Nuar Alsadir writes about the playwright Samuel Beckett’s psychoanalysis with Wilfred R. Bion, when both men were at the beginning of their careers.
Anyone familiar with the iconic image of Beckett in a black turtleneck staring impenetrably at the camera might find it difficult to imagine him consumed by “the analysis,” as he called it. After all, this was a writer so private that, after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1969, he told the reporters who’d managed to locate him in the coastal Tunisian village of Nabeul that he would grant them a few minutes for photographs only if he could remain silent.
But after his beloved father died, in 1933, he “had trouble psychologically,” as he put it in a 1989 interview collected in James and Elizabeth Knowlson’s “Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett.” Beckett’s symptoms included, among other things, severe anxiety, depression, boils, constipation, and heart palpitations, as well as night terrors that quieted only when his brother, Frank, slept in bed with him. Most of Beckett’s letters about his analysis are addressed to his friend Thomas McGreevy, whom he met in Paris, where he had a lectureship at the École Normale Supérieure between 1928 and 1930. After McGreevy introduced Beckett to James Joyce, Beckett began unofficially assisting him—running errands, taking dictation on what would eventually become “Finnegans Wake,” following him around. Beckett, aside from developing foot pain after wearing pointed-toe leather shoes identical to Joyce’s, despite having larger feet, thrived in Paris. He published an essay on Joyce’s work, a critical volume on Proust, a short story, and “Whoroscope,” a pamphlet-long dramatic monologue from the perspective of a bawdy René Descartes who spews Joycean puns while waiting for an egg to ripen. In 1930, Beckett returned to Ireland for a lectureship at Trinity College. Suddenly, he had no writing community: “Whoroscope,” considered risqué in Ireland, was not carried in bookstores, reviewed, or even read. Before long, Beckett confided to his friend in a letter, he was unable to “imagine even the shape of a sentence, nor take notes . . . nor read with understanding.” The biographer Deirdre Bair, drawing on these letters before they were published, was the first to detail his analysis, and the suffering that led him there. In her 1978 biography, she notes that the writer became depressed and dishevelled, wearing stained clothing and a tattered raincoat with “a pocket permanently distended by the bottle of stout he carried in it.” After spending days in bed facing the wall in a fetal position, Bair writes, Beckett resigned from his lectureship and was back in Paris by early 1932 to try to pick up where he’d left off. But Paris redux was not all he’d hoped. Joyce had become distant after Beckett refused the advances of his daughter, Lucia. Still, Beckett managed to write his first novel, “Dream of Fair to Middling Women,” which was narrated by a fictional Mr. Beckett who follows the protagonist—a “barely fictionalized Beckett,” Bair observes—from childhood through university and early adulthood. That May, the President of France, Paul Doumer, was assassinated by a Russian national, and it became difficult for foreigners to remain in Paris. Beckett moved to London, hoping to find a publisher. Instead, he quickly ran out of money and had to “crawl home,” as he later told Knowlson. This marked the start of what Beckett would later call the “bad years,” when his symptoms began to spin out of control. At the center of his misery stood his mother, who nagged him to get a job. Middle-class, non-intellectual, invested in the social world, May Beckett limited her financial support for her son, hoping to squeeze him into compliance through what he described as her “savage loving.” Beckett buoyed himself with his father’s warm attention. “Lovely walk this morning with Father, who grows old with a very graceful philosophy,” he wrote to McGreevy. “I’ll never have any one like him.” But after his father died of a heart attack, Beckett’s ailments became extreme. “I’ll tell you how it was,” he said to Knowlson years later. “I was walking up Dawson Street and I felt I couldn’t go on. It was a strange experience I can’t really describe. . . . So I went into the nearest pub and got a drink—just to stay still. And I felt I needed help.” To get that help, Beckett turned to his friend Geoffrey Thompson, a physician training to become a psychoanalyst, who recommended psychoanalysis. Beckett’s mother agreed to pay for the treatment after Frank told her that he couldn’t run his late father’s business and continue to comfort his brother at night. In early 1934, Beckett returned to London and began seeing Wilfred R. Bion, a psychiatrist just out of medical school who was training at the Tavistock Clinic. They would meet three times a week for the next two years. Yet even without the gossipy pleasure of being let into Beckett’s personal life, what is available of the analysis is exhilarating—at least to this psychoanalyst. We can trace the impact of Beckett’s work with Bion on his personal and creative life, and we get an early glimpse of an analyst who would go on to become an important figure in his field, alongside Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and Jacques Lacan. Bion, who was born in 1897, in Muttra, India, to a European father and an Anglo-Indian mother, moved to England for boarding school at age eight. After fighting for the British in the First World War, he attended Oxford, and then University College London for medical school. By the time he entered formal analytic training, at the British Psycho-Analytical Society, around 1946, he was already recognized for the originality of his thinking, particularly his experimental work on group relations, which he began as an Army psychiatrist during the Second World War. Once, after Bion presented a paper, Klein, who had been his training analyst and saw him as a “prize catch,” “was found weeping in the hall because Bion had failed to give acknowledgement to her,” the biographer Phyllis Grosskurth notes in “Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work.” In my own experience, I’ve found that practicing psychoanalysis in a Bionian way is like writing poetry rather than prose—intuition is as important as intellect. Whereas Freud’s investment in legitimizing psychoanalysis led him to frame it as a medical science, Bion treated it as an art form. He believed that psychoanalysts, like “artists, musicians, scientists, discoverers,” were investigating what may be “beyond our comprehension or experience” and should not limit themselves to “what we understand.” Even the notion that what happens when we are awake is more real than when we dream was, to Bion, “prejudice . . . in favour of the voluntary musculature.” Bion’s clinical work was guided by the belief that an analyst “needs to be able to listen not only to the words, but also to the music.” In one case vignette, Bion described a breakthrough after realizing his patient was not conveying verbal meaning but was “doodling in sound.” He once advised an analyst presenting a case to tolerate confusion: the befuddling story his patient had relayed “will form the basis of an interpretation which you will give six sessions later, six months later, six years later. That is why it is so important to have your senses open to what is going on.” Bion was fond of quoting a line from the philosopher Maurice Blanchot: “The answer is the misfortune of the question.” In analysis, Bion told an audience in 1976, “there is always a craving to slap in an answer so as to prevent any spread of the flood through the gap which exists.” Analysts must resist the urge to stop up that gap—which Bion described as the “nasty hole where one hasn’t any knowledge at all”—with ready-made answers. In my work with patients, I have observed that the unconscious, too, is a nasty hole. You can’t anticipate what will escape. That’s why I particularly appreciate Bion’s portrait of the dynamic between analyst and analysand. “In every consulting-room, there ought to be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psychoanalyst,” Bion said in an interview that same year. “If they are not both frightened, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what everyone knows.” Beckett, in writing to McGreevy about his sessions with Bion, described himself as unplugged: “belting along with the covey with great freedom of indecency & conviction.” After a few weeks, Beckett’s symptoms began to resolve, and after a few months he observed that “things at home” felt “simpler.” Yet during extended stays with his mother—something Bion had advised against—his symptoms would return. He would then resume with Bion and report “feeling better,” which he thought was “a kind of confirmation of the analysis.” The sessions seemed to alleviate his writer’s block: “I have been working hard at the book”—his first published novel, “Murphy”—“& it goes very slowly, but I do not think there is any doubt now that it will be finished sooner or later,” he reported in October, 1935. Analysis, rather than encouraging Beckett to adjust to the external world as his mother had hoped, led him inward. He experienced “extraordinary memories of being in the womb, intra-uterine memories,” as he would later tell Knowlson. The writer began to see his “diseased condition” as having begun in his “pre-history,” the time before he was born. Analysis also helped unleash the wholly original style one sees in “Murphy,” published in 1938, about a protagonist who would rather be strapped naked to a chair and “come alive in his mind” than pursue such normative aims as a job, marriage, money. Dylan Thomas, reviewing “Murphy” that year, dubbed it “Freudian blarney.” Beckett was no longer following anyone around. Sure enough, something Jung said appears to have catalyzed their work together. Jung discussed how children maintain an extraordinary awareness of the world from which they have emerged until a “veil of forgetfulness is drawn” and they adapt to the external world. He spoke in elusive terms about a girl who lived between worlds. “She had never been born entirely,” Jung said. For Beckett, this last line was a bolt from the blue. In 1968, he recounted Jung’s anecdote about the little girl to the French poet and playwright Charles Juliet, who recalled Beckett saying, “I have always had the feeling that I had never been born either.” This idea would reverberate throughout Beckett’s work. The British actress Billie Whitelaw observes, in her 1995 memoir, that Beckett “invariably said one particular thing, usually in passing, that gave me the key to the part.” In Beckett’s 1957 radio play, “All That Fall,” Whitelaw starred as Mrs. Rooney, a character “haunted” by a line spoken at a lecture by “one of these new mind doctors” who told a story of a girl who “had never really been born!” Whitelaw remembers Beckett describing Mrs. Rooney as “ ‘bursting with abortive explosiveness.’ ” And in Beckett’s play “Footfalls,” from 1976, she reports that the playwright said of the character she played, “She was never properly born.” But perhaps the most striking iteration of the little girl from Jung’s lecture is in Beckett’s 1972 play “Not I,” which opens with a description of a “tiny little girl” cast into the world “before her time” through a “godforsaken hole.” These words are spoken onstage by Mouth, a disembodied mouth that seems to be floating in the air, unleashing a rapid flood of free-associative speech. Mouth, who is nearing seventy, recalls moments in her life from a third-person perspective—she refers to herself as “tiny little girl” or “she,” not “I.” “I knew that woman in Ireland,” Beckett explained. “I knew who she was—not ‘she’ specifically, one single woman, but there were so many of those old crones, stumbling down the lanes, in the ditches, beside the hedgerows.” Whitelaw, on first reading the script, couldn’t stop crying. “In her outpourings I recognised my own inner scream,” she writes. Whitelaw starred in the original London production of “Not I,” her body disappeared by a black hood, cape, eye mask, leotard, tights, and makeup. “Sam wanted all the lights taken out in the theatre, including the exits, the lavatories, and the aisles,” she observes. “There was to be no escape from the Mouth for the audience.” An impossibly tall, faintly lit “Auditor,” in a long black-hooded robe inspired by djellabas that Beckett had seen in Morocco, was positioned to the side of Mouth, listening silently, like an analyst. When Jessica Tandy was rehearsing the role of Mouth for its world première, at New York’s Lincoln Center, her husband, the actor Hume Cronyn, sent a cable to the playwright expressing concern that the rapidity of Mouth’s speech would make it incomprehensible. “I am not unduly concerned with intelligibility,” Beckett replied. “I hope the piece would work on the necessary emotions of the audience rather than appealing to their intellect.” In a sense, he hoped that people would listen like Bion, not just to the words but also to the music. As Whitelaw puts it, “Mouth was not going out to an audience; the audience had to be sucked into this rioting, rambling hole.” They clamored to get in. A few nights after the production at the Royal Court Theatre London opened, Whitelaw reports, queues “went all the way round Sloane Square.” The New York production had also been a hit, leaving a “literally stunning impact upon the audience,” as Edith Oliver wrote in a review for this magazine in 1972. Beckett had seemingly unplugged the nasty hole, bringing the audience close to what Whitelaw called “some unconscious centre.” As had been the case with Beckett’s analysis, the experience appeared to be transformative. Clive Barnes, in a review in the New York Times, observed that the play “lasts about 15 minutes and a lifetime.” This fall, I went to see the Skirball production of “Krapp’s Last Tape.” An isolated writer , on his sixty-ninth birthday, searches among the diary-like tapes he has recorded each year since he was in his twenties for moments that contain the “grain,” which he describes as “those things worth having when all the dust has . . . settled.” He wants to find what he calls “Box thrree, spool five,” which relays the memory of a romantic encounter forty years earlier with a woman on a boat, when his internal and external worlds were momentarily aligned. As it happens, Rea, who met Beckett when he starred in a London production of “Endgame” in the seventies, prerecorded himself as the younger Krapp in 2009, so that his voice quality would differ if he ever had the opportunity to play Krapp in the future. Beckett would no doubt have appreciated the layer of authenticity—during one production of “Krapp’s Last Tape,” he reportedly brought in his own slippers so that the actor playing Krapp would have the right shuffle. “Krapp’s Last Tape” ends with the older Krapp listening again to his younger self describe the romantic scene and then sitting motionless as the “tape runs on in silence.” Something about his immobility made me want to leap out of my seat. “Nothing to be done,” the opening line of “Waiting for Godot,” is a common refrain I hear in sessions these days. But Beckett didn’t live that way. He joined the French Resistance in 1941 after the Nazis had invaded France. “You simply couldn’t stand by with your arms folded,” he explained to Knowlson. “Somewhere in the analytic situation, buried in masses of neuroses, psychoses and so on, there is a person struggling to be born,” Bion said in a 1975 clinical seminar, clearly influenced by Jung’s lecture, too. Working with Bion helped Beckett access the courage to figure out who he was and to be that person, even if it required living between worlds. As Jung put it in his talk, “My principle is: for heaven’s sake do not be perfect, but by all means try to be complete—whatever that means.” ♦
Psychoanalysis Psychoanalysts Samuel Beckett Theatre Waiting For Godot
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