Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of LoveThis study presents a comprehensive and original argument about the fundamental literary value and the underlying psychological meaning of Beckett's work. John Keller explores Beckett's work, not only for its importance on a personal, human level for many readers, but its place in elaborating the origins of human emotional life, and of creative fiction. He explores the central place of the emotional world in Beckett's writing, which he argues is primarily about love. Keller believes that Beckettian texts embody a struggle to remain in contact with a primal sense of internal goodness founded on early experience with the mother. He suggests that Beckett's greatest achievement as an artist was to document a universal struggle that allows for the birth of mind, and to connect this struggle to the origin, and possibility of the creative act. |
Contents
Foreword by Lance St John Butlerix | 1 |
Preliminaries and Proust | 9 |
Murphys misrecognition of love | 49 |
Copyright | |
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abandonment absence ambivalence annihilation anxiety Arsene aspects attack attempt authentic autistic Beckett Beckettian becomes begins bye bye bye calm Celia central child condensed connection containment core create cylinder dead death death instinct depression Depressive Position despair disconnection dominant early experience echoes emerging-self emotional Endon enduring engagement entrapment Estragon experienced failure fantasy fear feeling felt fiction final Footfalls fragmented function Guntrip hope hostile identification imagery imagos infant infantile infantile-self inner internal experience internal objects internal world introjection isolation Knott living loneliness loss Lucky Lucky's manifests mirroring mother Murphy Murphy's narrative-self narrator narrator's nurturing oeuvre Paranoid Schizoid Position passage patient person play possibility Pozzo presence primal primary object projective identification protect Proust psychic psychoanalytical rage reflects regressed relationship reminiscent Rockaby rupture sadistic Samuel Beckett sense separation space story struggle suggests symbolic tramps vignette Vladimir voice Waiting for Godot Watt Watt's Winnicott withdrawal words