The World of Samuel Beckett - Psychiatry and the Humanities

Jacket Description/Back: "The World of Samuel Beckett" brings together a distinguished group of authorities, among them Beckett's longtime associates and colleagues Herbert Blau and Martin Esslin. In a chapter on Beckett's "Enough", Blau concedes that parts of the playwright's work can be lyrical and beguiling, but "it's still an appalling vision". Esslin (who coined the term "theater of the absurd") challenges the notion that Beckett is difficult or depressing, arguing instead that he is basically a comic writer, gallows humor thought it be. Angela Moorjani sees Beckett's writing as the product of a cryptic text inscribed within. Bennett Simon, a psychiatrist who has written extensively on Beckett, examines the self in current art and psychoanalysis. Joseph H. Smith emphasizes that Beckett, like Freud and Lacan, challenges any notions of "cure" as the easy achievement of happiness. Review Quotes: "The psychoanalytic vision that informs the majority of the articles (those of the academic scholars as well as those of the practitioners of psychiatry) sheds important new light on Beckett's work." -- Theatre SurveyReview Quotes:"The psychoanalytic vision that informs the majority of the articles (those of the academic scholars as well as those of the practitioners of psychiatry) sheds important new light on Beckett's work." -- Theatre SurveyMarc Notes: Avail. in cloth at $ 42.50 Paperback reprint of the 1962 Knopf ed. Publisher Marketing: "The World of Samuel Beckett" brings together a distinguished group of authorities, among them Beckett's longtime associates and colleagues Herbert Blau and Martin Esslin. In a chapter on Beckett's "Enough," Blau concedes that parts of the playwright's work can be lyrical and beguiling, but "it's still an appalling vision." Esslin (who coined the term "theater of the absurd") challenges the notion that Beckett is difficult or depressing, arguing instead that he is basically a comic writer, gallows humor thought it be. Angela Moorjani sees Beckett's writing as the product of a cryptic text inscribed within. Bennett Simon, a psychiatrist who has written extensively on Beckett, examines the self in current art and psychoanalysis. Joseph H. Smith emphasizes that Beckett, like Freud and Lacan, challenges any notions of "cure" as the easy achievement of happiness.

Contributor Bio:  Smith, Joseph H Smith is supervising and training analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute and president of the Washington Psychoanalytic Society.