Sara Haslam (The Open University, UK): ‘Contested Ground: alcohol, attachment, and the hut habit at war’

This talk is about the different ways and places in which attachment was expressed, managed, contained and denied at war. My focus is on alcohol, and on associated ideas about the articulation and performance of masculine identity, as demonstrated by church organizations and the military, as well as a range of men who fought. The concept of the ‘whole man’, fundamental to the wartime caregiving of the YMCA, for example, was, I will argue, a construct that conflicted with the military model. The experience of attachment, as explored in the literary record, exposes the extent of that conflict, as does the military/medical debate over the use and effects of alcohol – a debate that had a politically and socially fraught history in the UK in the years before 1914. If, as one historian argues, ‘the British soldier was remarkably well looked after’, how was that looking after managed and manifested when alcohol was the matter at hand? This talk examines this and other questions in its exploration of the contested ground of alcohol at war.

This event is free and open to all.  So that I have an idea of audience numbers in advance it would be useful if you could register your interest by sending an email to barry.sheils@ucd.ie

Speaker:

Sara Haslam is Senior Lecturer in English at the Open University. She is author of Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War (Manchester, 2002), and editor of three of Ford’s works, including an annotated critical edition of A Man Could Stand Up – volume 3 of Ford’s Parade’s End (Carcanet Press, 2011). Further publications include Life Writing (Routledge, 2009, with Derek Neale) and essays on Henry James, Thomas Hardy, the Brontës, and the literature of the First World War, most recently in the Journal of First World War Studies (4.2, October 2013) and online for The Conversation https://theconversation.com/glory-farce-and-despair-the-many-stories-of-world-war-i-22201

1. Brendan Kelly (UCD) ‘‘He Lost Himself Completely’: Shell Shock and its Treatment at Dublin’s Richmond War Hospital, 1916-1919’

2. Julie Walsh  (Warwick University) ‘1914: Psychoanalysis and the Narcissistic Wound’

This event is free and open to all.  So that I have an idea of audience numbers in advance it would be useful if you could register your interest by sending an email to barry.sheils@ucd.ie

Speakers:

Brendan Kelly is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Consultant Psychiatrist in the School of Medicine and Medical Science at UCD. His latest books include, ‘He Lost Himself Completely’: Shell Shock and its Treatment at Dublin’s Richmond War Hospital, 1916-1919 (Liffey, 2015), Ada English: Patriot and Psychiatrist (Irish Academic, 2014) and Custody, Care and Criminality: Forensic Psychiatry and the Law in 19^th-Century Ireland (History Press, 2014).

Julie Walsh is a Global Research Fellow at Warwick University and a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist qualified with the SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in London. Her latest book is called Narcissism and its Discontents (Palgrave, 2014) and her current research project explores the relationship between shame and sociability.