ABSTRACT
Recalling his lifelong friend, Samuel Beckett, the London psychoanalyst Geoffrey Thompson noted in a 1976 radio broadcast that an understanding of Beckett’s relation to his mother, May, was fundamental to any understanding of the renowned writer (Thompson, 1976). While this reference to maternal difficulty suggests a simplified psychoanalytic shorthand, Thompson could not have been more correct in relation to Beckett’s psychological situation during his twenties. Indeed, it was the tormented struggle to separate from his family of origin, while simultaneously affirming his identity as a writer, that framed Beckett’s path to psychoanalytic psychotherapy with Wilfred Bion in London between 1933 and 1935.
