An Alternative Psychoanalytic Reflection on the Irish Residential Property Bubble

Clare Branigan

ERES from European Real Estate Society (ERES)

Abstract: We explore the role of repressed ancestral suffering in driving institutional and broader societal responses to contemporary events. We demonstrate how a traumatic past becomes interwoven in the fabric of the social order, rendering state and parastatal organizations and their leaders powerless. This is manifest in the recent destructive Irish real estate bubble, and its associated economic and social consequences. The concept of intergenerational transmission of trauma is key to our analysis. We show how the Irish obsession with owning property and land is a psychic attempt to transcend the traumatic past to ‘inhabit’ an idealized pre-colonial land leading to emergent feelings of empowerment, euphoria and omnipotence. We also explain why the property bubble is being re-enacted so soon with no apparent learning. In addition, we highlight the potential for an enhanced understanding of this bubble with insights from novels, drama, and poetry.

Keywords: real estate bubble; social unconscious; socio-economic crisis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-ure
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