All in My Head: Beckett, Schizophrenia and the Self

Abstract

This article will explore the representation of certain mental and somatic phenomena in Beckett's trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, exploring how his understanding of schizophrenia and psychosis informs his representation of the relationship between mind and body. It will also examine recent phenomenological and philosophical accounts of schizophrenia (Louis Sass, Josef Parnas, Shaun Gallagher) that see the condition as a disorder of selfhood and concentrate in it on the disruption to ipseity, a fundamental and prereflective awareness of self that leads to a loss of 'grip' (in the term of Merleau-Ponty) on concepts and percepts. Beckett's writing might, it is argued, make such disruptions more tangible and intelligible. The article will also consider John Campbell's argument that immunity of the first person to error-Sydney Shoemaker's foundational philosophical idea that we cannot misspeak the first person pronoun-is revoked in states of psychosis, and relate such states to the moments in Beckett's writing where this immunity is challenged, and quasipsychotic experiences represented.

Accepting the Incomprehensible

“…We approached these texts by focusing on what they teach us about reality (or distortions of reality). We did not focus on psychopathological descriptions of phenomena that are common in psychotic conditions as this aspect has already been covered (Barry, 2016).…”

“…Beckett's novels disrupt readers' expectations because they are "antinarratives" radically deconstructing the concept of a novel and challenging readers' emotions and expectations (Nussbaum, 1988). Psychiatry has a long-standing interest in Beckett's works, which can be interpreted as exemplifying specific psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia (Barry, 2016) or posttraumatic states (Tranter, 2018). In this article, we are not interested in dissecting Beckett's art for specific psychopathological phenomena, we rather would like to point out that his narrative perspective can broaden psychiatrists' horizon in coming to terms with a wide spectrum of cognitive appraisals of "reality" (Zawadzki et al, 2012).…”