Samuel Beckett on the Couch

""Three times a week I give myself over to probing the depths with my psychiatrist," a twenty-seven-year-old not-yet-famous Samuel Beckett wrote in a letter to his cousin Morris Sinclair, on January 27, 1934. Beckett had moved to London from his family home, in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, a few weeks earlier in order to begin analysis. "I regard myself as very fortunate to have been able to embark on it," he continued. "It is the only thing that interests me at the moment, and that is how it should be, for these sorts of things require one to attend to them to the exclusion of virtually anything else.""

"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. (You can watch the bizarre result with a Swedish television crew on YouTube.)"

"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."

At age twenty-seven Samuel Beckett began analytic treatment three times a week after moving to London in January 1934. The analysis followed his father's death in 1933 and addressed severe symptoms including anxiety, depression, boils, constipation, heart palpitations, and night terrors that eased only when his brother Frank slept beside him. Beckett described analysis as his sole consuming interest at the time. He maintained extreme personal privacy later in life, famously allowing photographs after his Nobel Prize only if he could remain silent. Correspondence with friends documented the experience, and the clinical relationship with Wilfred R. Bion had lasting, transformative effects.

Read at The New Yorker