The College of Psychoanalysis debated the causes of social breakdown and crime during a meeting in the Irish Writer’s Museum in Dublin on Saturday. A paper was presented by psychoanalyst and lecturer, Rob Weatherill which blamed psychoanalysis itself for many of the pathologies facing modern society, including family breakdown.

Weatherill stressed the importance of fathers and other authority figures in helping children develop healthy ‘superegos’ which can assist them in controlling their impulses, provide them with a sense of right and wrong and thereby help to create a more civilised society.

Weatherill’s thesis is that while psychoanalysis can work very well in clinical settings when it is applied to society as a whole it can be disastrous.