When Beckett began seeing Wilfred Bion for analysis in 1934, he was creatively blocked, frustrated and depressed. He had been deeply affected by the death of his father the year before and was experiencing a collection of somatised symptoms as well as acute attacks of anxiety, night sweats, panic attacks; his heart racing away on what he called its jigs (see Knowlson, 1996: 172). Bion, then still an assistant at the Tavistock Clinic, was hugely influential to Beckett, and their sessions allowed him to shift away from a place of isolation and self-absorption to start to think about how to respond to what he called, the ‘savage loving’ (ibid: 180) of his mother, without becoming ill with extreme anxiety. He worked to try to find a solution to what Beckett’s biographer, James Knowlson, thinks of as a tension between an umbilical dependence on and a desire for independence from his mother (1996: 178). The fact that his impoverished state compelled him to ask his mother to pay for his therapy probably didn’t help resolve this conflict. Bion once said that what the analyst and patient do together is to find stories for the inappropriate; to find the stories, but also to find ways of telling them. What Beckett got from his work with Bion is, for the most part, a matter of conjecture, but we might permit ourselves the thought that Beckett may have become more adept at converting his Bionian no-thing into useful thought; that is becoming alive to the idea that nothing, no-thing, is what happens when we are frustrated in getting what we want (see Bion, 1970: 17). Maybe Beckett’s analysis with Bion may have allowed him to understand the importance of recognising, and utilising in his work, absence as a profound presence and the no-thing of desire – becoming, of course, Beckettian themes par excellence. Beckett, at about the time he was writing the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable, wrote about his experience of the creative process as: ‘the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’ (Beckett, 1983: 139).
