Not I: Beckett and psychiatry

Back to the Beckett text

Chronic Conditions: Beckett, Bergson and Samuel Johnson

This article analyses the work of the twentieth-century late modernist Samuel Beckett, in light of the turn-of-the-century anti-rationalist Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the eighteenth-century neoclassicist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). What unites these three very different thinkers is a concern over habitual, automatic and involuntary behavior, which in all three cases has a distinctly neurolog...

Psychiatry and the Community. Part I

The Phenomenal Presence of Invisible Legs: Beckett and the Actor

ed, and conceptualized” (Garner “‘Still Living Flesh’: Beckett, MerleauPonty, and the Phenomenological Body” 448). 2. Kuhn’s influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), specifies that landmark scientific advancements such as Newton’s Principia should be understood as paradigms because “[t]heir achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adher...

Can psychiatry prevent suicide? Not yet!

The “pro” part of this debate suggests that psychiatrists can prevent suicide in 3 ways: first, by adopting a shared care model that allows greater collaboration and thus better support for treatment of mental disorders (particularly depression) by general practitioners (GPs); second, by optimizing treatment of depression via the application of clinical management procedures as outlined by the ...