Staging Psychoanalysis: "Endgame" and the Freudian Theory of the Anal-Sadistic Phase

This essay aims to show that, when composing Endgame in the mid-1950s, Beckett proceeded in a strikingly systematic manner to include the principal traits of the anal-sadistic personality as outlined in Ernest Jones's chapter on “Anal-Erotic Character Traits” in his Papers on Psycho-Analysis (1912), a work read by Beckett in early 1934. Once this intertextual relation is taken into account, not only do many of the details in the play become intelligible, but its very form and rhythm can be seen to be indebted to the Freudian theory of the anal-sadistic phase.