As I get older I playmy cards too close to the chest, which is why I now need psychotherapy

THE GENERAL once told me that Freud considered the Irish to be the only race for whom psychoanalysis is of no use. Apparently the Irish psyche was too inscrutable for the good doctor. “There are simply no maps,” as the General is wont to say, “either into, or out of, an Irish mind.” Which is a pity because I need psychotherapy. I was in the hairdresser’s last week, when a woman turned to me and said: “You’re not well in the head.”

I said: “Why do you say that?”

She said: "I read what you wrote in The Irish Timeslast week. About sitting in your car, staring at the lake like a zombie."

“Perhaps, Madame,” I replied, “you haven’t read much Beckett, or John of the Cross for that matter. My bewilderment before the awesome beauty of the lake, my inability to put into words the agonising mystery of existence, is a silence of existential proportions.”

She wasn’t comfortable with the word existential. I think she thought I was trying to insult her.

“You writers are all the same; you need your heads examined.”

The hairdresser was examining my head, with a scissors close to my nose, so I could say no more. I have learned to remain completely still when being examined by my hairdresser, as she may suddenly attack the beard, the hairs between the eyebrows, or even the fur in my ears, without even asking permission.

“Let’s get rid of this stuff,” she says, and in she goes with her little buzzing machines.

She has a daughter getting married in August, which is how we ended up speaking about statues.

“People used to put the Child of Prague out in the garden, to ensure a good day for a wedding,” she said, “but the young people nowadays don’t do any of that; no wonder it rains all the time.”

The effect of statues on the weather, or the effect of weather on statues, absorbed my attention all day, and that night I had a disturbing dream.

Mind you, I’ve been having disturbing dreams for a few weeks. I think it’s the antibiotics. When on medication, I think the worst; a pessimism which originated in childhood, when I used to hide under the stairs, in fear of other people.

Why I should fear other people is another question, but I do, and as I get older I play my cards too close to the chest, as the General often reminds me; which is why I now need psychotherapy.

But after my visit to the hairdresser, I did have a disturbing dream; I dreamt that a long- dead bishop came back and sat on my bed. He was looking out the window, weeping, and holding an old broken statue of St Patrick.

He said: “Did you know that statues can die?”

I said: “No, I didn’t.”

He said: “If a statue is revered, and adorned with flowers, and people pray, then it becomes alive. But if it is just abandoned on a dusty shelf, like a cracked teapot, it withers and dies.”

Back in the 1970s I often frequented a parochial house in west Cavan. At that time the church was being renewed liturgically, and religious statues went out of fashion. But rather than just dump them, the saints were stored away under the stairs in the priest’s house, and sometimes I opened that door and saw St Theresa eyeballing me from the dark, where she had been incarcerated with Ignatius Loyola and St Antony, and I used to wonder if they ever chatted to each other in there about the weather, or the state of the universe. I confessed this to the bishop.

He gripped his little St Patrick very tightly with both hands and asked: “Did you ever pray before a statue?”

“As a child I used to gather lots of tiny statues and play with them on the dressing table in my mother’s room,” I said, “and ever since then I have indeed been deeply affected by religious icons.”

This calmed the bishop somewhere, yet he still wailed so plaintively that I woke up, to find the room empty, and the window creaking in a heavy rainstorm.

And three questions arose.

Does the Child of Prague have an effect on the weather? Was climate change caused by the incarceration of Catholic statues at the time of liturgical renewal in the 1970s? And what would I say to Doctor Freud if he ever walked into the room?