Beckett and Bion

The (Im)Patient Voice in Psychotherapy and Literature

Ian Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429911224
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Literature

This book focuses on Samuel Beckett's psychoanalytic psychotherapy with W. R. Bion as a central aspect both of Beckett's and Bion's radical transformations of literature and psychoanalysis. The recent publication of Beckett's correspondence during the period of his psychotherapy with Bion provides a starting place for an imaginative reconstruction of this psychotherapy, culminating with Bion's famous invitation to his patient to dinner and a lecture by C.G. Jung. Following from the course of this psychotherapy, Miller and Souter trace the development of Beckett's radical use of clinical psychoanalytic method in his writing, suggesting the development within his characters of a literary-analytic working through of transference to an idealized auditor known by various names, apparently based on Bion. Miller and Souter link this pursuit to Beckett's breakthrough from prose to drama, as the psychology of projective identification is transformed to physical enactment.

PART I

THE CONTEXT AND EVENTS OF BECKETT’S PSYCHOTHERAPY WITH BION

CHAPTER ONE


Presenting problems

Recalling his lifelong friend, Samuel Beckett, the London psychoanalyst Geoffrey Thompson noted in a 1976 radio broadcast that an understanding of Beckett’s relation to his mother, May, was fundamental to any understanding of the renowned writer (Thompson, 1976). While this reference to maternal difficulty suggests a simplified psychoanalytic shorthand, Thompson could not have been more correct in relation to Beckett’s psychological situation during his twenties. Indeed, it was the tormented struggle to separate from his family of origin, while simultaneously affirming his identity as a writer, that framed Beckett’s path to psychoanalytic psychotherapy with Wilfred Bion in London between 1933 and 1935.

For Beckett, his twenties was a decade of contrast, both rich and painful, resulting in the development of literary acquaintances and accomplishment as well as the experience of suffering great anguish. These contrasts took Beckett close to the limits of tolerance, but would ultimately empower him to individuate from the adhesive power of his family, played out through the “savage loving” (letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 6 October, 1937, Fehsenfeld & Overbeck (2009), hereafter cited as TM, followed by the date of the letter) between May Beckett and Sam, the younger of her two sons. Before achieving this psychological consolidation, Beckett would endure almost a decade of personal challenge in struggling to affirm his adult identity as a writer. Complicating his distress was the underlying suffering of painful physical symptoms and panic attacks.

It was a decade in which Beckett would practise a continuous circuit of separation and return, both specifically from his family’s Foxrock home, Coolindragh, and generally from Dublin, his spiritual home (O’Brien, 1986). Beckett’s own oscillations, “a series of physical flights from one spectacle of suffering after another” (Knowlson, 1996, p. 159) foreshadowed his character Molloy’s continuous psychological departure and return to his own mother, initiating the first novel of Beckett’s “trilogy” (Beckett, 2006b). Indeed, Beckett’s own path paralleled what he would describe in his psychological notebooks as “the vicious cycle of psychogenic illness: disappointment of desire, aggression, fear of results, object of desire turned into something terrifying, repudiation, disappointment, etc.” (Feldman, 2006, p. 110) until achieving acceptance of a firm and actionable recognition that “I am what her savage loving has made me, and it is good that one of us should accept that finally” (TM, 6 October 1937).

Samuel Beckett began his undergraduate education at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1923, at the age of seventeen. While secondary school classmates at the Portora School in Enniskillen had recognised his tendencies towards moodiness, withdrawal, and introspection, these were to develop, over the period of his time as a Trinity undergraduate, into the difficult triad of superiority, contempt, and depression (Knowlson, 1996, p. 79). The development of physical symptoms, beginning in 1926, would include the diagnostic markers of panic attack including insomnia, heart palpitations, night sweats, and fear of madness (American Psychiatric Association, 1994).

Throughout this period of emotional turmoil, Beckett was able to maintain and burnish his extraordinary capacity for critical reading and writing. In terms of emotional balance, he demonstrated a determined and reliable capacity for intellectual activity, often reflected in his early writing, through his extensive use of dictionaries, etymologies, foreign languages, and literary allusions, which was strikingly at odds with his psychological disarray. His highly focused writing, including the extensive composition of letters and “notebooks” on literature, philosophy, and psychology contrasted sharply with the maddening distraction of emotional suffering. Writing functioned as an intellectual buoy, a “psychic retreat”, in providing a reliable refuge from the experience, the near-despair, of personal suffering (Steiner, 1993). Beckett’s typed notebooks on the subject of psychoanalysis reached 20,000 words, primarily drawn from his reading of Ernest Jones’ extensive Papers on Psycho-analysis (1948) and Treatment of the Neuroses (1963) (Feldman, 2006, p. 100). Unlike the encyclopaedic quality of Beckett’s notes on philosophy, his “Psychology notes” suggest that Beckett used them as intellectual adjuncts in finding his way through personal suffering (Feldman, 2006, p. 96).

Late in 1935, and in attendance with psychiatrists Wilfred Bion and Geoffrey Thompson, Beckett would hear Jung argue that a writer’s characters develop autonomously from the unconscious experience of a personality’s symptom complexes. Jung’s comments both underlined and suggested the mobilisation of what Beckett had already studied in Ernest Jones’ guide for physicians in the treatment of neurosis. Jones defines “complexes” as

a group of connected ideas, invested with a strong body of emotion and having a definite conative tendency (wish, longing, etc). In actual practice it is found that such localized groups of ideas always present some propensity towards dissociation, the extent of which varies considerably in different instances; consequently there is generally some portion of the complex that is repressed in the unconscious. (Jones, 1963, p. 36, fn 1)

“Conation” is an early twentieth century psychological term referring to the mental precursor of thought as desire or aversion (McDougall, 1918, p. 29). The implementation of Jung’s suggestion would involve Beckett’s own narrative mobilisation of the conative, in articulating wishes and longings that were conventionally repressed in polite society, but which are aggressively resonant as currents of love and hate beneath the conventional surface of daily interactions.

It was in the exploration of this unconscious world, itself lived within every man’s daily life, that Beckett’s writing would also secure him a special kind of psychic retreat, wherein his own considerable sufferings might inform productive creative pursuit. “In a secret way”, according to Jung, the writer’s use of himself would narrate his own “indefinite, because unknown, number of complexes or fragmentary personalities” (Jung, 1968, p. 81). Not only would Beckett’s characters articulate these fragmentary personalities, but the written record of their narratives would also provide Beckett with a self-generated study of his internal world, enacting it for the author “in order to witness it” (Beckett, 2006b, p. 297).

Two psychic retreats, then, emotional outlets functioning together, the first providing emotional distance through clear intellectual activity and the second providing literary externalisation of the author’s unconscious “complexes”, would help to stabilise Beckett’s turmoil within the pain and suffering of emotional conflict. In writing, Beckett would also create a powerful and creative space between writer and reader, facilitating his own psychological growth through the joint action of producing and reflecting upon objects of his mind.

At Trinity, Beckett flourished under the mentorship of Thomas Rudmose-Brown, a “teaching professor” of Romance languages, who not only encouraged Beckett’s love for contemporary French poetry, but also encouraged his creative writing, saying, “every one of us must strive, unflinchingly, to be himself” (Knowlson, 1996, p. 66). A similar Delphic message had probably been communicated to Bion from his supervisor, J. A. Hadfield (Feldman, 2006, p. 95). Yet, however over-determined this classical sentiment by teachers and mentors—both of Beckett and Bion—its practical achievement would be another matter altogether.

Understood from within this context, Beckett’s painful struggles as a young adult were on this road to discovery of his mature adult identity. Conflicted, he was both appreciative of his mentor’s continuing support and care, but could also be cruelly destructive and rejecting of it, as in his mocking characterisation of “Ruddy” as the grotesque “Polar Bear” in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1992) and More Pricks Than Kicks (1970) (Knowlson, 1996, p. 66).

Beckett’s mother, May, was a complicated, often anxious and preoccupied woman. The circumstances of her original meeting with Bill Beckett, the writer’s father, doubtlessly heightened her own anxieties in what she took to be her younger son’s lack of direction, midway through his undergraduate study at Dublin’s Trinity College. May had been a capable and business-like young nurse during Bill’s own brief psychiatric hospitalisation, following the termination of his earlier engagement to marry (Knowlson, 1996, p. 33). Their subsequent courtship had been brief, and, while there is no biographical record of future emotional turmoil for Bill, May’s own traits of high-strung rigidity and internal focus were prominent (Bair, 1978; Knowlson, 1996).

The tone of her behaviour towards Sam is most famously suggested in a vignette from Company, written late in Beckett’s life. The images in Company suggest an emotionally pregnant screen memory, a psychological situation reflecting profound and deep latent content. It describes the exit of mother and son from Connolly’s Store in a town very similar to Beckett’s home of Foxrock. The boy attempts to engage his mother on the subject of the distance of the sky from earth, an almost universal interaction in the lives of latency age children and their parents, but the boy’s curiosity and desire for response is met with his mother’s sharp rebuke (Beckett, 1996, p. 6). An earlier iteration of this incident, penned a half-century before in The End, reflects an even more traumatic outcome. There, the mother’s response to her son’s question is a terse, “fuck off”. It is followed by a sentence suggesting the shock and trauma of this moment with a direct allusion to non-nutritive caring, “I suddenly remembered I had not thought of asking Mr Weir for a piece of bread” (Beckett, 1995a, p. 81). The adult memory of traumatic childhood experience in seeking maternal nurturance continues to haunt adult behaviour, hampering this fictional character’s ability to secure caring from another.

Such harsh treatment is redolent of Fairbairn’s comments on the failure of mothers to convince their children of their love through conveying aspects of both possessiveness and indifference (Fairbairn, 1952, p. 13). Just as possessiveness and indifference might alternate confusingly for a child, Beckett’s narratives, too, contain confusing levels—some more accessible than others. The non-nutritive example of Mr Weir, for example, suggests Ernest Jones’ 1920 comments on the Weir Mitchell treatment of hysterics, which had evolved to the bed rest and isolation from which the narrator in The End was being driven (Jones, 1963, p. 24), but which also included the overfeeding of which Virginia Woolf complained (Poirier, 1983). For the narrator in The End, nourishment is absent. Like the multi-levelled relation of consciousness and unconsciousness, Beckett’s own allusions slide between the openly shocking and a different shock, just beneath the surface.

This pairing of maternal indifference and over-concern is profoundly difficult for children to overcome, and frequently eventuates in the development, for the child, of schizoid characteristics, including a pronounced internal focus and deep sense of aloneness (Fairbairn, 1952). Beckett’s own fabled memories of prenatal life within May’s womb were associated with similar claustrophobic feelings of painful entrapment.

This same felt inability to escape the confines of his mind probably marked Beckett’s coming of age, during his early years at Trinity. It was there, studying for scholarship exams at age twenty, that he first experienced and sought medical attention for what today would be classified as panic attacks. The disorder is described in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV, 1994, p. 402) as including:

multiple panic attacks with persistent concern about more attacks and worries about implications of attacks (going crazy, etc.)

with at least four of the following symptoms, developing abruptly and peaking within ten minutes: palpations and accelerated heart rate; sweating; trembling or shaking; shortness of breath or sensations of smothering; feeling of choking or abdominal distress; dizziness or feeling unsteady; de-realisation, feelings of unreality; or depersonalisation, feeling detached from oneself; and the fears of losing control, going crazy, or dying, as well as numbness, tingling chills, or hot flushes. Beckett’s characters’ sense of perennial dying, unreality, derealisation, deterioration, and pervasive fear clearly show how such experience of panic might provide experiential ground for authorial character development.

Beckett persevered in his studies, and was awarded the College Scholarship. Against the background of panic, this occasioned an early version of his characteristic inability to go on, triumphed over by his perseverance: “I can’t go on, I must go on, I’ll go on” (Beckett, 2006b, p. 407). Yet, it was later during that same year of graduation and success, 1926, that his propensity to panic blossomed into a larger psycho-social condition, broadly recognised and familiar to many late twentieth-century collegians as an “identity crisis”. The identity crisis emerges in the transition from adolescence to adulthood as a confusion of roles in which young adults struggle to “find themselves” in solidifying a cohesive sense of ego identity. Erikson’s description of identity (1959, 1970) integrates an individual’s subjective and observable sense of personal sameness and continuity and extends to choices in living, including occupation, friendships, mentors, values, and first sexual encounters.

The formal beginning of Beckett’s identity crisis can be dated to a family argument concerning Sam’s plans for the future, during the Christmas holiday of 1926–1927 (Knowlson, 1996, p. 81). At the time, the young Beckett reflected profound disinterest in future professionalism. His father, Bill, seemed able to tolerate Sam’s reticence. May, however, felt things differently. Her first son, Frank, who had also graduated from the Portora School and Trinity, had opted for conventional security. He had joined the Beckett family business of quantity surveying. Sam, however, was another matter.

It is likely that a combination of Sam’s recent panic attacks, coupled both with his ambivalence about the future and with his selfconsciously studied nonchalance, modelled on Dante’s character Belacqua, deeply disturbed her. Perhaps she dreaded a possibility of her second son’s future hospitalisation, paralleling in her fearful imagination a linkage with Sam’s father. Perhaps her identification was more personal, identifying within Sam her own emotional struggles. In any case, in demanding a concrete plan of action, her behaviour towards Sam externalised her own anxiety. In the mutual dance of unspoken communication called projective identification by psychoanalysts, where the receiver enacts, and so confirms, the other’s extruded anxieties, Sam responded to May’s sharp attack with equally sharp rebuttal. The battle was on.

Sensitive to experiential states of emotional entrapment, Beckett reacted quickly and pragmatically to his mother’s demand for certainty. Pressed for an answer to affirm May’s insecurity, Sam found a plausible escape into something he knew well, academia. He agreed to discuss the possibility of future academic life with his academic adviser and mentor, Thomas Rudmose-Brown, who was predictably thrilled with the decision. The route would lead Beckett conveniently away from the fights at Coolindragh through productive academic flight, a prestigious and yet private career path into which his parents could not follow him. Rudmose-Brown charted a course for his scholarship-winning student, beginning with the position of exchange lecturer in English at the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris. This would lead later to an assistantship in modern languages under Rudmose-Brown’s watchful eye, back home at Trinity.

The only difficulty was Beckett’s profound ambivalence about this course of action. Certainly, it solved the problem of his mother’s persistent and intrusive interest in her son’s vocation, but it set up another in that Beckett was setting a course which both interested and exasperated him. Like all young people in that situation, he was thrilled to have what would be an extended moratorium, a rich intellectual period away from his family, and in Paris. It was even more productive than he could have expected. It was there that he would meet Thomas MacGreevy, the previous exchange lecturer, and, through MacGreevy, be introduced to James Joyce and the vast circle of Anglophone expatriate intellectuals in Paris.

In terms both of his emotional support and his practical actions, MacGreevy would facilitate Beckett’s entry to the world of letters. Thirteen years older than Beckett, MacGreevy must have seemed a worldly-wise role model. A fellow Irishman from Kerry and a twice-wounded lieutenant in the Great War (Knowlson, 1996, p. 98), his social facility seems, too, to have made him what social network theorists would later term a “connector”, a vitally social individual linking others who might not otherwise participate in wider social networks (Gladwell, 2000).

Erikson stresses that part of the resolution of the identity conflict is the development of “fidelity”, a sense of genuineness, sincerity, and loyalty, to others. Beckett’s friendship and reliance upon MacGreevy would reflect not only MacGreevy’s gracious and giving nature in introducing Beckett to a life in literature, but also the younger man’s fidelity and esteem for his mentor. The socially retiring Beckett was fortunate in finding this friend and, significantly, Beckett’s biographers mention no symptomatic recurrence of panic during this period in Paris.

On the other hand, while outward bound for Paris, Beckett was also profoundly uninterested in the teaching vocation implied by the Paris position. This was reflected both in his first teaching post at Campbell College in Belfast in 1928, where he sardonically referred to the students as “the cream of Ulster, rich and thick” (Knowlson, 1996, p. 88) and in his subsequent misery on return to Trinity after the liberating Parisian sojourn. Beckett’s pragmatic promise might have temporarily placated May, but it also created a tension between the fictive pursuit of the academy and his emerging desire to pursue creative writing.

The delicate peace thus created between Beckett and May did not last long. Even before his departure for Paris after the summer of 1928, sparring continued between May Beckett and her twenty-two-year-old son (Knowlson, 1996, p. 92). This time the provocative issue, just like the question of Beckett’s future vocation, also occurred in the context of a young man’s slow separation from the anchorage of his family. It concerned another element of the Identity Crisis as described by Er...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• Part I: The Context and Events of Beckett’s Psychotherapy with Bion
• Part II: An Interpretative Construction of Beckett’s Literary Development and Bion’s Later Clinical Theories
• Conclusion
• References
• Index