O'Doherty, (Eamonn) Feighin

by Terry Clavin

O'Doherty, (Eamonn) Feighin (1918–98), priest, academic, and psychologist, was born in Dublin on 10 February 1918, youngest son among four sons and two daughters of Séamus O'Doherty (qv), revolutionary, and his wife Kitty O'Doherty (qv). His eldest brother, Kevin O'Doherty (qv), was a prominent Bord Fáilte executive. A bookish youth and an academic prodigy, he was educated through Irish at Scoil Cholmcille, Marlborough Street, and then at Coláiste Mhuire, Parnell Square, where he was a foundation pupil. He sat the 1933 intermediate examination the day after a serious operation, obtaining a first-class scholarship.

Student career Marked out for the priesthood from a young age, he studied at Clonliffe College (1935–9) and attended UCD where his achievement in the first arts examinations both of a first and first place in Irish, as well as firsts in logic and English, earned him a scholarship. He graduated BA with first-class honours in 1938 and was awarded the Pierce Malone scholarship in mental and moral science. He was awarded a first-class MA in 1939, along with a travelling studentship in philosophy. At the time UCD's philosophy faculty was steeped in nineteenth-century neo-scholasticism, which deployed the works of St Thomas Aquinas to rebut modernist heresies while integrating subsequent scientific discoveries into this medieval worldview. O'Doherty became an ardent Thomist, but not a neo-scholastic, disliking the manner in which that school seemed to warp Aquinas's philosophy into an overly systematised, stridently anti-modernist dogma.

He postponed taking up his travelling studentship, instead going to the Irish College in Rome to study theology at the Lateran University. By the time he graduated BD in 1941, Italy was at war, and the archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid (qv), ordered his return to Ireland. With difficulty he and two other Irish clerical students made it as far as Lisbon, where they secured passage home in February 1942 by signing up as deckhands for a short-staffed Limerick Steamship Company vessel captained by a Belfast Orangeman. The ship was stopped and searched by a German U-boat in the Bay of Biscay but was allowed to proceed. On arriving in Dublin O'Doherty received his discharge papers, which read 'conduct – excellent, seamanship – adequate'. He related his adventures to McQuaid only to be admonished for abandoning priestly dress and acting outside his calling.

He re-entered Clonliffe College and was ordained there in 1943 before taking up his travelling scholarship at Downing College, Cambridge, to study experimental psychology. At Cambridge he was a protégé of Frederic Bartlett, cognitive psychology pioneer and fellow of St John's College, attended lectures given by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and also studied logic, abnormal psychology, and the history of philosophy. His doctoral work involved a number of experiments in the process of recognition and identification of objects presented by a tachistoscope (a device that displays an image for a specific amount of time). In doing so, he persuaded some initially unsympathetic Cambridge scientists that laboratory evidence supported the description of the process of knowing outlined by Aquinas.

While at Downing he became interested in mental health and religious psychology and through his activism in the World Federation of Mental Health (later serving on the United Nations Committee for Mental Health) became friendly with and was influenced by the psychoanalysts Gregory Zilboorg and Harry Stack Sullivan as well as the anthropologist Margaret Meade. He was made a member (1945) and then an associate (1946) of the British Psychological Society, also becoming a fellow of the Psychology Society of Ireland.

Academic On graduating Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1945, he was appointed lecturer in the department of logic and psychology in UCD and chaplain of the nearby hostel of the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus on Harcourt Street; many years later, when UCD moved from the city centre to Belfield, he likewise became chaplain to the Carmelite nuns at Roebuck. He studied mathematical logic during 1946–8 under his UCD colleague Jan Lukasiewicz, supplementing his earlier acquisition at Cambridge of the Russell–Whitehead forms of symbolic logic. In 1949, his appointment as professor of logic and psychology capped a meteoric rise through academia.

Thereafter O'Doherty published ten books and contributed over a hundred articles and reviews to journals in Ireland and abroad. These ranged widely across the fields of philosophy, theology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, logic, visual perception, literature, cognition, linguistics, art and design, ergonomics, industrial relations, educational practice and politics; the fraught intersection between psychology and religion was a recurring theme. He was visiting professor at universities in the USA and in Britain and a frequent and distinguished attendee of various internationally prestigious academic conferences.

His writings – which savour more of a synthesising, intellectually lively journalism than of pioneering scholarship – were based on his lectures, and bear a pedagogic, clear and confident manner that outlined his positions coherently and persuasively without getting bogged down in detailed considerations of evidence. Some pronouncements, designed to stimulate debate in a lecture hall, appear provocatively absolutist in print and involve lawyerly simplifications of and imputations from the opinions expressed by intellectual foes. The freshness of his prose and his delving into modish themes distracted from the traditional Thomism that underpinned his thinking. A critic of Thomists who tried to reconcile Aquinas with Kant's transcendentalism, O'Doherty accordingly denied that humans possess innate wisdom, asserting that all knowledge is the result of experience and observation.

His time at Cambridge exposed him directly to Bertrand Russell's contempt for Christianity and particularly for Thomism, which would explain the contrast between his rather begrudging acknowledgement of the British philosopher's stature and his forbearance towards other equally atheistic thinkers. He perhaps identified Russell as the most articulate contemporary proponent of what he saw as the hypocritical attempt by secular modernism to replace God with an alternative source of extrinsic meaning. Existentialism received his backhanded approbation for complementing Aquinas's declaration that God's absence would render all existence absurd and for being the first consistent attempt to accept the consequences of atheism.

Though lecturing in logic as his main and preferred subject, he established and developed the department of psychology in UCD. In 1958 he set up a diploma in psychology: a postgraduate qualification taken by teachers, doctors, social workers and other professionals. Experimental facilities were established at Thornfield and when these were sufficiently developed an undergraduate degree was instituted in the faculty of arts in 1967 and in the faculty of science a few years later. He also oversaw in 1967 the creation of a diploma in career guidance (the first in Ireland) and a course of professional training in clinical psychology in 1979.

An active and efficient academic administrator, he was elected by the graduates to the UCD governing body (1970–83), largely on the strength of the sizeable clerical cohort among UCD graduates, served on the NUI senate for twelve years, was acting registrar of UCD on two occasions (1972–4; 1982–3), restructuring the office, and was dean of the faculty of philosophy and sociology (1971–80). A genuine polymath, his breadth of knowledge and worldly demeanour aroused the jealousy and suspicion of his lay colleagues who harboured a justifiable (though in O'Doherty's case exaggerated) mistrust of priestly designs on UCD's academic integrity.

Certainly O'Doherty's progress owed much to the patronage of McQuaid who effectively controlled and took a keen interest in UCD's philosophy faculty; the great majority of students there were seminarians while almost all the lecturers were priests. The growth of the department of psychology occurred at McQuaid's behest and was in part intended to maintain the church's grip over an expanding education system. Similar considerations governed O'Doherty's involvement in the promotion and development of adult and vocational education schemes, and his publication of a guidebook for school counsellors.

McQuaid's fearsome reputation, particularly as mediated by his forbidding watchdog within the UCD faculty of philosophy, Monsignor James Horgan, had a paralysing effect on the faculty, which was characterised by intellectual aridity and a negligible publishing output. O'Doherty admired and was awed by his episcopal benefactor, but was confident in his relationship with him, recognising that McQuaid was prepared to countenance a degree of independent-mindedness if it added lustre to an embarrassingly stale faculty. A gifted expositor, O'Doherty was scathing of the inept, manual-reliant fashion in which philosophy was taught in Ireland, describing it as more akin to apologetics, and he warned that the educated laity would react by philosophising free of clerical supervision with malign consequences. (As it transpired, the clumsy propagation of absolutist Thomism nurtured an academic generation of devout empiricists, suspicious of all philosophy and inoculated against any overarching belief system.)

Outside interests Outside of academia O'Doherty was a practising psychoanalyst, acting as psychological evaluator for would-be Aer Lingus pilots from 1961, serving as a consultant at St John of God Hospital and counselling clergy. A prominent intellectual, he was often invited to talk in public and appear on radio or television, sometimes to promote church teaching but also to bring his expertise to bear in a more secular capacity. He served as a member of the editorial advisory board of Acta Psychologica, a multi-lingual international scientific review. He was a member and sometime vice-president of the Royal Irish Academy.

He was first chairman of the Human Sciences Committee (1958–64), a group established by the government to promote the study of human problems in industry and to prepare for an anticipated wave of economic development. As such, he was at the forefront of efforts to develop an indigenous social science research infrastructure and to raise awareness of ergonomic issues, though the committee's initiatives were hampered by a lack of funding. He also served on the government committee charged with preparing for the decimalisation of the currency in 1971. Through his contact with the the Bernard van Leer Foundation, a Dutch philanthropic group, he organised in the 1970s the first major research study of inner-city poverty and educational disadvantage in Ireland. These initiatives secure his exemption from the general charge that the catholic clergy's mid-century dominance of the social sciences in Ireland impeded the development of the discipline.

O'Doherty was regularly commissioned by the church to investigate parapsychological phenomena as possible supernatural occurrences, and was by his death the only accredited exorcist in the country. Generally, he took a sceptical line, though not when the prestige of the church was involved. Charged in the 1960s with investigating the late-nineteenth-century Marian apparition at Knock, he uncovered a document in the archives of the diocese of Tuam claiming that a local policeman had cast an image using a magic lantern, an early form of projector. His report considered this evidence questionable given that the account was not by the policeman, but by his brother. Privately he was less certain, while maintaining that Knock was nonetheless a holy place.

Uninterested in sport as a youth, in adulthood he was a keen swimmer, skier and mountaineer, and he enjoyed regular holidays with the two priests who had been his travelling companions in 1941–2. A lover of literature, he was of the view that the great works provided an indirect but effective means of deepening the reader's personal experience and development and also provided a comprehensible rendering of complex psychological concepts; similarly, he praised Freud's appropriation of Greek myth to propagate his theories. He had friendships with J. R. R. Tolkien and with Brendan Behan (qv) (to whom he administered the last rites), and he was an avid and learned admirer of James Joyce (qv), whose mature works were a rejection of, yet permeated by, Thomism.

Speaking six European languages fluently and having some faculty for another two, he was interested in the philosophy and teaching of language, being conversant with the linguistic analyses of Frege and Wittgenstein (though he believed much of contemporary philosophy had retreated from soaring metaphysical speculation into anal disputations over linguistic terminology). In a controversial speech made in November 1957, he criticised the government's efforts to encourage teaching through Irish to students whose vernacular was English and who existed in a wholly English-speaking environment outside of their classrooms. He predicted that this policy would retard the intellectual and personal progress of pupils, causing social alienation and even emigration, and concluded that the attempted revival of Irish through the education system alone was doomed to failure, noting that its nineteenth-century abandonment had been accompanied by a host of political, economic and social pressures that could not be applied contemporaneously.

Responses to change A similar sensibility informed his attitude towards the far-reaching social and cultural changes experienced by Irish society from the early 1960s. In a much discussed essay published in 1965 ('Society, identity and change', Studies (summer 1965), 125–35), he warned that a culture cannot be preserved in stasis indefinitely without entombing it and that the challenge was to distinguish the permanent and abiding values embodied within Irish culture from those aspects of it that were mutable relics of a particular time. By holding fast to cherished but ultimately transient shibboleths, the older generation alienated the young who are less invested with tradition and realise that reality fails to correspond with communal myth-making. Concerned by the manner in which Christian values had become intertwined with Irish nationalism and with an agrarian, faux-Gaelic society, he feared that catholicism was being identified with conformism, backwardness and poverty, and as an obstacle to achieving prosperity and technological sophistication.

The importance of instilling values into the young drew him towards the psychology of adolescence, particularly in relation to religion. He regarded adolescence as the crucial period, when the religion of childhood – the reproduction of a learned pattern of behaviour – typically either matured into a full faith or dissolved into rebellion against authority. Student unrest in UCD from 1968 enabled him to observe the latter phenomenon at close quarters; though sympathetic towards their grievances against the college administration, he regarded the students' actions as fundamentally infantile and nihilistic. He felt the extent of youthful misbehaviour was exaggerated by moralisers (who seemingly derived a vicarious pleasure from dwelling upon it) and arose in part from the older generation's unprecedented lack of confidence in its own values and its unwillingness to acknowledge the partial maturity of the adolescent.

He welcomed the second Vatican council (1962–5) as freeing the church from its Mediterranean cultural orientation, and so assisting evangelisation in non-western countries. But later he was dismayed by developments arising from these reforms, such as his fellow clergy's tendency to regard their function as primarily social, not sacramental, and their abandonment (in practice) of Thomism, which was conflated with a discredited neo-scholasticism. In 1971 his condemnation of sixteen priests who publicly questioned church teaching on artificial contraception signalled his disenchantment with the liberal movement within the church and his identification with more conservative elements.

While welcoming the advent of a more pluralist society in the 1970s, he pointed out that in practice many self-proclaimed pluralists interpreted this as granting freedom of opinion to all except the catholic church. He warned catholic legislators that they remained bound by church teachings and bore moral responsibility for the harm incurred through the legalisation of abortion, divorce or homosexuality. Describing calls for the ending of denominational education as totalitarian cultural engineering, he identified educational institutions as the crucial mechanism for transmitting Christian values at a time when familial and social controls were weakening. He also fretted that trends within secondary education would produce an overly demotic and utilitarian method of teaching, culminating in the failure to realise the potential of gifted students and in the neglect of the humanities.

Freudianism, religion and free will A devotee of Freud, he argued that some of his theories bore out Aquinas's teachings, particularly his concepts of habitual knowledge (which O'Doherty equated with the Freudian sub-conscious) and of humankind as a psycho-physical composite, neither wholly rational nor wholly biological (which proved useful in slaying various rationalist and empiricist demons). The discovery of subliminal motives, capable of impeding moral and spiritual development if not consciously confronted, he commended as a crucial advance, facilitating the exercise of free will within the context of an organism that must undergo a learning process and is subjected to the demands of a sensory-emotional life. O'Doherty's core principle was that humans have a spiritual dimension independent of matter and consequently were to a greater or lesser extent free and rational individuals, capable of choosing between right and wrong. Thus, while social or psychological factors have a bearing on immoral behaviour, the existence of such extenuating circumstances cannot absolve sin. (He praised sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists for describing and analysing human behaviour, but stressed that they went astray when they implied that acts conventionally held to be immoral were legitimised if discovered to be widespread, making society the sole arbiter of right and wrong and suggesting that moral norms could be established through observation of empirical phenomena.)

O'Doherty held that Freud's psychoanalysis was untainted by his philosophical and theological heresies, maintaining that the unreflective, a priori atheism underpinning his critiques of religion could be easily parried. Freud contended he had proved that God was a psychological construct by demonstrating parallels between the conduct of the neurotic and the religious person, and in showing that religion is related to humanity's craving for ritual and symbolism to reinforce order and soothe anxiety. O'Doherty rebuts this by arguing that God would communicate his revelation to humans in a manner appropriate to their needs and frailties. Thus, while the sacraments are incidentally an expression of worldly longings, they are primarily the indispensible supernatural mechanisms for demonstrating faith and achieving salvation. He was at pains to reject Jung's claim that religious well-being was intrinsically linked to mental health, regarding Jungianism as a dangerously subversive form of competing, inward-focused spirituality, reminiscent of Gnosticism, that obviated institutional faith in favour of pseudo-salvific psychotherapy.

Maintaining that catholics should purge their religious observances of primitive ritualism, he advocated the clinical dissection of established church practices as a means of distinguishing mere symbolism from true faith. This penetration of catholicism's veil of miracle, mystery and authority undoubtedly unsettled his fellow clergy. They would have been further discomfited by his ready acceptance of an overlap between religious asceticism and masochism and between prayer and obsessive compulsion; he was also of the view that many catholic mystics' experiences of divine communication were likely either hallucinations or manifestations of schizophrenia.

The priest and mental health In 1960 he organised a conference, 'The priest and mental health'. Its content, particularly its treatment of sexuality, stimulated heated debate. Significantly, in his address to the conference, Archbishop McQuaid declared Freud's influence to be entirely pernicious, denying that his methods were separable from his analysis, and also denying that Jung was a greater menace. Nonetheless he did not restrain O'Doherty and the conference papers exerted considerable influence over formal church policy when published in book form two years later. For O'Doherty, Freudianism was too useful and pervasive to be dismissed. He grasped that its clarification of the subconscious sexual motivation underlying ostensibly non-sexual behaviour patterns served notice of dangers associated with (but not inherent in) clerical celibacy.

In 1967 O'Doherty warned of the need for psychological evaluations of candidates for the priesthood, arguing that many young people were pursuing a vocation, not as a commitment to a life of sacrifice, but as a means of resolving personal issues, often stemming from sexual immaturity; as such they were not mentally equipped for celibacy. He regarded Christians as prone to seeing their souls as an ethereal spirit trapped in impure organic matter leading to the neurotic repudiation of human nature, instead of the acceptance of emotions, desires and instincts as natural, as something to be controlled, not suppressed. Bereft of prudishness, O'Doherty enjoyed a social drink, irreverent banter and the company of woman, towards whom he bore a conspicuously progressive attitude.

In 1971 he published three handbooks, which advised religious superiors on how to help those training for a life in religion to fulfil their vocation, detailing indicators and counter-indicators of a calling. During the early 1970s, he persuaded a reluctant hierarchy to permit him to conduct psychological evaluations of seminarians and clergy, establishing for this purpose the Group for Religious Psychology. He travelled widely, both around Ireland and abroad, undertaking these duties, uncovering evidence of the prevalence of bizarre sexual attitudes among seminarians and clergy, including a priest who believed that having sex with a man did not constitute a breach of his vows of chastity. Yet while paying lip service to O'Doherty's advice, the church's desperation to mitigate a sharp fall in vocations meant that not just sexually troubled, but transparently predatory candidates, were sometimes indulged to an unwarranted degree.

This was brought home to O'Doherty on at least two instances: during 1981–2 he interviewed and wrote psychological evaluations of child sex abusers Fr James Doyle and Fr Sean Fortune (qv), which expressed grave concerns about their psycho-sexual development, commitment to chastity and fitness not just for the priesthood, but for society; he described Fortune as a liar and his past conduct with boy scouts as tantamount to indecent assault. Nonetheless, O'Doherty was wary of pushing too far against his superiors' wishes and affirmed that Fortune could be rehabilitated, though he expressed renewed alarm after his final interview. The relevant diocesan authorities failed to act on these warnings.

The manner in which O'Doherty's loyalty (be it misguided or prudential) to church institutions constrained his reforming inclinations, further emerges from studies he conducted on the boys in St Patrick's industrial school in Dublin (1967) and on the extent of mental handicap and educational backwardness within industrial schools generally (1970); the latter was part of a wider survey into the industrial school system known as the Kennedy report. Both studies found the children in these schools to be deprived educationally, culturally and emotionally, and implicitly called for change, but avoided criticising the Christian Brothers who ran those institutions and ignored the systematic maltreatment and abuse of inmates.

O'Doherty retired from academia in 1983, moving to a small flat near UCD. He died 9 September 1998 in St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, and was buried in Glasnevin cemetery. During his life he accumulated a collection of eighteen paintings (including two by Mainie Jellett (qv)), two sculptures, four woodcarvings and a stained glass medallion. He donated them to the Mater Dei Institute; they were loaned to UCD in 1998. Fittingly, these works were rendered in a modernist fashion while having a traditional religious content, reflecting his devotion to the Virgin Mary. His papers, including publications as well as drafts and typescripts of lectures and publications, are in the National Archives of Ireland (NA 2001/83).

Assessment O'Doherty's life, by successfully balancing progressivism with orthodoxy to an unusual, perhaps singular, degree, confounds both secularist criticisms of Irish catholicism as irredeemably philistine and obscurantist, and religious conservatives' characterisation of any engagement with modernity as incipient spiritual backsliding. He regarded faith as an act of mind and not as a content of experience, which distanced him from catholicism as practiced in Ireland: a determinedly unintellectual, communal and devotional faith, manifested in what one did rather than what one thought. As a result, he overestimated Irish catholicism's capacity for renewal, his conviction that the church could shape the cultural metamorphosis attendant upon the unleashing of powerful socio-economic forces foundering amid the reaction to the Humanae vitae encyclical (1968). To his further dismay, the church's loss of authority was compounded by its refusal to confront vigorously the implications of psychoanalytic revelation, thus facilitating a series of child-abuse tragedies and the percolation into Irish society of a crude cod-Freudianism that saw a commitment to chastity as a form of sexual deviancy, serving to undermine public confidence in both the ideal and practice of clerical celibacy.

Published work O'Doherty's published work included: 'Psychotherapy and mystical phenomena', Studies (March 1951), 23–32; 'Marcel, Sartre and existentialism', University Review, i (summer 1954), 45–57; 'Religion and mental health', Studies (spring 1956), 39–49; 'Bilingual school policy', Studies (autumn 1958), 259–68; 'Taboo, ritual and religion', Studies (summer 1960), 131–43; 'Towards a dynamic psychology: Freud and St. Thomas', Studies (winter 1960), 341–54; E. F. O'Doherty and S. Desmond McGrath, The priest and mental health (1962); 'Society, identity and change', Studies (summer 1965), 125–35; 'Freedom, responsibility and guilt', Studies (winter 1965), 363–72; 'Man in Freud and St Thomas', Studies (spring 1967), 41–50; Anne Flynn, Nuala McDonald and E. F. O'Doherty, 'A survey of boys in St Patrick's institution: project on juvenile delinquency', Irish Jurist, ii, n.s., pt 2 (winter 1967), 222–32; 'Literature and the development of personality', Studies (winter 1968), 361–71; Reformatory and industrial schools systems report (1970), appendix F; 'The role of the school counsellor', The Irish Journal of Education, iv, no. 2 (winter 1970), 84–9; The psychology of vocation (1971).