'Saints, Scholars, And Schizophrenics'

In, “Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics” by Nancy Schephur-Hughes, the typical personality of an Irish person is one of fear and mistrust. They are also, “intensely familistic and tightly endogamous”. Schizophrenia is also very common. They especially do not trust outsiders and are very influenced by their past, holy geography, and their language which they regard as sacred tongue. According to the author, these main type of personality traits arise from the decline in culture of rural Irish people and their culture.
Tales in the Irish culture reflect the fear many of the Irish people feel. For example, the author describes the tale of an evil body of water, a small lake called, “Loch Geal” which is believed to hold a demon serpent that holds an evil curse. The tale says that a midwife, on her way down an inaccessible cliff, slipped and fell in the water. Because she never made it to the women who was about to give birth, both the mother and the child died. The body of the midwife was never recovered and a fear of a curse grew which caused the remaining habitants to leave their homes.
Irish people from Ballyran share the same …show more content…
Only men were used in this test and the results show a common theme. They were showed a card of a boy with a violin in front of him. Many of the men, both average and hospitalized, suggested that perhaps the boy was looking at his violin in a sad manner because it was broken or out of tune. Another boy describes that the boy in the card has a broken violin and that he does not know what to do except look at it with disgust. Many of them suggested that there was some sort of issue with the violin. Hughes suggest that the test reveals how Irish men feel about their own life and work. They incorporated their own feelings when they described the boy and his violin on the