Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

Abdon M. Pallasch ponders the truth of a provocative line from the movie The Departed.

“What Freud said about the Irish is: We’re the only people who are impervious to psychoanalysis,” declares Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) in Martin Scorsese’s film The Departed.

The irish mentality

So what exactly did the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, mean by that, anyway? Are we Irish all crazy? Or just experts at hiding our true thoughts?

Have centuries of oppression by the British, repression by the church, suppression of our sexual urges and a thirst for the drink made us into a race of people who can have lively, jovial arguments about the weather, sports and politics without ever divulging the real issues burning in our souls, if we even admit to ourselves what they are?

(Pregnant, awkward silence.) At best, Freud generalized.

Or maybe we’re just a well-grounded people who would rather solve our problems on our own than pay $ an hour for help.