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Our town: Your legacy, our legacy

Dr Tom Ferraro
“Whether from Peru, Greece, Ireland or elsewhere, your ancestors have left lasting impressions on your personality, body and your behavior.”

I attended a conference this weekend in Manhattan with the unusual title “Trauma Trails” about the impact a specific cultural trauma can have on generations that come after. The talk was by Dr. Michael O’Loughlin, an Irish psychoanalyst and professor at Adelphi University and his work focused on uncovering the traumatic damage done to the Irish due to the Great Famine of 1845 to 1849. He suggested that traumas like this can lead to an intergenerational transmission that impacts the minds, bodies, appetites, personalities, and behavior for generations.

We all know that each nation has a specific character. The Irish are stoic, spiritual, intellectual and depressed. I can attest to this fact because my mother was a beautiful Irish woman but the best she could come up with for comfort when I needed it was to say “You made your bed, now sleep in it.”

Dr. O’Loughlin suggested that the secrets of past ancestral trauma are buried deep within each of us and though these things influence us we really do not have access to discovering exactly what they are or how they function. The secrets of our homelands remain as a silent presence which gives us our strength and also our anguish.

I can see much truth in his hypothesis. I think there is a stoic, defensive, sullen, and yet humorous and magical quality about the Irish. As a sport psychologist, I have observed that some of the best golfers in the world such as Rory McIlroy, Padraig Harrington, Graham McDowell, and Shane Lowry come from Ireland. Golf is punishing and extremely pressure-packed and the Irish golfer seems to have a remarkable ability to remain calm, stoic and well defended.

More proof of the Irish character is seen in the Samuel Beckett play “Waiting for Godot,” a work filled with Irish humor used to ward off, despair, hunger, and suicidal urges.
I wondered if I might be able to ask other folks from foreign nations to define for themselves their nation’s personality and character traits. So off I went down Hillside Avenue and ran into a variety of shopkeepers who were born overseas. My first interview was with Allan Walsh longtime owner of Pyramid Jewelers. Allan was born and raised in London and still has that distinctive British accent. I asked him to describe the British personality and he told me that the majority are very warm and very middle class, not the upper-class aristocrats that Americans typically think of when they think of the British Empire. Allan emphasized the working-class mentality most British have and how they all must work hard and focus on survival rather than lording it over others. As he spoke of all this I thought of one of my favorite British authors, Thomas Hardy and realized that Allan was correct to describe this character trait. In “Far from the Madding Crowd” Thomas Hardy wrote of the love and honor amidst the harsh realities of the farming community in 19th century England. There has never been a more humble and honorable hero than Gabriel Oak the faithful farmer who forever loved the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene. That is the type of British character that Allan Walsh was describing to me.

I left the jewelry shop and headed westward and stopped at Williston Park Florist owned by the gregarious and always affable Gus, who is Greek through and through. I asked him to try to describe the Greek personality and he smiled and then said: “The Greeks are a happy people and know how to live a good life.” I thought of the famous film Zorba the Greek starring Anthony Quinn and the wonderful dance he did. Gus went on to tell me that perhaps the weather helps the Greeks to relax and enjoy life and said, “In Greece, the people work to live whereas in America, we live to work.” This is an old adage that is truer today than ever before and I reminded myself to book the Greek cruise this spring.

I had a chance to then interview Gus’s assistant Chris who is Peruvian and who told me that Peru has the fabled city of El Dorado with all the gold in the world but you must go into the Amazon to get it. Peru compelled the Spanish conquistador Pizarro to enter in search of Inca gold. Pizarro’s conquest entered into modern mythology when Werner Herzog made the mesmerizing film “Aguirre: The Wrath of God” about man’s obsession with gold and power.

And after interviewing these three men and after listening to Dr. O’Loughlin’s talk about the Irish I could see that two things were true. One, it is true that each country has a history that is deeply embedded into its people over many generations. And two, it will take either a masterful psychoanalyst to unlock these secrets or a great artist to do the same.

Artists like Samuel Beckett, Thomas Hardy, Nikos Kazantzakis, and Werner Herzog are like the fabled city of El Dorado in that they are worth their weight in gold. The wonderful Irish poet Yeats coined the term Spiritus Mundi which was that deep place that artists dive into to bring back to us the secrets of their society. So if you perchance are interested in learning about the secrets that are embedded within you have two choices. Either get yourself into psychoanalysis or go see a great film or book that is authored by someone well-known in your homeland. You will learn far more about yourself in analysis, by watching a great film or reading a great novel than any Ancestry.com readout you can buy.

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