Beckett and Psychoanalysis

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Abstract

Facing psychoanalysis, Beckett’s position among other modernist authors is quite exceptional: not only did he undergo a psychoanalytic treatment for two years while living in London, but also his works are replete with references to psychoanalysis, to the point that a psychoanalyst like Didier Anzieu could say that his texts are a vast continuation of psychoanalysis by the means of writing. After having retraced what we can learn from Beckett’s letters about his cure, I will focus on the impact his psychoanalyst, W. R. Bion, kept  having on him. I will also stress how an earlier encounter with Freud (about Descartes) had paved the way for such a deep immersion, and then follow the aftermath of the cure in a few later texts. Finally, it is Beckett’s entire philosophy that can appear as testifying to his struggle with the Freudian Unconscious.  

就精神分析而言，贝克特所处的位置与其他现代主义作家相比无疑是独一无二的。这不仅因为他住在伦敦时接受了两年心理治疗，还因为他的著作广泛涉及精神分析，以至于像迪迪埃 • 安齐厄这样的精神分析学家都认为贝克特的作品以写作来延续拓宽了精神分析领域。首先，本文通过回顾贝克特的日记来了解有关他的治疗情况，探讨心理治疗师W.R.贝恩对他的持续影响力。接着，本文着重分析早期(因笛卡尔)与弗洛伊德的接触如何奠定了他与精神分析如此之深的关系，厘清他的治疗对其后期的一些作品所产生的影响。最后，本文试图阐明贝克特整体的哲学证明他一直在与弗洛伊德的无意识理论进行抗争。 

Author

Jean-Michel Rabaté, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, is an editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the co-founder of Slought Foundation, where he organizes exhibitions, conferences, and public conversations. As the author or editor, he has published more than forty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literary theory. Recent titles include Rust (Bloomsbury, 2018), Kafka L.O.L. (Quodlibet, 2018) and the collection After Derrida (Cambridge UP, 2018). 

Email: [e-mail] 

让·米歇尔 • 瑞贝蒂，宾夕法尼亚大学英语与比较文学教授，《现代文学学刊》 主编，美国艺术和科学院院士，斯洛特基金会联合创始人。他在斯洛特基金会组织展览、会议和公开对话，以作者或编辑身份先后发表了 40 余部有关现代主义、精神分析、哲学和文学理论的专著和编著。近期代表作有：《锈》(2018)、《卡夫卡》(2018)和《德里达之后》(2018)等。 

To read Beckett through psychoanalysis means retracing several intellectual adventures of the last century at once, a series of encounters spinning fine webs linking textual production and psychic production. The web did not start only with the two years of Beckett’s analysis with Bion in London, but should take into account earlier evidence of interest in psychoanalysis. The climax happened in October 1935, when at the invitation of his London psychoanalyst, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, Beckett went to hear a lecture by Carl Gustave Jung who discussed the case of a young girl who had died prematurely because, as he said, she was “not properly born,” which provided Beckett with a key for his later work and for his life. The interaction between Beckett and psychoanalysis had lasting effects on Beckett’s later work, as we will see. Finally, one should take into account the impact of Beckett’s work on psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan, Didier Anzieu, and also, more surprisingly, the later Bion, who started a career as a novelist in his late seventies, with the publication of a superb trilogy,  A Memoir of the Future (1977). I can only detail a few of the exciting segments that together would draft a very rich figure, a pattern that scholars are still reconstructing today. 

My aim will be to demonstrate how psychoanalysis interacted durably with Beckett’s  work, whose notes on psychology evince a solid understanding of Freudian notions. Beckett was an exception in the group of modernist writers because he was one of the only authors who had a real-life experience of psychoanalysis. The other writer he could be compared with would be H. D., Hilda Doolittle, the American modernist poet who was a friend of Ezra Pound and who was treated by Freud in the mid-thirties. Beckett decided to resort to psychoanalysis when he was living in London, feeling that all his hopes for a literary career had been dashed. He then worked for two years with Bion at the Tavistock clinic, beginning after Christmas 1933. Before, we know that Beckett had suffered from severe panic attacks that led him to believe that his heart would stop, and the cure greatly helped to dispel these symptoms. It also helped to dissolve his writer’s block.

Let us survey the first-hand account of the cure from his letters. Beckett had asked help from his childhood friend Geoffrey Thompson who had trained in psychoanalysis in London in 1934 (psychoanalysis was not allowed in Irish hospitals at the time). Thompson was a resident at Bethlem Royal Hospital, which provided a model for the setting of the psychiatric ward described as the MMM in Murphy, and he suggested that Beckett should begin psychotherapy with Bion in 1934. Bion had begun by studying language, history and literature, but he qualified as a medical doctor in 1930 and in 1932 joined the Tavistock Clinic where he was still a trainee therapist at the time he saw Beckett. Here is how Beckett describes the treatment to his cousin Morris Sinclair:

Three times a week I give myself over to probing the depths with my psychiatrist, which  has already, I think, done me some good, in the sense that I can keep a little calmer, and  that the panic attacks in the night are less frequent and less acute. But the treatment will  necessarily be long, and I may have months more of it yet. … I regard myself as very fortunate to have been able to embark on it, it is the only thing that interests me at the moment, and that is how it should be, for these things require one to attend to them to the exclusion of virtually everything else.” (Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett 183) 

We can see that Beckett had grasped the fundamentals of the psychoanalytic cure: he took  it seriously, knows that it will take more than a few months, and is in fact glad to have this  opportunity to explore his inner recesses. A few months later, in a letter in French to the same cousin, he could speak of “victory over the night,” the end of his nightmares, sweats, panics, and mad spells (Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett 195). However, the symptoms did not disappear immediately or completely as he complains in January 1935, although he was aware that this might signal that the therapy is actually progressing (Beckett, The Letters of Samuel  Beckett 242). In March 1935, he had reached a certain diagnosis about himself: 

It was with a specific fear&a specific complaint that I went to Geoffrey, then to Bion, to learn that the “specific fear and&complaint” was the least important symptom of a  diseased condition that began in a time which I could not remember, in my “pre-history”,  a bubble on the puddle; and that the fatuous torments which I had treasured as denoting  the superior man were all part of the same pathology.” (Beckett, The Letters of Samuel  Beckett 259)  

In September 1935, he both complained of “intestinal pains” and documented the slow  genesis of the novel he was working on: “It is poor stuff&I have no interest in it” (Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett 277). Finally, Beckett went to hear a lecture by Jung that  proved crucial. It was to Bion that Beckett owed this capital meeting. Bion had decided to bring his analyand to hear a talk by Jung who had come to London. Jung’s theories helped Beckett overcome his writer’s block as he was struggling to finish Murphy. The key was the phrase that Jung had used about a little girl who had died young, having been unable to really live, so deeply immersed in her unconscious she was. She had “never been born properly,”  Jung said, which became a sort of mantra for Beckett. He wrote the phrase in the addenda to Watt (Beckett, Watt 248), and used it again and again. However, this did not mean a sudden conversion to Jungism or to psychoanalysis. In October 1935, Beckett described to his friend McGreevy the meeting with Jung with distance and sarcasm: 

His lecture the night I went consisted mainly in the so called synthetic (versus Freudian analytic) interpretation of three dreams of a patient who finally went to the dogs because he insisted on taking a certain element in the dreams as the Oedipus position when Jung  told him it was nothing of the kind! However he lost his neurosis among the dogs … The  mind is I suppose the best Swiss, Lavater&Rousseau, mixture of enthusiasm&Euclid, a methodical rhapsode. Jolas’s pigeon all right, but I should think in the end less than the dirt under Freud’s nails. (Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett 282)  

The view of Jung’s mind is somewhat critical, and Beckett’s bantering tone suggests a divided allegiance, a hesitation between Freud and Jung. It was indeed Bion’s model, grounded as it was in Melanie Klein’s elaborations of the objects of fantasy, that would provide Beckett with a better theory, far from the Oedipal drama with his mother, at a remove from the exploration of collective archetypes. Bion would above all reconnect Beckett with a more productive practice of thinking (and writing). Beckett had read some Jung, because the latter’s paper on “Psychology and Literature” was published in the summer issue of Transition from 1930, an issue in which Beckett’s poem “For Future Reference” was included. Jung’s talk was supported by a diagram with the different spheres of the mind in gradually darkening colors, in circles of decreasing circumference, until the personal and collective unconscious was reached, shown as a black circle at the very heart of the drawing. Jung concluded that when  the individual sinks into the hole at the center, he disappears and is “victimized” by it. 

It is just such a “victimization” that Murphy wants to avoid when he runs away to the safety of his rocker. The anarchic proliferation of fragmented images corresponds to the savage irruption of the collective unconscious into the life of a subject who fails to master it. The buzzing confusion of the ground turns into a nightmare, and the last vision of a face – be it that of Celia, of his mother, or his father, “all the loved ones” – is but a frail rampart against the disruptive negativity of a night of the soul. Murphy dies an ambiguous death in “his” novel in which Beckett knowingly played many games with psychoanalysis. 

Murphy decides to work and live next to psychotic patients in a mental hospital. This affords him leisure to meditate on Arnold Geulincx’s motto, “Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis.” He has chosen, he thinks, the “little world” of the hospital, which corresponds to the restricted life of patients who prefer the safety of confinement in order to live fully in their minds, fantasies, dreams, and delusions, to “real life” in the “big world.” This is glossed further: “How should he tolerate, let alone cultivate, the occasions of fiasco, having once beheld the beatific idols of his cave? In the beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx: Ubi nhil vales, ibi nihil velis” (Beckett, Murphy 78). The neat Latin phrase is rendered by the author as “to want  nothing where one is nothing.” Beckett goes on: “But it was not enough to want nothing where  he was worth nothing, nor even to take the further step of renouncing all that lay outside the intellectual love in which alone he could love himself, because there alone he was lovable”  (Beckett, Murphy 179). “Vales” is understood as “being something” here, while “velis,” (you want) includes the negative sense of the verb, as in the “want of a want.”  

As a novel and not as a theory of desire, Murphy presents the blueprint for the foundation of a negative cogito that Beckett discovered in the works of Geulincx, the Belgian occasionalist philosopher whose main verb is “nescio” (I do not know). Beckett translates  “Ubi nihil vales, nihil velis” as “Where you are worth nothing, you will want nothing,” but the sentence can also be translated as: “Where you have no power, you will have no desire.” Here is the passage that had attracted Beckett’s attention, from Geulincx’s own annotations to his Ethics, a point at which he attempts to sum up a whole argument bearing on the “observation  of the self” leading to a doctrine of “humility,” and it recurs throughout Beckett’s works:“The axiom, Wherein I have no power, therein I do not will, embraces both parts of Humility: I have no power denotes Inspection of Oneself, I do not will denotes Disregard of Oneself” (Ruler 247 and 337). In the text of Ethics, Geulincx discusses at length that we do not know how our muscles or nerves move our limbs. I can see the beauties of the world, but all this beauty reinforces my sense that I have created nothing, not even the motions of my body. We never understand or imagine precisely how our nerves connect with our brains and our muscles to  lift any limb. Even if I can move or speak, I do not make that motion – only God “makes” in fact. The counterargument is that I move better when I am distracted, do not think, or pay  attention (Ruler 33). Geulincx concludes: “Thus, I am a mere spectator of a machine whose  workings I can neither adjust nor readjust. I neither construct nor demolish anything here: the whole thing is someone else’s affair” (Ruler 34). Because the only Actor must be a true Creator, it is only God who can “make” things happen. 

The philosophy of Geulincx, founded as it is on the principle of ignorance (because I  know nothing of what happens, all happens because God wills it), proposes less a philosophy of impotence or nonknowledge than a philosophy of the Unconscious leading to a theology of the permanent miracle. This doctrine turns subjects into God’s puppets; this can leave us “miraculised” as President Schreber felt when he thought that he was acted upon by God in his paranoia, or otherwise free of all volition. By splicing Kleist’s meditation on the uncanny grace of puppets in the “Marionnettentheater” of the world and divine grace, once  the principle of causality has been abolished, we are offered the chance of the comical and  touching grace of automata animated from the outside. Grace, miracle, and comedy blend  together – this defines the site of Beckett’s later plays and texts.

The main question then becomes: was Beckett’s psychoanalysis successful? Did it allow him to write, to love, to be an active citizen? Unlike Didier Anzieu, I would risk to say that the answer is positive in all cases. I am referring here to the French psychoanalyst who had been Jacques Lacan’s patient for a while, then discovered that his own mother had been cured  by Lacan much earlier, upon which he left Lacan. Anzieu’s work on Freud and self-analysis,  on the “skin-ego” is very important in French psychoanalysis, and he wrote no less than four  books on Beckett. The first of these is called Beckett and the Psychoanalyst, and it recreates the first session when Beckett went to see Bion in a memorably hilarious manner. ① Anzieu felt the need to use fiction to imagine how Beckett related to Bion. On the whole, he believed that Bion was too young and not properly trained enough to understand Beckett’s plight. He also concluded that Beckett ended up repeating the situation of psychoanalysis in all his texts! I will now focus on a few privileged interactions.   

A first engagement with psychoanalysis sends us back earlier, to when Beckett began writing and publishing. I owe these analyses to the discovery made by Edward Bizub when he analyzes Beckett’s first published poem, “Whoroscope,” a poem that contains all the seeds of the work to come. ② Bizub found that when Beckett decided to work on Descartes, while teaching at the École Normale Supérieure, he was inspired by the then very recent publication of a new book on Descartes, Descartes, le philosophe au masque (Descartes, the Masked Philosopher) by Maxime Leroy. The book was published in 1929, just when Beckett tackled Descartes. The slim two volumes elicited attention in Paris for one main feature: Leroy includes a letter Freud wrote to him about Descartes. Leroy had asked whether Freud could  explain for him the meaning of three crucial dreams that Descartes had had, dreams that made him decide to become a philosopher. Leroy sent Freud the account of the three dreams and Freud replied in a two-page letter partly translated and quoted by Leroy. 

In his reply, Freud was cautious, hesitating to give a precise meaning to the dreams, first of all because Descartes himself had managed to interpret them. Freud also points out, not unexpectedly, that a melon mentioned at some point, must be a sexual symbol. Freud concludes that the intellectual crisis represented by the outcome of the dream was triggered by unconscious conflicts. Leroy uses these rather limited insights as a confirmation of his view that Descartes was a deeply divided person, a passionate and enthusiastic rebel who  felt the need to hide under a conventional mask to avoid persecution. Descartes was a political reformer in advance of his times, who tried all the same to play it safe by hiding and disguising himself. Indeed, Descartes remained a perpetual exile who made intricate plans to hide from public view wherever he happened to live, whether he was in Germany, Paris, or in  the Netherlands. Moreover, he could only think well when lying in bed and being allowed to  get up very late, which he did most of his life—all idiosyncrasies shared by Beckett.  

Leroy, a prolific writer, began his career as a philosopher of law and political science. His 1929 book, Descartes, shows evidence of his leanings to the left; Descartes is depicted  as a proto-socialist, the scion of impoverished nobility at heart close to the people, a thwarted mystic with sympathies for the Rosicrucians, a rebellious intellectual avant la lettre who fled France because he was afraid of religious persecution, only to be disappointed when he realized that Amsterdam was barely more tolerant. His use of disguises, his cunning correspondence, and his equivocations had all the same aim: to avoid censorship and pave the way for his system until the truth of science would impose itself.

Thus Descartes was a “masked thinker” (his motto was “larvatus prodeo,” I progress while masked). The consequence for Leroy is that one should read Descartes symptomatically by probing the gaps and contradictions of his texts, and also by linking his body, his private life, his erotic confessions, and even his dreams to his philosophical and scientific work. If Leroy sees Descartes as a genius, a thinker who planned and achieved the destruction of the ancient world of Aristotelian delusions and confusions, he points out that the philosopher was deeply split, and may have remained a Rosicrucian all his life. Here is why he would be superstitious about his horoscope, which was the starting point for Beckett.

Leroy details Descartes’s contradictions, which gave Beckett the idea of structuring “Whoroscope” by moving from contrarian “biographemes” to conceptual riddles whose cumulative force subverts the usual equation made between Descartes and rationalism. Beckett agrees with the picture of a Descartes on the side of the “blind, mad, dreamy and  bad” much more than on that of an emerging positivism based on philosophical dualism. The point of departure for “Whoroscope” was a letter in which Descartes talked about his ideal omelet, a taste which, in the words of a biographer, was weird. This bizarre recipe provides Beckett’s poem with a recurrent verbal gag. The conceit that an egg is only an aborted  chick is a recurrent trope in Beckett’s earlier poems, but in “Whoroscope,” the main issue is Descartes’s revisionist (and perhaps skeptical) views on the doctrine of transubstantiation; his friend Claude Clerselier had received a series of letters from Descartes about his theory of transubstantiation and he also edited Descartes’s essay on the foetus.     

The materialism hinted at in the poem is a key issue in Leroy’s book. Leroy notes that when Descartes discussed the dogma of “real presence,” that is the presence of god in the consecrated host, he “compared the highest miracle of Christian faith with the phenomenon of human digestion” (Leroy 27). Hence, we should not trust Descartes when he asserts tongue in  cheek that he believed in transubstantiation. Beckett added in an endnote: “He proves God by  exhaustion.” (Leroy 244) The lines echo Joyce’s theory of mystical paternity linking Stephen  Dedalus to God. There is a lex eterna residing in God’s will that passes directly from creator  to creature. It is divorced from the accidents of human copulation, conception, and generation.  Here, Descartes is thinking about his father, Joachim, hinting that Joachim had little to do with him for his true father is god, the divine knot of light appearing at the end of Dante’s  Divine Comedy as a mystic rose. Like the tree of Waiting for Godot with its single leaf in the first act, the divine rose bears only one last and lonely petal. If most of the anecdotes quoted in “Whoroscope” were already in Mahaffy’s book on Descartes known to Beckett, it was Leroy who incited Beckett to read Descartes against the grain.He would capture Descartes by his hidden side, or catch him in an unconscious network of fears and fascinations. Rationalism appears as the other side of an irrational devotion to omens and dreams—dreams that  motivated him to become a philosopher.  

Murphy testifies to this oneiric beginning when the hero laughs so much at his own bad joke that he sinks down “on the dream of Descartes linoleum” (Beckett, Murphy 140). It is as if the poem’s very title had planned the whole program of Murphy, even though it was only begun several years later. “Whoroscope” sketches not only the beginning of the plot, when Celia the golden-hearted prostitute brings Murphy his horoscope to force him to find a proper job, but also organizes the rest of the novel, when we realize that the Cartesian hero devoid of  a conarium or pineal gland, hence split between his body and his mind, betrays an unhealthy fascination for institutionalized psychotics. Madness, displayed first in its seductive then horrifying aspects, appears as the exact reverse of arrogant rationalism. 

“Whoroscope” is a foundational poem: it shows a divided subject who cannot reconcile an affective and desiring body with pure thought; it presents a driven and obsessive thinker progressing through mistakes and fantasies, superstitions, dreams, and delusions. Tellingly, “Whoroscope” replaces the Cartesian motto of Cogito ergo sum with its true source,  Augustine’s celebrated “Si enim fallor, sum,” from Book 11, 26 of De Civitate Dei (City of God): “If indeed I am deceived, I am.” Beckett rewrites Descartes’s dream of an absolute foundation via subjective certainty as “I am deceived, therefore I am.” Fallor is the passive form of fallo,“I am mistaken, I deceive, I cheat,” from which the past participle falsus derives. Such a universal deception allegorized by Descartes’s malin génie can also function as a proton pseudos, a first mistake capable of bringing about the collapse or the abortion of the  entire system. The theme of abortion, so crucial for Beckett’s birth trauma, is developed masterfully in the image of hatched eggs in which one recognizes aborted chickens.  

Consequently, “Whoroscope” unveils the un-thought of Descartes’s thought. Its dramatic staging of feverish hallucinations at the time of an untimely demise in Sweden evokes the death of Bergotte, or the fears exposed by the narrator at the end of Proust’s Recherche. Beckett translates Proust’s culinary metaphors (the whole book is compared with Françoise’s masterful Boeuf en daube in Time Regained) into a suspicious omelette, in which boned and feathered chicks are caught in the egg paste. Here is the traditional balut,the delicacy wellknown to Philippinos, Laotians, Cambodians, and Vietnamese gourmets, made with eggs fecundated and hatched long enough for the little baby birds to appear with some down,  their bones brittle enough to be crushed by human teeth. The other result is that the dish is aphrodisiac, as the legend goes, which sends us back to the “whore” evoked by the poem’s  title. Thanatos lurks behind Eros, for the whore hiding in the horoscope is nothing but a disguise for Death, and Death catches the philosopher unawares—the thinker of the ego cogito cannot foresee the madness of an unthinkable death looming in his eggy horoscope.  

This new view of Descartes can call up a more recent controversy opposing Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault who locked horns over the issue of madness in Descartes’s first  two Meditations. Beckett anticipates Derrida, because his poem presents a Descartes haunted by irrationality. The persecutory malin génie provides a powerful metaphor for psychosis, it embodies an always lurking threat of unreason in Descartes’s Meditations. Derrida saw there a return of an irrational ghost in the heart of Reason. The influence of Descartes on Beckett leads to the later motto of the “torture of the cogito” not before generating its opposite, however, the statement of the impotence of reason. 

Jumping from that early poem to the first true novel published by Beckett, Murphy, one can see that there are similarities between the image of Murphy’s mind presented in chapter six and the model of the mind detailed in the poem: the rational mind of the philosopher hides a whole psychic apparatus similar to the models elaborated by Freud and Jung. All these models show three circles, a huge sphere in fact divided into three zones going from grey to  dark. In the middle is the obscure core of the unconscious. The surrounding zone of fantasy is a more superficial layer: it combines forms from the world and wishful distortions: “Here the physical fiasco became a howling success” (Beckett, Murphy 111). This is the reworking of images in what Freud calls conscious fantasies. The second zone corresponds to unconscious fantasies. And for Murphy, they revolve around “contemplation” and a passive “Belacqua bliss,” meaning the wish not to have been born or to remain forever in limbo as his model, Dante’s Belacqua. The third zone is the darkest “matric of surds,” a space in which Murphy  was “a mote in the dark of absolute freedom” (Beckett, Murphy 112). 

Murphy offers many clues to Beckett’s relation to psychoanalysis. One of these is when the hero wishes to cheat the restaurant where he eats, however minimally. Having gulped down the first cup of tea, he complains that the tea is from India and not China as he had asked. Given a fresh cup of tea, Murphy asks for a refill and some milk. He adds the words:“‘I know I am a great nuisance, but they have been too generous with the cowjuice.’ / Generous and cowjuice were the keywords here. No waitress could hold out against their  mingled overtones of gratitude and mammary organs” (Beckett, Murphy 83). Murphy plays on the unconscious register of the waitress to swindle the caterer of a few pennies. His near starvation, which smacks of anorexia, is instrumental in transforming the psychological experiment into a struggle – however minimal it is – with the forces of capitalism on the one hand and the seductions of femininity on the other. Vera is described as “a willing bit of sweated labour, incapable of betraying the slogan of her slavers, that since customer or  sucker was paying for his gutrot ten times what it cost to produce and five times what it cost  to fling in his face, it was only reasonable to defer to his complaints up to but not exceeding fifty per cent of his exploitation” (Beckett, Murphy 83). Her Latin name inscribes her in the series of Beckettian feminine characters whose names end in a. She allegorizes a “truth” that  is effective even though it is humiliated and exploited. The truth that her name contains can  be interpreted in Kleinian or Bionian terms; it is the primitive link established between truth and the “good object” or “good breast.” For Bion if the relation between the infant and the mother is lacking in truth, there is a premature weaning or starvation: “This internal object starves its host of all understanding that is made available. In analysis such a patient seems unable to gain from his environment and therefore from his analyst. The consequences for the development of a capacity for thinking are serious; I shall describe only one, namely precocious development of consciousness” (Bion, Second Thoughts 115). 

Bion’s “Theory of Thinking” opens with an analysis of the dire consequences of a mother’s inability to engage in reverie, which often creates a perverse couple with her infant. The starvation of truth attacks the thinking process, which Bion normally explains in terms identical to those describing the digestion of healthy food: thinking can only take place if beta elements made up of inchoate impressions, early sense data and raw feelings of loss and anger are transformed into alpha elements. Alpha elements are the conditions for mental categories that are deployed in dreaming, memorizing, and above all thinking thoughts. Bion assumes that schizophrenic patients were deprived of an “experienced mother” – that is, mothers equipped of a capacity for reverie. The mothers failed to help infants transform their inchoate experiences into “thoughts.” Bion’s distinctive contribution to the Kleinian school was founded on a grid of abstract categories providing conditions of possibility for both normal and pathological thinking. It is on such a grid that the notion of “thoughts without a thinker” is  founded. 

The paper “On Linking” examines patients eager to cut all links, especially the link connecting them to the analyst. One strategy, self-defeating as it is, consists of destroying language to achieve this end. In order to understand situations when attacks on linking are delivered, Bion postulates “thoughts that have no thinker.” Bion would often compare thinking with the concept of infinity: thoughts exist without a thinker because the idea of infinity comes to one before any idea of the finite. Hence, the finite is “won from the dark and formless infinite” (Bion, Second Thoughts 165). The human personality is aware of infinity through the oceanic feeling described by Freud and becomes aware of limitation, “presumably through physical and mental experience of itself and the sense of frustration” (Bion, Second Thoughts 165). Such an analysis describes Murphy’s plight, when he hesitates between surrendering wholeheartedly to the infinite that he discovers in himself and accepting the sense of limitation equivalent to castration.

The model capable of reconciling Beckett’s rationalistic Cartesian dualism with a psychoanalytical philosophy of desire is Bion’s theory of thinking. Bion may not have been able to communicate all his thoughts to the reluctant patient who used to grumble that therapy led him nowhere, but it was with his psychoanalyst’s help that Beckett could start “thinking” productively with a concept of the “Nothing.” This proximity with negativity allowed him to transform the ineffable horror experienced by Murphy facing disjointed and threatening images into “thoughts without a subject.”  

In his syntheses, Bion kept foregrounding the function of Truth, called “O.” Truth is seen as very different from Knowledge (“K”), which calls up Lacan’s and Badiou’s subsequent opposition of Truth and Knowledge. For Bion, O can be reached if one suspends memory, desire, and even understanding. One should approach O by a systematic annulment of K, in a sort of via negative,like what mystics experienced – and Bion invariably quotes Saint John of the Cross at this point. O will thus emerge as a lack of form and a lack in form, because knowledge bears on “phenomena” and never the “thing-in-itself,” to follow the Kantian terminology favored by Bion. A dialectical interaction between “other-people-seen-byme” and “Me-seen-by-other-people” adheres to the logics of forms. Bion’s questions sound  extremely Beckettian: 

 It is possible through phenomena to be reminded of the “form.” It is possible through “incarnation” to be united with a part, the incarnate part, of the Godhead. It is possible through hyperbole for the individual to deal with the real individual. Is it possible through psycho-analytic interpretation to effect a transition from knowing the phenomena of the real self to being the real self? (Bion, Transformations 148)  

The analyst achieves this via a negativity that releases the mother’s reverie in him. The death of the morphe reconnects him with his mother, which opens a shared creative reverie.

Bion proposed a psychoanalytical theory of “thinking” that was lacking in Freud. In his sense, thinking cannot be restricted to either Cartesian rationalism or Enlightenment optimism. For Bion, thinking also includes daydreaming and fantasy. Bion’s theory of thinking offers a bold expansion of Freud’s discussion on thought processes in the Project for a Scientific Psychology and finds an anchor in Melanie Klein’s investigation of the young child’s unconscious battles with pre-Oedipal monsters. Thoughts without subjects are a basic axiom for Bion. For him, human psyches are machines for thinking these thoughts, and they begin operating early to deal with absence – the absence of the mother’s breast being the first object of thought for the infant. Thinking is thus also dreaming, both activities working with a truth-function that is originally provided by the mother alone. Often, Beckett’s texts use animal images to represent thoughts without a subject. Animals are between the human and the natural realms and are literally “wild thoughts”; they may have to be “tamed,” to quote a  book by Bion, ③ but they can also roam freely in a new textual unconscious. 

This is perceptible in “From an Abandoned Work,” the first text initially written in English after a long interruption. John Pilling has evoked the “hysterical-obsessional structure” of this text, noting that it “seems at once to invite and discourage psychoanalytic interpretations” (Pilling 176). Its autobiographical aspects are immediately obvious. We recognize the son’s departure from a home in which the mother stays alone, wringing her hands in grief. The son exhibits Oedipal remorse because he feels that he has killed his father, which triggers a wish to escape “anywhere out of the world,” when in fact he is going nowhere. The title puns on abandonment, from the birth trauma to leaving one’s home as an adult, while describing its own status: Beckett never completed the draft.  

The affects triggered by the status of being abandoned are marked by high ambivalence: given the tension between freedom and loneliness, they are marked by a mixture of rage and guilt, desire and disgust, all this leading to a curious mixture of haste and procrastination. There is both the libidinal release of pent up drives and the savage repression of the superegoic law. Meaning is opaque but concentrated in animal images that can make sense in a psychobiographical narrative. We meet suddenly a white horse and then some stoats. These creatures suddenly emerge to block the progression of the narrator. The opening scene presents him as he leaves his mother‘s house: she is “weeping and waving,” but soon his worry is deflected by the bad weather; when he might be changing his mind and turn back home, he is prevented by animals. Several animals signal the narrator’s paranoia (they resist, he attacks; they present vicious moving obstacles) while offering some solace, if not a model. In a text propelled by long rhetorical surges, the imagery of animal life will be dominated by the opposition between motion and immobility. 

A section began with “Enough of my mother for the moment.” For a psychoanalyst like Bion, the horse would stand for the mother, more precisely the mystery of the appearance and disappearance of the mother’s breast. The hallucinatory presence and absence of the mother and the color white, associated with skin and milk, and the German word calling up the image of “shimmering” in the memory, all allude to what is totally both foreign and homely: the mother’s body. The Schimmel exemplifies the main features of Freud’s Uncanny. The dream  vision is explained soon after: having evoked the onset of sudden rages that would blind him, the narrator moves on to more peaceful thoughts, remembering that he studied Milton’s cosmology. Beckett plays with Oedipal wishes and their repression and how repression affects memory. The white animals are acceptable substitutes for the mother’s body. 

The second act of the Oedipal fantasy is the inevitable punishment meted out, because the narrator now thinks he has killed both father and mother, although he is not entirely sure: “My father, did I kill him too as well as my mother, perhaps in a way I did, but I can’t go into  that now, much too old and weak” (Beckett, Complete Short Prose 159).

 Indeed, they have not been killed in the same way: the father has been “killed” in Oedipal fantasies, whereas the mother was “killed” by the son’s departure to live on his own. The son imagines his own demise in a vision split between the earth and the sky. The earth is the chthonian world beneath with its “conqueror worms.” The realm above, with its white animals, keeps symbols of beauty. The narrator drifts a little, his fantasy makes him penetrate under the surface, drift through earth and rocks, down into the sea:  

A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it … Now is there nothing to add to this day with the white horse and white mother in the window, please read again my descriptions of these, before I get on to some other day at a later time… What happens now is I was set on and pursued by a family or tribe, I do not know, of stoats, a most extraordinary thing, I think they were stoats. Indeed, if I may  say so, I was fortunate to get off with my life (…) Anyone else would have been bitten  and bled to death, perhaps sucked white, like a rabbit, there is that word white again. I know I could never think, but if I could have, and then had, I would just have lain down  and let myself be destroyed, as the rabbit does. (Beckett, Complete Short Prose 161) 

One cannot miss the emphatic use of the verb “to think”: first innocuously in “I think they were stoats,” then reflexively in “I can think these thoughts.” This is Freudian overdetermination in the domain of fantasy allied with Bion’s theory of thinking. Here, thinking truly is daydreaming with images – mostly images of animals. The choice of this specific animal is less weird than it seems, because a pun links wild “stoats” with those stray “thoughts.” Thoughts left in a wild state before rationalization occurs, rabid and fluctuating thoughts that need to be straightened by thought as thought. The color white signals as much the mother’s beauty as a death associated with her, because the two meanings have now been  blended. The recurrent image of a white horse leads to another pun: the association with a “hoarse” throat, which accompanies diminished hearing: “Throat very bad, to swallow was torment, and something wrong with an ear, I kept poking at it without relief, old wax perhaps pressing on the drum” (Beckett, Complete Short Prose 163). Bion repeated that thoughts can be generated without our knowledge, or even without any subject being present. Such a process also happens when the body does its duty unconsciously, which is actually what takes  place most of the time. This was a moot point, a point made into a methodological principle of Occasionalism, for Arnold Geulincx, the post-Cartesian philosopher of humility in whom Beckett immersed himself in the 1930s. 

If I cannot know what happens when my limbs move, I should leave this thought to God or to the Other. They will make sense of the process. Beckett’s “abandoned” text ends without ending but logically enough with a glimpse of mechanical autonomy. The world and the body can go on without the intervention of the narrator: “[Y]ou could lie there for weeks and no one hear you, I often thought of that up in the mountains, no, that is foolish thing to say, just went on, my body doing its best without me” (Beckett, Complete Short Prose 164). The fantasy thinks itself without a subject. As Beckett wrote at the close of Ohio Impromptu: “What thoughts who knows. Thoughts, no, not thoughts. Profounds of mind. Of mindlessness. Whither no light can reach” (Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works 44).  

Another author close to Bion who should be referred to discuss Beckett’s attitude facing  psychoanalysis is that of Winnicott. This has been done by Ciaran Ross, whose source of inspiration was Anzieu, who as we have seen, was obsessed with Beckett. What triggered Ross’s investigation was the manner in which Beckett interrupted the writing of the “trilogy” of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable to dash off Waiting for Godot. It was clear to Beckett that the oppressive meta-textuality that he was exploring in these French novels did not leave him enough space in which to breath and dream. With Godot, Beckett could explore a “transitional space” in which the simplest object, be it a carrot, a shoe, or a tree with a few  leaves, acquires a double status: prop and allegory – a clown’s decoys or symbols of finitude – neither fully one nor the other. Transitional objects will be relayed by transitional subjects. Beckett characterized this as the “pseudo-couple.” The first pseudo-couple to appear was in  Mercier and Camier. These charactersarecalled “pseudo-couple” in The Unnamable. The  narrator sees two men appear: “I naturally thought of the pseudo-couple Mercier-Camier” (Beckett, Three Novels 297).The most famous “pseudo-couple” is Didi and Gogo. Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot as a diversion from the relentless probing of meta-textual paradoxes in Molloy and Malone Dies. The first draft of En Attendant Godot pairs two old men named Lévy et Vladimir. Didi comes from Vladimir, a Russian name that evokes Lenin. Indeed, without Vladimir, Gogo-Lévy would only be a “little heap of bones,”(Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works 11) which evokes the death camps and their liberation by Russian troops. These two characters obliquely and discreetly allude to a history marked by the Shoah and the emergence of communism. Their brotherly solicitude doubled by constant bickering calls up the last sequences of Renoir’s famous 1937 film, La Grande Illusion. Two French  prisoners escape from a German jail: the French tough guy Maréchal (Jean Gabin) and the rich Jewish Rosenthal (Marcel Dallo). Their solidarity allows them to survive. Their pairing owes something to the “pseudo-couple” constituted by the psychoanalyst and the analysand. Bionian psychoanalysis would, in that sense, stage and enact a workable “great illusion.” 

At the time, the first transitional space explored by Beckett was the space of a language other than his mother’s. Later, he would systematically retranslate his own texts into the other language, keeping this back and forth movement until he felt that Worstward Ho had reached such a degree of concision that it could not be translated at all. Beckett’s works show to what extent fantasies find their specific space between playing and thinking, both activities done  unconsciously. 

It is time to conclude and to ask why Beckett has become so popular today when it seems that his work is aloof, cynical, disabused, so that it is often called “pessimistic” if not downright nihilistic? What has Beckett to say to our shrinking world, our global village marked by unprecedented technological development, but also by widening discrepancies between the rich and the poor, a world riven by religious radicalism, ethnic intolerance, exploding migrations, to our urban culture in which gender fluidity is encouraged while shortterm encounters can be arranged by swiping a thumb across a screen, this overheated planet in which environmental disasters loom large while many political regimes regress to archaic  populism or drift to totalitarianism as we see in mostly Europe, in South America and perhaps  in the United States?  

Despite its being very much a work of the late 20th century, Beckett’s texts, his  later plays above all, remain relevant today in a way that cannot be rivaled by modernist predecessors like Joyce, Proust and Woolf. Moreover, Beckett is the only author of this group who went to therapy and witnessed positive results, at least the lifting of a writer’s block. Despite Proust’s proximity to Freud, Woolf’s sympathy for psychoanalysis and her lending a hand to the publication of the Hogarth Press issued Standard edition, or Joyce’s ambivalent  attitude facing Jung, to whom he sent his daughter Lucia but really too late, only Beckett had a first-hand experience of psychoanalysis and then was able to exploit its lessons in many  ways, all creative.

责任编辑：乐水

此文原载于《外国文学研究》2019年第2期

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