Beckett and trauma: the father’s death and the sea

2018 ◽  
pp. 23-45
Author(s):  
Julie Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Radio Play ◽  
Future Reference ◽  
As If

Shedding lights on biological episodes in Beckett’s writing, Julie Campbell in this chapter focuses specifically on the fear of diving that he experienced at six years old, which recurs from the early poem ‘For Future Reference’ to the later fiction Company, and analyses how and why it was traumatic for him. The incident, together with the shame and the sense of guilt he felt in mourning his father’s death, traumatised him. Beckett’s trauma, caused by his remorseful feeling that he had betrayed his father’s expectations, is perhaps most strongly reflected by the character Henry in Beckett’s radio play Embers. Henry is obsessed with the death of his father, who drowned at sea but whose body was not found. Henry denies his father’s death as if trying to expunge it from his memory. His distress, anger, bitterness, and confusion are expressed in his commands of his own actions and of the story of Bolton and Holloway. The radio listeners witness Henry’s inner feelings and share in his suffering.

scholarly journals Namelessness from Artaud to Beckett

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Slote
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Antonin Artaud ◽  
Radio Play ◽  
Electroshock Therapy ◽  
Final Work ◽  
As If

Abstract After a period of electroshock therapy, Antonin Artaud claimed to have been able to regain his name and sense of self. The dehiscence of name and identification is reprised in Artaud’s final work, the radio play Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu. This consists of five texts, read by four people. Each text is followed by unintelligible, glossolalic screams performed by Artaud, as if Artaud were reacting against the speech acts performed by others in his name. The structure of this play suggests the predicament of Beckett’s Unnamable: an entity reacting in pain to its attempts to articulate itself in a language that is not his, but theirs.

Improvement of an artificial test substrate technique for evaluation of em immunocytochemical labeling

1987 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 762-763
Author(s):  
G. D. Gagne ◽  
M. F. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Bovine Serum Albumin ◽  
Serum Albumin ◽  
Bovine Serum ◽  
Artificial Substrate ◽  
Chemical Fixation ◽  
As If

We recently described an artificial substrate system which could be used to optimize labeling parameters in EM immunocytochemistry (ICC). The system utilizes blocks of glutaraldehyde polymerized bovine serum albumin (BSA) into which an antigen is incorporated by a soaking procedure. The resulting antigen impregnated blocks can then be fixed and embedded as if they are pieces of tissue and the effects of fixation, embedding and other parameters on the ability of incorporated antigen to be immunocyto-chemically labeled can then be assessed. In developing this system further, we discovered that the BSA substrate can also be dried and then sectioned for immunolabeling with or without prior chemical fixation and without exposing the antigen to embedding reagents. The effects of fixation and embedding protocols can thus be evaluated separately.

As-If Test

1956 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore R. Sarbin ◽  
Donal S. Jones
Keyword(s):  
As If

From Container to Claustrum: Projective Identification in Couples

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Health ◽  
Projective Identification ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Intimate Partners ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
As If

This paper is a contribution to the growing literature on the role of projective identification in understanding couples' dynamics. Projective identification as a defence is well suited to couples, as intimate partners provide an ideal location to deposit unwanted parts of the self. This paper illustrates how projective identification functions differently depending on the psychological health of the couple. It elucidates how healthier couples use projective identification more as a form of communication, whereas disturbed couples are inclined to employ it to invade and control the other, as captured by Meltzer's concept of "intrusive identification". These different uses of projective identification affect couples' capacities to provide what Bion called "containment". In disturbed couples, partners serve as what Meltzer termed "claustrums" whereby projections are not contained, but imprisoned or entombed in the other. Applying the concept of claustrum helps illuminate common feelings these couples express, such as feeling suffocated, stifled, trapped, held hostage, or feeling as if the relationship is killing them. Finally, this paper presents treatment challenges in working with more disturbed couples.

Ellipsis of Grammatology: Derrida's Beautiful Passages

Derrida Today ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-143
Author(s):  
Alexander García Düttmann
Keyword(s):  
The One ◽  
As If

Beautiful passages are passages of ‘pure presence’ inasmuch as they cannot be separated from an absence, from an absence that cannot be revoked by restoring a ‘pure presence’. Beautiful passages are passages that move and inspire because they do not withhold anything, though their gift and their surrender lies in an ellipsis that is essential to ‘pure presence’ and that cannot be sidestepped, as if a remainder, a reserve, or a surplus inhered in them. It is impossible to get a grip on beautiful passages. They are riddles that have been solved but persist in the midst of their solution and do not forfeit any of their enigmaticalness. Their beauty resides in an experience of intensity, in an experience based on an elision, on a tightening and an averting. Such averting is an immediate turning towards the one who feels the intensity, touching and stimulating him as a consequence. This paper explores the question: Are there beautiful passages in Of Grammatology?

Jacques Lacan

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances L. Restuccia
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
As If

Agamben only sporadically alludes to psychoanalysis and invokes psychoanalytic concepts. He does so most prominently in Stanzas, where he dedicates Part III to ‘geniisque Henry Corbin et Jacques Lacan‘ (S 61); refers to ‘the Lacanian thesis according to which […] the phantasm makes the pleasure suited to the desire’, in order to elaborate a point in Plato about desire and pleasure relying on images in the soul (S 74); and takes up melancholia and fetishism – both of which, it is important to note, circumvent lack. But Agamben is by no means ‘psychoanalytic’. He presents and employs melancholia and fetishism as paradigms for accessing the inaccessible (perhaps we can say that he plays with them). Melancholia, in Agamben, becomes an ‘imaginative capacity to make an unobtainable object appear as if lost’ so that it ‘may be appropriated insofar as it is lost’ (S 20), a strategy for saving the unsavable that evolves into his conception of the messianic. And, although Agamben is preoccupied with ‘a zone of non-consciousness’, he underscores that it is ‘not the fruit of a removal, like the unconscious of psychoanalysis’ (UB 64)

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document