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Didier Anzieu is an author well known to psychoanalysts as an important theorist of contemporary psychoanalytic thought, through such texts as L’Auto-Analyse de Freud and Le Moi-Peau. The book under review is a recent new edition of a work that first appeared in 1992 and it is most original in form: as the publisher’s blurb has it, it is ‘the diary of a psychoanalyst composing a book about the author who has fascinated him for nearly forty years’.
Anzieu introduces himself as
a passionate reader of Beckett and a psychoanalyst eager to cure … whom, and of what? To cure Beckett by delayed action of his destructive passion for writing? To cure himself of his therapeutic passion for reading? Will Beckett at least go to a psychoanalyst in the end, even if he does not surrender to him?
Beckett did in fact have psychoanalysis with Bion. The author imagines the first session between the young psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Clinic and Samuel Beckett, who was at the time assailed by what Bion would later describe as anxieties that threaten the deepest foundations of the personality, concerning which he would also develop his own theories.
The author invites us to accompany him as he approaches ever closer to his subject, through the reading of Beckett’s texts, through Beckett’s biography and also through the mirror of his own daily life. Sometimes he dons his psychoanalyst’s hat and tells us of his working day, of the questions he puts to himself about a patient, while at other times he takes us on a walk with him to meet Beckett in the Bois de Vincennes in Paris.
The study of Beckett’s oeuvre, which adopts the elegant guise of a journey of initiation with multiple starting-points, offers an approach to the exceptional literary creation of an author who parted from his analyst in order to save himself (or to save the analyst?) and transposed the sufferings of his psychic life into writing.
Indeed, Beckett not only succeeded in creating an oeuvre but also, as Anzieu postulates, made