Michael scenario; so typical of student relationships. It then emerges that Michael will leave Clio if she doesn’t acquiesce. And Kit uses the word ‘blackmail’.
At UCD the romantic focus in Maeve’s circle seems to have been on the men in the university’s rugby club, as in the novels: in
Echoes
, Clare O’Brien tells Valerie and other friends about her near-miss experience with Ian and compares it to rugby tackles she’d seen earlier in a student rugby game. Valerie produces vermouth to calm them all down and Mary Catherine wonders how far you can go before it is deemed unfair to boys not to go the whole way. Later Clare will have sex with David Power and rue the day, because she becomes pregnant and the baby comes early, causing Clare, a scholarship girl, to miss taking her finals, which had been the purpose of her life since a very young girl.
Suddenly, in the 1950s and ’60s, talk between young peoplewas
all
about feelings, as were films, music and women’s magazines . Before the 1940s nobody spoke much about any of their feelings. Brothers and sisters used to talk sometimes. But generally it was thought unseemly to say how you felt, ‘like selling yourself’. You would lose respect if you did.
The new science of psychology had opened the door. With the advent of psychology, what was done quietly before was done openly now. Psychiatrists made people talk. In the clinical context in the 1930s, for example, psychiatrists for the first time encouraged workhouse inmates to talk to one another and tell each other how they felt – they became much more difficult to handle afterwards, apparently. In 1939, when Freud died, his daughter Anna took over the world psychoanalytical movement and set up psychological guidance centres all over America to encourage people to discuss their sensibilities.
But the really big change happened earlier, when psychology was harnessed by big business actually to
trade
in people’s feelings. Edward Bernays, having devised America’s propaganda machine in the First World War, took the teachings of his uncle Sigmund Freud to advise businessmen how to link mass-produced goods to people’s unconscious feelings and make them buy things that would make them feel good, whether or not they needed them. For the first time sexual imagery was used by the automobile industry to advertise cars, for example. The policy kick-started the consumer society, became the key to economic progress and became the cornerstone of the American Dream.
In 1946 the feelings of women were for the first time researched in ‘focus groups’ by the psychiatrist Ernest Dichter,as it was realised that women were the principal target for the new consumerism.
By the 1950s psychiatrists and psychologists were operating in every corner of society, sometimes aggressively in marketing, but also therapeutically, a development that influenced relationships and in particular discipline within the family and elsewhere. It was a change consistent with the enlightened approach of Mother St Dominic at the Holy Child, her little chats in the room downstairs so different to the harsh dictatorial approach of the religious institution of the Catholic Church which had produced the Jesuit schools that Maeve’s father and uncles knew.
It is clear how this development also influenced the working lives of Maeve, and her sister Renie, who became a psychiatrist. Ultimately, the change made it possible for Maeve to write whole books about people sharing their feelings, particularly women, who had only recently begun to talk openly about how they felt. It was on this tsunami of emotion that Maeve’s novels rode to international success from the early 1980s.
In the meantime, in 1957, Maeve was a nervous undergraduate about to undertake her own personal revolution which would place her mid-current in this sea change. She was nervous because everything was new. But there was much that was new in the late 1950s for all undergraduates
At UCD the romantic focus in Maeve’s circle seems to have been on the men in the university’s rugby club, as in the novels: in
Echoes
, Clare O’Brien tells Valerie and other friends about her near-miss experience with Ian and compares it to rugby tackles she’d seen earlier in a student rugby game. Valerie produces vermouth to calm them all down and Mary Catherine wonders how far you can go before it is deemed unfair to boys not to go the whole way. Later Clare will have sex with David Power and rue the day, because she becomes pregnant and the baby comes early, causing Clare, a scholarship girl, to miss taking her finals, which had been the purpose of her life since a very young girl.
Suddenly, in the 1950s and ’60s, talk between young peoplewas
all
about feelings, as were films, music and women’s magazines . Before the 1940s nobody spoke much about any of their feelings. Brothers and sisters used to talk sometimes. But generally it was thought unseemly to say how you felt, ‘like selling yourself’. You would lose respect if you did.
The new science of psychology had opened the door. With the advent of psychology, what was done quietly before was done openly now. Psychiatrists made people talk. In the clinical context in the 1930s, for example, psychiatrists for the first time encouraged workhouse inmates to talk to one another and tell each other how they felt – they became much more difficult to handle afterwards, apparently. In 1939, when Freud died, his daughter Anna took over the world psychoanalytical movement and set up psychological guidance centres all over America to encourage people to discuss their sensibilities.
But the really big change happened earlier, when psychology was harnessed by big business actually to
trade
in people’s feelings. Edward Bernays, having devised America’s propaganda machine in the First World War, took the teachings of his uncle Sigmund Freud to advise businessmen how to link mass-produced goods to people’s unconscious feelings and make them buy things that would make them feel good, whether or not they needed them. For the first time sexual imagery was used by the automobile industry to advertise cars, for example. The policy kick-started the consumer society, became the key to economic progress and became the cornerstone of the American Dream.
In 1946 the feelings of women were for the first time researched in ‘focus groups’ by the psychiatrist Ernest Dichter,as it was realised that women were the principal target for the new consumerism.
By the 1950s psychiatrists and psychologists were operating in every corner of society, sometimes aggressively in marketing, but also therapeutically, a development that influenced relationships and in particular discipline within the family and elsewhere. It was a change consistent with the enlightened approach of Mother St Dominic at the Holy Child, her little chats in the room downstairs so different to the harsh dictatorial approach of the religious institution of the Catholic Church which had produced the Jesuit schools that Maeve’s father and uncles knew.
It is clear how this development also influenced the working lives of Maeve, and her sister Renie, who became a psychiatrist. Ultimately, the change made it possible for Maeve to write whole books about people sharing their feelings, particularly women, who had only recently begun to talk openly about how they felt. It was on this tsunami of emotion that Maeve’s novels rode to international success from the early 1980s.
In the meantime, in 1957, Maeve was a nervous undergraduate about to undertake her own personal revolution which would place her mid-current in this sea change. She was nervous because everything was new. But there was much that was new in the late 1950s for all undergraduates
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