[In the following essay, Hawkins analyzes the "familial/ communal interactions" that produce a schizoid condition, which is found in both the characters and communities in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, The Freedom of the City, and Translations.]

In Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, Nancy Scheper-Hughes states that the Irish and Northern Irish have the world's highest rates of hospitalization for schizophrenia, and, to establish that these rates do not merely reflect the availability of beds for treatment, she adds that Irish-Americans and Irish-Canadians are more frequently treated for schizophrenia than are members of other ethnic groups. The highest rate of schizophrenia in Ireland, she says, is in the West of Ireland in isolated rural areas dependent on peripheral agriculture and suffering from depopulation, and the most commonly afflicted are celibate males, suggesting that all of these factors are connected with Irish schizophrenia.

Scheper-Hughes's statistics about the Irish rate of schizophrenia suggest that the schizoid condition may be particularly characteristic of the Irish psyche, North and South—an opinion that dramatist Brian Friel, who has called both Northern Ireland and Dublin "schizophrenic," appears to share [quoted in Ulf Dantanus, Brian Friel: A Study, 1988]. Furthermore, suggesting that he sees this schizoid split embodied in his work, he speaks [in a 1981 interview with T. P. McKenna, Radió Telefis Éireann] of the "projection of some kind of dual personality in a lot of [his] plays," which he thinks reflects an aspect of his self which stems from his membership in the Catholic minority in the divided community of Northern Ireland.

The most obvious example of this "dual personality" is the split character of Public Gar and Private Gar in Philadelphia, Here I Come! Gar dramatizes the schizoid state not only through his division into two "selves" but through their interactions with each other and with others, and he repeatedly emphasizes it by asserting that he and everyone else in Ballybeg has been, or will be, driven crazy.

Despite his desire for closeness with others, Public Gar strives for the indifference and withdrawal which characterize the schizoid individual. While he is not clinically hallucinated, his vivid reliving of past experiences, such as his last walk with Kate and his interviews with her father and with his Aunt Lizzie, as well as his ability to hear Private Gar, whom no one else hears, suggest hallucinatory states. Although he does not have delusions of persecution or omnipotence, his fantasies verge on both. Furthermore, Private Gar frequently adopts the role of internalized persecutor often found in schizoid individuals.

T. P. McKenna points out that "the divided mind of Gar epitomize(s) not only his own but a whole community's life." Gar's community, whose dominant characteristics he embodies, well fits the pattern which Scheper-Hughes says is associated with schizophrenia in Ireland. Ballybeg is in the West and is connected with peripheral agriculture. Gar (like his motherless family and his friends) is male. Everyone, with the possible exception of Kate, is isolated and celibate, and Gar's impending emigration reflects the depopulation endemic to the region.

The schizophrenogenic effect of all of these factors can be traced in Philadelphia, Here I Come! (and in many of Friel's other plays). Given that Friel has described the Irish community as a family [in a 1972 interview, "Two Playwrights with a Single Theme," in A Paler Shade of Green, ed. Des Hickey and Gus Smith] and that he repeatedly presents these psycho-social problems in the context of a (usually dysfunctional, often motherless) family unit suggests that an analysis of familial/communal interactions may provide clues to the origins of both Gar's schizoid condition and that of his community.

R. D. Laing, the Scots psychiatrist, was one of the first to argue that certain patterns of familial interaction can induce schizoid states. These patterns affect what he calls "experience," which he distinguishes from "behaviour." Experience is the way one perceives and comprehends the world, including one's self. Behaviour is the way one acts as a result of one's experience. Experience, in this sense, conditions and either supports or threatens one's sense of identity which he says, "requires recognition of oneself by others as well as the simple recognition one accords to oneself [R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, 1 960].

If what Laing calls "significant others"—usually parents, though any members of one's family and/or community who have a strong formative effect on the individual would fit this category—confirm one's experience, they confirm the validity of one's perception of oneself, of others, and of the world; by so doing, they validate one's self-recognized identity. They can, however, "disconfirm" one's experience—and so reject the validity of one's self-recognized identity—by denying that experience. They can also disconfirm it through "collusion"—that is, by validating a false experience in preference to an unacceptable true one, thus doubly denying the reality of the true experience. Through such denial or collusion, one's experience can be "destroyed"; as a result, the two dimensions which make up one's sense of identity are in disagreement, leaving one in doubt as to whose perceptions of reality to trust: one's own or those of the significant others. The result, Laing says, is that the schizoid individual experiences "a rent in his relation with his world and … a disruption of his relation with himself."

In Philadelphia, Here I Come! we find precisely such destructions of experience by significant others. Gar perceives, or at least wishes to perceive, himself as a valued member of a family and a community which he loves and which will miss him after he emigrates. He repeatedly seeks validation of this status, but, one by one, others implicitly deny it, often by refusing to acknowledge even that he is leaving; thus, they deny him the confirmation of saying or showing that they will miss him, though it is apparent to the audience that each denial is a result of their fears of acknowledging how much they do love him and will miss him because they fear that Gar will deny their experience of their relationships to him. Everyone is caught in a schizophrenogenic "double-bind" situation.

Gar's father, S. B., apparently ignores Gar's impending departure, insisting that everything is "as usual. Not a thing happening." Gar seeks confirmation from his friends, but they, too, resolutely avoid the subject of his leaving, and the confirmation implied by their unexpected visit is apparently invalidated by Joe's revelation that Madge asked them to call.

Master Boyle's farewell visit seems to offer confirmation, not only of Gar's status in the community, but also of his desired role as a beloved "son"; Gar's dead mother, Maire, was courted by Boyle before she married S. B., and Gar imagines Boyle loving him as the son he never had by the woman he loved and lost. But the schoolmaster apparently denies kinship with Gar by stressing Gar's merely average intelligence and lack of poetic taste. He ends his visit by asking for a loan, leaving Gar convinced that Boyle views him as a soft touch rather than as a lost son.

Madge, the housekeeper, denies Gar's experience of him-self as her surrogate son. Like S. B., she feigns indifference to his departure: "The clock'll be set," she says, "If you hear it well and good." When he urges her to visit her niece, she goes, implicitly rejecting him by confirming his fear that it is her niece's children whom she regards as her surrogate children, not him. Further, she denies Gar's desire to see himself as someone's loved son, the product of a loving relationship. When he asks whether Boyle became an alcoholic out of disappointment at losing Maire as his wife (and hence Gar as his son), she evades the question. Though she asserts that Maire married the better man, thus implying that the seemingly uncaring S. B. is the more appropriate father for Gar, she denies that Gar is the product of a love match or, implicitly, that Maire would have truly loved her son had she lived; Maire's love, Madge suggests, was indiscriminate and valueless: "she went with a dozen—that was the kind of her—she couldn't help herself."

Even Kate's farewell visit, which would appear to validate Gar's desired experience by confirming that someone whom he loves will miss him, actually denies that experience through collusion. Her urging Gar to present a false self to her father when they were courting, by telling him to tell the Senator that he has money saved and a good income, has convinced him that his true self is unacceptable to her—an experience confirmed by her father's praise of the socially-prominent doctor, Francis King, as a prospective son-in-law and by Kate's marriage to King after Gar, intimidated, fails to ask for her hand. Hoping to impress Kate with what she's lost by losing him, Public Gar spins boastful fantasies of how well he expects to do in America; when Kate agrees with his fantasies, she colludes with his false self to deny the worth and lovableness of his true self, thus denying his last hope that she might have loved him for himself rather than for the fantasy self he is trying to project.

The most damaging and explicit denial of Gar's experience, however, occurs when he finally works up the courage to ask his father to confirm his memory of an event which he has cherished for fifteen years as proof that S. B., though unable to say so, truly loves him: the day they went fishing in the blue boat. S. B., he remembers, symbolically expressed his love by putting his hat and jacket on Gar to protect him from the rain. "Between us," Private Gar says, "… there was this great happiness, this great joy—you must have felt it too—although nothing was being said—just the two of us … and then, then for no reason at all except that you were happy too, you began to sing: … All round my hat I'll wear a green coloured ribbono"—a song of love for one who "is far, far away," as Gar will be on the morrow. But, when Public Gar finally asks S. B. to confirm this memory, his father denies the existence of the blue boat and insists that he has never heard, much less sung, that song. Private Gar's bitter reaction vividly illustrates the destruction of his experience: "So now you know: it never happened!"

Gar's experience, however, is not the only one denied. Denial of experience is so ingrained a pattern of behaviour in his community that the majority of the characters habitually deny the experiences of others, as well as denying their own experiences to forestall others from doing so, behaviour which fits Laing's argument that "If our experience is destroyed, our behaviour will be destructive" [R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, 1967]. Aunt Lizzie contradicts her husband's memories and denies their American benefactor's religious identity as an Episcopalian because it reinforces the identity she left Ireland to escape—that of a member of the socially- and economically-inferior Catholic community. Boyle rejects the possibility of kinship with Gar even as he asks for it. Madge denies her yearning for surrogate motherhood by feigning indifference both to Gar's departure and to her niece's failure to name the new baby after her. Kate and "the Boys" collude to validate false experiences in order to avoid acknowledging the true ones which they fear will be denied. And S. B. is afraid to ask Gar to validate his memory of shared love, not only with Gar as his son but with Gar as the product of a love match with the dead Maire, from whom Gar takes his middle name. Instead, S. B. turns to Madge, asking her if she remembers the day that Gar, dressed in his sailor suit, walked with him, "hand in hand," the two of them "as happy as larks"—but Madge denies that Gar ever had a sailor suit, just as S. B. denied that there ever was a blue boat.

As a result, all display schizoid characteristics. Aunt Lizzie calls herself Elise and claims that Lizzie is dead. Kate and "the Boys" present "false" selves. Madge, S. B., and Gar feign indifference and withdraw. Gar's ambivalence is so marked that twice Private Gar recoils in terror from the love and offered kinship he so deeply desires: once when Boyle embraces him and once when Lizzie calls him "my son". That this deep, self-destructive division within the self and against the self is a familial (in both the nuclear and communal senses) characteristic is emphasized by Madge, who says of Gar and S. B.: "When the boss was [Gar's] age, he was the very same as him. … And when [Gar is] the age the boss is now, he'll turn out just the same. … That's people for you—they'd put you astray in the head if you thought long enough about them."

The Freedom of the City, an overtly political play, would seem a departure from the familial context characteristic of most of Friel's plays unless one remembers Friel's definition of the community as a family. Then it becomes apparent that Northern Ireland is, in fact, a metaphorical family whose composition echoes the British imperialist analogy of the Union between Britain and Ireland as a marriage between John Bull and Hibernia—two of the significant others whose destruction of the experience of their last children still living at home, the Northern Irish, results in extremely (self-)destructive behaviour. As such, it clearly fits Laing's contention that manipulating the experience of others is political behaviour, a violent exercise of "the power to define reality" [quoted in Paul Levine, Divisions, 1975] commonly carried out to preserve the power structure within the family.

As in Philadelphia, Here I Come! Friel dramatizes another schizoid condition which appears to be created by the destruction of experience; he splits Michael, Lily, and Skinner into two "selves" each: their live selves and their dead selves. Alive and subject to significant others' disconfirmation of their experiences, they are, to varying degrees, unable either to articulate completely or to validate their own experiences, and they behave destructively, denying each other's experiences. Only their dead selves can fully affirm and articulate the meanings of their lives.

In denying their own and each other's experiences, the three living protagonists internalize and replicate the destruction inflicted on them by their society's significant others: the British government, the republican nationalists, the Church, the middle-class academic establishment, and the Southern Irish. Each significant other defines the experiences of Michael, Lily, and Skinner in terms which, denying their realities, validate its own version of reality in order to consolidate its power. The British government defines them as dangerous terrorists, the republican nationalists as rebel heroes. The Church first defines them as martyrs for Catholic rights; then, fearing that some might construe those rights to include rights for the poor, which would jeopardize its capitalist power-base, it redefines them as unfortunate victims of "Godless communism."

Even Dodds, the American sociologist, rejects their experience by depersonalizing and de-nationalizing them to enhance the "objective" authority of middle-class academia. By portraying them as nameless representatives of the world's poor, he denies the effect of British imperialism on their reality. He justifies the destruction of their experience by attributing to them the compensation of having "a hell of a lot more fun than [the middle class] have," just as racists long justified discrimination against Blacks (yet another colonized people) by portraying them as happy, watermelon-eating, banjo-playing piccaninnies whose simple joie-de-vivre would be destroyed by equal opportunity. Finally, he denies the validity of the identity which their dead selves achieve by asserting that once "they acquire an objective view of their condition," they are no longer legitimate members of their "subculture."

The RTE [Radió Telefis Éireann, the national broadcasting corporation of Eire (Southern Ireland)] announcer endorses the British government's description of them as terrorists and uses their funeral to celebrate the ascendancy of the alliance between Southern Irish politicians and the Church. His misnaming Skinner "Fitzmaurice" rather than "Fitzgerald" and dropping his middle name, Casimir, has multiple functions. It denies Skinner's identity, but it also repudiates kinship between the dominantly Catholic Southern Irish state and the Northern Irish Catholic minority. Casimir was the name of Countess Markievicz's husband, who, like his revolutionary wife, supported pre-independence Irish nationalism, though (appropriately, given Skinner's level of political awareness) in a more dilettantish fashion, and who fought for Polish freedom during the First World War; dropping "Casimir" from Skinner's name denies him association with the Irish nationalist movement which established Éire and with other national liberation movements. Changing "Fitzgerald" to "Fitzmaurice" rejects any possible relationship between Skinner and Garret Fitzgerald, the leader of Fine Gael, historically Éire's pro-Treaty (and therefore pro-Partition) party. As Éire's official spokesman, the RTE announcer's deliberate distancing of himself from the three protagonists implies that, like many of Friel's other families, the Northern Irish "family" is motherless; Hibernia, having left the marriage, has, at best, abandoned her Northern Irish children to the untender mercies of John Bull.

On another level, the three central characters are three aspects of the same schizoid self, the Northern Irish community divided against itself, with Michael as the will, Lily as the body, and Skinner as the intellect. Skinner, the one most aware of the discrepancies between his experience and the false experience imposed on him, the one most alienated and, apparently, paranoid, is, significantly, the one whom Michael calls bad, and Lily, mad. But it is Skinner who confirms the experiences of the other two, preparing them and himself for the self-realization, self-validation, and final unity which their "family" will allow them only in death. He does this by refusing to collude with Michael, the false self who has most thoroughly internalized the authorities' disconfirmation of his experience and who most adamantly denies the experiences of the others, and by confirming Lily's self-denied experiences, including helping her to reject her husband's denigration of her experience as the false perception of a "bone stupid bitch," as well as his denial of her worth and that of their retarded son.

By inducing Michael to entertain the possibility that his paranoia is really metanoia, Skinner prepares him to question and reject the false experience that has been imposed on him. By confirming Lily's experience and articulating it for her, he prepares her to understand that her experience, unassessed and unarticulated, has not been validated. By taking her experience seriously, he prepares himself to dare for the first time to take his own experience seriously and validate it.

The three finally realize that, given their metaphorical "parents'" destructive behaviour, they are better off as self-validating "orphans." However, to become such "orphans" in life would require them to unite and kill their "parents" because their significant others would, and ultimately do, kill them rather than allow them to leave the "family." In The Freedom of the City, the "family" is not merely dysfunctional, schizoid, and schizophrenogenic—it is murderously/suicidally schizophrenic.

Having extended his examination of the schizophrenogenic effects of the destruction of experience from the post-colonial nuclear and communal "family" in Philadelphia, Here I Come! to the colonized national "family" in The Freedom of the City, in Translations Friel moves his examination backwards in time to the colonized communal "family" of nineteenth-century Ireland from which both the post-colonial South and the still-colonized North derive. By focusing on the schizophrenogenic effects of the destruction of the Irish language and the experience which it embodies, he elaborates Lily's perception that unarticulated experience cannot be validated. Destroying the linguistic tools with which one organizes and expresses experience destroys the experience itself.

As in The Freedom of the City, there is no doubt that the authorities' manipulation of experience through the manipulation of language is a politically motivated exercise of the power to define reality. Names equal identity, and the act of naming (or renaming) confers possession of and control over the person or object thus identified. There-fore renaming is a military action whose purpose, like that of previous British renamings of Ireland, is to effect what Lancey admits is the "forfeiture and violent transfer of property," including the most important "property" of all—the identity and experience of the colonized.

The process is first exemplified by the British renaming of Owen. The name which they attribute to him, "Roland," denies his experience, and therefore his identity, as "Owen Hugh Mor. From Baile Beag," an Irish locus of experience. A conflation of his own name with Yolland's, it not only denies him an individual identity, but renders his a subsidiary, derivative identity dependent for meaning, and even existence, on his British masters. Though he eventu-ally comes to realize that Owen and Roland are not "the same me," his recognition comes too late to save his experience or that of his communal "family."

As the play proceeds, Owen colludes with the British to establish similar bastardized false identities for local place names, thus transferring control and possession of both the physical and psychological environment to the colonizers—a process which he vindicates by denying the local inhabitants' experience. They do not know, he asserts, why Tobair Vree is called Tobair Vree, nor does the name embody a valid experience because there is no longer a well (Ir. tobair) there. Because the experience embodied in the name is invalid, it is justifiable to redefine it by renaming it.

The schizophrenogenic result of renaming is most effectively exemplified by Owen's use of it to deny explicitly his father's experience. The priest does not, as Hugh thinks, live "at Lis na Muc" because, Owen asserts, "Lis na Muc, the Fort of the Pigs, has become Swinefort. … And to get to Swinefort you pass through Greencastle and Fair Head and Strandhill and Gort and Whiteplains. And the new school isn't at Poll na gCaorach—it's at Sheepsrock." His father, he insists, does not know the places because he does not know their names. Hugh apparently refuses to "hear" what Owen has said, but his oblique response suggests his recognition of the destruction of his experience through the destruction of his linguistic control over it. Irish, he replies (ostensibly speaking to Yolland), is a language "full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception"—that is, it is the language of the schizoid condition.

That this renaming is destructive of the entire community's experience is later concretized by Lancey and Owen's litany of townlands to be levelled. As Lancey reads the Anglicized names, echoed by Owen's translation, each Irish place-name is obliterated, presaging the literal obliteration of the places themselves. Owen's enforced cooperation in this destruction, like the Donnelly twins' murder of Yolland, fits Laing's contention that destroyed experience results in destructive behaviour, while the retributive levelling of the townlands fits his argument that the use of power to define reality is, in fact, a violent, destructive, political act.

However, the psychological effects of non-military imperialism will, in the long run, more efficiently destroy the native Irish experience than the military destruction which is a metaphor for it. The inroads of cultural and economic imperialism, manifested by Maire's desire to learn English so that she can emigrate to America to escape Baile Beag's poverty, begin even before the cartographic expedition reaches the village and have already begun to divide the Irish community against itself, as O'Connell's collusion with the British to validate English over Irish demonstrates. The establishment of the national school, in which only English will be spoken, will complete the process of denying the Irish experience; every morning there, the students will sing a song thanking God that they are happy little English boys.

None the less, Friel is not politically or psychologically naive enough to subscribe to "Maud Gonne's catechism"—the nationalist formulation that the origin of all evil is England. That his early nineteenth-century Baile Beag, like its modern descendant, Gar's Bally beg, is a schizoid community is not due solely to the effects of British imperialism. The motherless nuclear family which embodies the schizoid communal family is headed by an alcoholic father who retreats into fantasies of omnipotence to compensate for his inability to cope with reality and who requires his symbolically crippled son, Manus, to assume both paternal and maternal roles in order to keep the young man from leaving home. This western community, like the schizophrenogenic ones Scheper-Hughes describes, is already characterized by peripheral agriculture, depopulation, isolation, and celibacy; the males are either unmarried or widowed, while most of the eligible females are either emigrating, like Maire, or reduced to mute impotence, like Sarah.

The foremost exemplar of the schizophrenogenic destruction of the community's experience is the obviously schizophrenic Jimmy Jack. Though his condition, and that of Hugh, results at least partly from the defeat of Irish nationalist hopes in the crushing of the 1798 Rebellion, they carried another source and symptom of the destruction of their experience into battle with them then: the Aeneid. Even in 1798, both lived in a fantasy world; in Glenties, Hugh says, they "got homesick for Athens, just like Ulysses" and, since their return, both have retreated further into their imagined Athens, compensating for their defeat by reliving the glories of dead civilizations. Just as the British deny the Irish experience of the present generation, their immersion in Classical Greek and Roman experience have denied and continued to deny, devalue, and destroy Hugh and Jimmy Jack's experience, and Hugh has perpetuated that denial by teaching his students Latin and Greek but not Irish. Hugh is a poet, not in Irish but in Latin. Jimmy Jack knows of Grania, but his schizophrenic hallucinatory fantasies are of Athene—and, though they mock him for them, all the others collude with him to validate those fantasies. Hugh's insistence on the superiority of Classical language and culture has already denied the validity of Irish experience, thus preparing the ground for the triumph of British cultural imperialism.

As a result of generations of denied experience, all of Ireland is, in the early-nineteenth as in the later-twentieth century, a divided, self-destructive "family" which, like the Carthage to which Hugh's last speech compares it, destroys its own children. Just as Aeneas's Roman descendants destroyed Carthage, his British "descendants" are destroying Ireland, and the Irish, overwhelmed by these significant others, are colluding with them in the denial and destruction of their own reality. "To remember every-thing," as Hugh says, "is a form of madness." Part of Ireland's problem is that, like Jimmy Jack, she can no longer discriminate between "the literal past… [and the] images of the past embodied in language," and she has failed to renew those images. Worse, however, she has accepted false images in which to "fossilize" herself. The result is the destructive and self-destructive "petrification" or "depersonalization" which Laing says that the schizoid fears from and perpetrates on others [Laing, The Divided Self, 1960] and which Friel presents as resulting in the schizoid "privacies" which are now, as Hugh says, "all we have."