Prescript

This lecture was given as part of a day of lectures and discussions on ‘Beckett/Bion: The Emergence of Meaning’, a day set up by the Lincoln Clinic and Centre for Psychotherapy and held at University College London in September 1999. The lectures were held alongside a viewing of Samuel Beckett's play Endgame which was part of the Barbican Beckett Festival, brought by the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and was a showing of major works of all kinds by the author. The lecture was conceived as a talk

and relates to the performance of Endgame which the participants would have had the chance to see. Although now published in written and not spoken form this text has retained much of the format of a talk, an interaction with the audience in the tradition of Freud and his early lectures on psychoanalysis, in the hope that this format might apprehend the processes of mind that obtain in the analytic/self-analytic process. The latter traditionally seeks a way towards meanings less than conscious, by means of an oral dialogue, a two-person process, this being what essentially facilitates the kind of knowledge psychoanalysis pursues. The more traditional paper, which Freud also used, the scientific format, has been deliberately eschewed as a less satisfactory medium for demonstrating the presence and use of unconscious process, the latter being the results of findings, the theoretical positioning, as against the dialogic enquiry which is a condensed, fragmentary and processive form. These, therefore, in this talk, are not findings, but demonstrate the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of the way towards finding (pursuits of mind), and do so by what are traditionally poetic means, rhythm, imagery, condensation, symbolization, repetition, alliteration and all manner of rhetoric to please and persuade the listener towards the meanings that words are capable of under the intense constraints of conscious and unconscious concentration on meaning, the emergence of meaning.

The talk addresses th