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I have been less accustomed to regarding Beckett as a student of depth psychology than as a prime example of how unconscious motives affect the creative process. It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, to discover in the present volume that Beckett was indeed on familiar terms with Freud and Jung, and their predecessor, Schopenhauer, as well. How well did he use his knowledge in the composition of such novels as Molloy, Murphy, the critical work Proust, the radio play All That Fall, and the stories “First Love” and “From an Abandoned Work” ? O'Hara is concerned mainly with these texts as he attempts to show how Beckett drew upon depth analytical sources to provide him with what O'Hara terms “scaffolding” for his literary works.
O'Hara's explicit assumption is that Beckett, though a skeptic, needed a “system of thought” and found it in the formulations of depth analysis. In order to answer the question of how well Beckett used his technical knowledge of depth analysis, it is necessary to trace the process by which Beckett integrated this knowledge with his original insights, based as they were, in part, on his own psychic needs and fears. This is the task that O'Hara has set for himself in this ambitious, finely textured work.
O'Hara makes it clear that Beckett, who had started out as a writer heavily influenced by Dante, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Joyce, and Proust, eventually was able to free himself of such dependence and to become a true original. This process of emancipation was made possible by his discovery of Freud and, later, Jung, and what he learned about psychic determinism during his own analysis as a deeply troubled young man.
Beckett's early works, such as Proust, “Dream of Fair to Middling Women,” “More Pricks Than Kicks,” and “A Case in a Thousand,” are viewed by O'Hara as prepsychological. By the time Beckett had begun to compose a major work such as Murphy, he appears to have understood some of the implications of the Freudian conception of narcissism,