Beckett Men: 'First Love' - then - 'The End'

Helena Texier

Date: Saturday 17th June 2006
Time: 10.00 am
Venue: Irish writers’ Centre
Parnell Square North
Dublin 1

After a ground-breaking decision taken on Killiney strand, Samuel Beckett changed the direction of his writing. The first effects were the births of his novellas.

This paper, based on a reading of Beckett's First Love and The End, looks at how these can help those of us who work clinically with people to better understand the “Beckett-men” of the clinical field. In discussion with those in attendance Helena will explore how it is that the vagaries of the very first bonds of love can entail the very end of loving itself.

Helena Texier is a psychoanalyst working in Dublin and Paris. She taught clinical case studies at Masters Level at the School of Psychotherapy, St. Vincent’s University Hospital, for a good many years, and elsewhere lectured on psychoanalytic theory at both graduate and postgraduate level. She was editor of The Letter, an Irish psychoanalytic journal, for over a decade and has contributed articles to a variety of publications.