cartesian challenge

In Samuel Beckett's Letters (blogged here), we see how his intense encounter with psychotherapy presented him with a direct challenge to the rationalism of Descartes.

J. M. Coetzee writes that Wilfrid Bion, Beckett's therapist at the Tavistock Clinic, offered 'an analytic deconstruction of the Cartesian model of thinking' and challenged 'the notion of a private, inviolable, nonphysical mental realm'.