Beckett and Language Pathology

An Outline of Psychiatry in Clinical Lectures

“…However, we need to add an internal relationship between these two elementary symptoms, which will seem much more plausible to you, if you remember my remarks on the importance of the left temporal lobe in my twentieth lecture (p. 129). In this sense we should regard thought echo as a special form of functional disturbance of the left temporal lobe.…”

“…there is also a long verbatim transcript of speech pathology. Such examples were used deliberately in literary productions when surrealism took off after World War II, for instance in the incoherent 'speech' of Lucky, in Beckett's Waiting for Godot [ 129 ]. Such crossovers from psychiatry were intended to portray speech disorganization ('formal thought disorder') in schizophrenia.…”

All in My Head: Beckett, Schizophrenia and the Self

“…language and schizophrenic speech disorder (Coe 1983;Keatinge 2008) or seeing in his characters' withdrawal from the 'outer world' and its materialist transactions what Richard Begam has called a Bphilosophical analogue^to the illness (1996, 45;Tahiri 2006). The persistence of the link between this poet-philosopher of modernity and the mental illness most often associated (metaphorically and literally) with the modern age has been both a contributing factor to and a reflection of the cultural capital the condition has accrued.…”