Beckett and Brain Science

Samuel Beckett has long been read as a writer who asks questions of the locus of the human, and the relationship between literature and society's deepest sense of itself. This project will extend this tradition into a new arena, using Beckett's work as a test case to ask specific questions of the relationship between literature, theatre and the scientific and medical understanding of the mind. By using the humanities to explore the limits of ideas of mind and categories of mental disorder the aim is also to restore empathy to the clinical encounter. The workshops will contribute to an important current debate about the human side of medicine, and give an intellectual framework to the intuition of many clinicians that literature offers a means to understand the phenomenal experience of challenging mental and neurological conditions.
It has been argued that the arts might be able to help doctors to understand such conditions within the totality of the patient's experience, to develop ethical awareness, and to discern shared patterns of response (Evans 2001). This project seeks to test these possibilities by giving medical practitioners and neuroscientists a meaningful encounter with literary and theatrical representations, and the critical insights that scholars might draw from them.
The project's focus on the science and medicine of the mind makes this emphasis on the patient's subjective experience all the more pertinent: psychiatric disorders are constitutively disorders of persons (Oyebode 2002) and concern their sense of selfhood. Much of Beckett's work, as well as the literary modernism with which the future project will be concerned, is vitally concerned with consciousness (Woolf's 'myriad impressions' of the mind) and the phenomenology of perception and experience, making it a rich field of investigation in connection with brain science.
The particular complexities of the medicine of brain and mind, and the particular case of the writer Samuel Beckett, offer a challenge and extension to the first models of medical humanities. The virtue of working with literary texts has been seen as the access they give the medical practitioner to a patient's distress in the language of everyday life (Oyebode 2002), as opposed to the antiseptic jargon of the clinic. The expectation has been, also, that the clinician would learn to think in terms of narrative as well as isolated events or symptoms. The work of Beckett, and a range of other modernist writers, offers something beyond expressive stories that are 'ordinary' and intelligible, however. Indeed, its characteristic concern is with modes of representation that emphasise disruption, alienation, and disorientation, and thus might offer particular insights into realms of experience seen as 'anomalous' in mental or neurological disorder. This project is a starting point in exploring the particular opportunities presented by literary modernism to medical humanities.
The project will also use performance and theories of performance to raise questions about the stability of medical knowledge and explore the importance of phenomenology to psychiatric and neurological medicine. The process of learning experientially through performance destabilizes the distinction between ontology and epistemology, challenging the idea of descriptive knowledge. Scientists will work with theatre practitioners, breaking down the boundaries between objective clinical categories and lived experience. There are challenges to both disciplines in this activity, which will remove the mediation of the 'science play', in which scientific knowledge is a stable object of scrutiny, and also dispense with the world of the theatre as a stable space for such operations. In their place will be an exploratory practice of performance as research, dislocating the knowledge about both the arts and brain science that is under investigation, and creating new knowledge in the process.

The work of this project will have an impact on several academic audiences whose work is affected by its questions and reconsiderations: literary and theatre scholars, philosophers of psychiatry, neuropsychologists, academic psychiatrists, and medical ethicists. These will not be abstract discussions, however: they have the potential to have a direct impact on medical treatment and patient care. Indeed, academic impact is not distinct from wider societal impact in this project. Many of the named groups are often clinicians as well as academic researchers. By developing models of 'pathology', and 'disorder', and considering the subjective dimension to clinical symptoms via exchanges between the academic disciplines of psychiatry, philosophy, and literature, this project will also have an impact on clinical practice. Some of those involved in the working group (Broome, Code, Oppenheim) have both an academic and a clinical role, and work with patients within the NHS or medical care in the United States.
The project will also actively engage with doctors in general practice who are concurrently studying for an MA in Medical Humanities, as well as with trainee doctors on the Warwick medical degree, and courses at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. By means of medical pedagogy, the aim is to improve the practice of current and future generations of doctors. Clinical understanding will be enhanced by questioning and refining categories of 'disorder' used in psychiatric care, and clinical skills will be improved by using performance to rethink the face-to-face encounter with those facing anomalous mental experiences. In both respects, patient care will benefit.
The results of this research will also be disseminated not only at academic gatherings of literary scholars, but also medical events, such as the annual Medical Humanities conference and the Royal College of Psychiatrists' International Forum, and in publications read by the medical profession such as Medical Humanities and Psychiatry, Philosophy and Psychology. The aim is to impact upon established medical practitioners and improve their clinical and research work. It is worth noting that medical practitioners (O'Brien 2006, 2008; Groninger and Childress 2007) have themselves published recently on the benefits of reading and watching Beckett for increasing doctors' understanding, empathy and ethical awareness in medical journals and press such as Irish Medical News, SCOPE magazine and Perspectives in Biology and Medicine.
The project aims to have an immediate impact on the delivery of psychiatric and medical care in the UK. It will also collaborate on transatlantic activities with Prof Lois Oppenheim, who practises psychoanalysis and is prominent in the public understanding of mental health in the United States. This project is an exploratory first step, however, towards a larger project in the future, embracing literary modernism as a whole, that hopes to embed work with literature and the arts in a wide range of medical training.
The project has ambitious aims both in its current incarnation and its future projection. Mental illness has a profound effect on nation's economic and social wellbeing. Improvements in clinical skills, enhanced empathy and understanding of narrative experience, better models of conditions, and an understanding of the limitations of the existing symptom-based models of diagnosis and treatment - all aspects of patient care that an encounter with the arts and humanities might benefit - will improve patient care and impact upon the public sphere.