Lovelessness is the main theme of “A Painful Case,” one of the stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners. What is the reason for Mr. Duffy’s lovelessness? According to abnormal psychology, one of the most important characteristics of schizoid personality disorder is that the people who have this symptom have neither human communion nor sexual emotion. Like people with schizoid personality disorder, Mr. Duffy doesn’t have any communion with others or feel sexual attraction towards women. His lovelessness is because of schizoid personality disorder.

Then what is the cause of Mr. Duffy’s schizoid personality disorder? Abnormal psychology theorists explain that schizoid personality disorder is mostly caused by a human being’s negative growing environments, especially a negative family background. Even though there’s no evidence about Mr. Duffy’s growing environment in the story, we can find the evidence in the rest of the Dubliners stories because Joyce intended Dubliners to be a history of a human being. So the childhood characters in other stories of Dubliners can be seen as characters who represent Mr. Duffy’s childhood. There is a lot of evidence which shows the negative circumstances of Mr. Duffy’s early life in Dubliners. In these circumstances he developed schizoid personality disorder and, as a consequence, cannot love Mrs. Sinico or other men and women.

Mr. Duffy’s impotence does not seem to be solved in the story, but Joyce implies its resolution in the story. He insists that Dubliners try to establish normal families, and then Irish children will grow up as normal characters, be able to love, and create a normal history of Ireland.