On the Freudian Motifs in Beckett’s ‘First Love’

• Main Author: Paul O’Mahoney
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Asociación Española de Estudios Irlandeses 2013-03-01
• Series: Estudios Irlandeses
• Subjects: Samuel Beckett; “First Love”; Freud; Psychoanalysis; Literary criticism
• Online Access: http://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Paul_O_Mahoney_8.pdf
• ISSN: 1699-311X; 1699-311X

Beckett’s “First Love” is in part a literary experiment, being one of his first texts of length written in French. It is a story that is replete with allusions to Freudian psychoanalysis, both general ideas or theories and individual case studies. We argue here that its experimental status extends to this feature. Its incorporation of Freudian motifs represents the beginning of an attempt by Beckett to move beyond or improve upon his previous engagement with Freud in his fiction, with which he was somewhat dissatisfied. The change is signified in his parodic or unserious invocations of Freud, which differ from his earlier stories; while we concede that the approach is not very successful, in literary terms, in terms of Beckett’s corpus and development as a writer it deserves attention. Having identified many of his Freudian sources and the character of his deployment of them, we note the difficulties his chosen approach presents for both writers and readers or interpreters. We close by pointing out the critical shortcomings that must follow on failure to attend to the story’s essentially Freudian framework, exemplified in an essay on the story by Julia Kristeva.