Millar, A: Socio-ideological fantasy and the Northern Irelan

Conducting a Lacanian-inspired psychoanalysis of some of the most candid interview materials ever gathered from former IRA members and loyalists, the author demonstrates through a careful examination of their slips of the tongue, jokes, rationalisations and contradictions, that it is the unconscious dynamics of socio-ideological fantasy, i.e. the unconscious pleasure people find in suffering, domination, submission, ignorance, failure and rivalry over jouissance, that lead to the reproduction of antagonism between the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland.