become jaded under the bombardment of irrationality and constant threat of renewed violence...
...The complexity of Ulster's problems as well as the raging terrorism, he feels, have disenchanted many Irish Americans who are disgusted at the inequalities, the violations of human rights and who would wish to see Ireland pursue her own destiny free of England...
...Accounts are gleaned from his knowledge of both Protestant and Catholic children from the inner city, from "normals" on the street and in Youth Clubs, to the psychiatric casualties he saw in his office...
...It conveys his profound humanitarian concern for the children who have grown up in the violence...
...There is also the Provisional wing (the Provos) who would unite Ireland by gun and bomb taking no cognizance of the dissenting Northern Protestants or the complexities involved for the Dublin government in assimilating them...
...Established Irish-American businessmen often wished to avoid association with more promises of agitation and a terrorist campaign...
...Congress was uninterested, even though Senators Kennedy, Ribicoff, James Buckley and Rep...
...This too would be an interesting issue...
...The subtitle, "A Psychology of Northern Ireland," is a misnomer...
...As many know, the I.R.A...
...All these books counter that state of mind about the Northern Ireland conflicts which would let the experience there sink down in us "like a stone...
...Desegregation is the logical educational recommendation for those who imaginatively can follow through the consequences of these chilling observations and insights...
...A child with nervous parents is more likely to suffer longer-lasting symptoms...
...of the seventies...
...boosts from Irish fighters straight from the front talking with local groups...
...I share Dennis Clark's hope that "some great leader will arise to lead the way out of sectarian and politically bigoted stalemate...
...The past forever entangles and often dominates the present in Northern Ireland in the seventies, violently reactive in some elements of the society and inertly passive and rigid in others...
...Rona Fields's book contrasts with the others...
...It is overstated to equate the Irish of the 1970s with the plight of the Jews under the Nazi regime...
...But it is still wracked with troubles...
...BOOKS THE TROUBLES AND THE TRAUMA ROSEMARY H. BALSAM Irish Blood DENNIS J. CLARK Kennikat Press, $7.95 Children in Conflict MORRIS FRASER Basic Books, $8.95 Society under Siege RONA M. FIELDS Temple University Press, $15 In All Quiet on the Western Front, the story of the inner struggles of a young German soldier in World War I, he bitterly observes: "And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall awaken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death...
...The book deteriorates into a kind of popularized expose of the purposive, evilminded British...
...supporting their mother countries in times of stress...
...Her interviews and tests show that these people were the objects of unconscionable brutality at the hands of the Army...
...Where the human mind begins to take responsibility for its own conflicting wishes and fears, sorting out the past from the present, the rational from the irrational that it would as soon let sink in order to maintain status quo, new realignments of its own resources can emerge...
...It was a different kind of warfare from the days of Tom Barry's flying column roving the misty Irish countryside...
...Adults have misinterpreted these acts as only "bravery" or else "hooliganism...
...It is a pity that she falls into the very trap that befuddles the indigenous Northern Irish—that of simplifying the complexity to one perspective, till everything seems to make sense in those terms, which in her version, however sophisticated, seems to be "Hate the British Imperialists...
...In order to justify such a title she would have had to listen attentively to all representatives of the population, even those whom she does not admire or identify with...
...the paradox of the strict handling of Irish-connected radicals by the Nixon administration, whose own agents were simultaneously arms-dealing with Latin countries, Greece, etc., and who seemed more interested in palliating the English government than in the plight of Ireland...
...He draws a distinction between the I.R.A...
...Fraser's studies were at the center...
...Or the stone can wash towards the beach where the beating waves and the eddies of the surf remold its exposed surface...
...This random bombing, which inevitably penalizes both Catholics and Protestants, has confused Irish Americans...
...Other versions of tunnel vision have been the following: "Hate the Fenians," "Hate the Prods," "Hate the Brits," "Hate the Hooligans," "Hate the Snobs," or "Hate the Working Class Scum...
...Another alternative may be to develop later phobias, ego-constriction, rigidity, lack of intellectual and social confidence, or the generosity necessary to appreciate the dilemmas of others—a toll paid for heavily defending against such memories, and the internal effects of severe disruption in childhood and adolescence...
...Some of his own findings match...
...Fraser points out that such acts of bravado as climbing right up on Saracen tanks to lob petrol-bombs at the hated "bogey-man," the British Soldier, are manifestations of age-appropriate immaturity and underdeveloped lifedeath concepts...
...Other factors within the U.S...
...However, I want to emphasize strongly Dr...
...15.00 Yale University Press New Haven and London Commonweal: 121 distress and how one sees long-lasting effects...
...It is unprecedented in history that children of from five-years-old and upwards have been organized into such an active role in guerrilla warfare...
...The other is the early teenage boy, who has been actively traumatized, has a relative interned, is part of the stone-throwing mob and perhaps is a youngster who has gorily maimed soldiers and/or been physically injured himself...
...is now divided in two...
...The British have earned worldwide condemnation for these violations of human rights...
...The aims and character are different from the past...
...Those in entrenched positions on either Catholic or Protestant side need to examine their arrogant carelessness for the quality of existence of their fellow human beings...
...O when may it suffice...
...However, it depends on one's orientation to psychological r Ethics at the Edges of Life Medical and Legal Intersections Paul Ramsey One of America's leading writers on medical ethics offers a major contribution to the ongoing debate concerning medical practice and public policy in such matters as abortion, euthanasia, and the right to die...
...Morris Fraser's work, too, serves to fight the apathy that would let these experiences be left in the realm of unease at a newsflash...
...The Provos are more secret, urban and have general targets, such as bringing the entire Ulster Society to a halt...
...He also examined the literature on the psychological fate of children and civilians in wartime...
...militated against support...
...The children of Dr...
...Dennis Clark's work is a well-written, informing and balanced book which eminently fulfills his own edict that "the light of scholarship should shine impartially...
...There is nothing in Dr...
...This is another sensitive, searching and open-minded book...
...I quote from the greatest poet of the island heritage, W. B. Yeats: Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart...
...Knowledge grounds rumor...
...Fraser does not address the psycho-analytic literature which abounds with evidence of childhood traumata having important dimensions for development into adulthood...
...of the twenties which was less ambivalently supported, and the I.R.A...
...Whether within a United Ireland, or whether just within Ulster, Catholics and Protestants will have to deal with each other straightforwardly, recognizing that the past is not exactly the same as the present in order to attempt different solutions...
...One is typified by the 10-year-old girl, passively traumatized and exhibiting anxiety symptoms such as bed-wetting, fainting, etc...
...Ulster has dropped from front-page American news...
...However, the rest of her book is chaotic and badly written...
...His concepts of authority are so jumbled that he lacks stable internal controls, is generally troubled and hostile—a boy "in need of protection from himself...
...The most valuable section is about the crippling psychological effects on internees interrogated by the British Army in the early seventies...
...The stone can sink deeply in the minds of people immediately overwhelmed, so that it remains submerged and virtually unchanged, till dredged up at some later time...
...Or a sculptor can lift it up and create visions with his tools...
...These legal issues, Ramsey suggests, both affect and reflect the morality of our times...
...However, the network support had a tendency to flag, and it never drew in other groups such as the Catholic Church, or the Jews or civil libertarian associations...
...She uses her psychological findings to reinforce her own social thesis, i.e., that England pursues an active policy of colonialism which is synonymous with psychological genocide towards the Irish...
...Fraser's beautiful responsiveness and sensitive observation and recording, which makes this book live as a moral document of the present struggles...
...Except by those IrishAmericans deeply committed to the anti-English tradition, support has waxed and waned since 1969, peaking at about one half a million dollars in 1972...
...He examines the history of Irish-American relations to the present strife, and looks closely at the network of American support for Irish Northern Aid, which is part of a tradition of immigrants to the U.S...
...A person with such traumata often has a subtle need to perpetuate and re-experience elements of the original trauma in attempts at mastery, either as an active or passive participant, and often in domestic circumstances...
...She did not do, in my opinion, what Dennis Clark says, "care to understand...
...There is the Marxist Official wing who pursue non-violence, and see the dilemma of the Northern Catholics in third world terms and Ireland as a whole in terms of class struggles...
Vol. 105 • February 1978 • No. 4
