A literary shrink’s analysis of literary giants
It’s packed with contradictions and is maddeningly inconsistent but this literary shrink’s analysis of literary giants simply makes you glad to be alive
In Writing: Essays On Literature Adam Phillips Hamish Hamilton €19.45
The cheerful psychoanalyst is as improbable a creature as the vegan butcher, the blind hairdresser or the butterfingered brain surgeon. In the late Seventies, when Adam Phillips first entered the world of psychoanalysis, he felt cold-shouldered by his peers. It was his general air of optimism that aroused their suspicions. Was there perhaps something wrong with him?
‘When I started in psychoanalysis… it was a very earnest and sentimental profession,’ he recalls in an interview contained in his new book. ‘There was a kind of vale-oftears attitude to life, with the implication that life was almost certainly unbearable, that the really deep people were virtually suicidal. So it was very difficult to be a relatively happy person training to become a psychoanalyst. I was then 23 and it seemed to be held against me as a sort of shallowness that I was in some way “happy”.’
These days, he is still capable of arousing strong feelings, both in and out of the profession. Some people dislike his many slim volumes, which often have upbeat, comehither titles such as On Tickling, Kissing And Being Bored. They find them slight, or slippery, or both. In this latest book, he summarises the opposition. ‘One kind of review says, “This is narcissistic, selfindulgent, pretentious, empty. Don’t be impressed and don’t be fooled.”’
Such criticism may well be tinged with envy. He has written 21 books and edited many others, yet he only ever writes on Wednesdays, devoting the rest of the week to psychoanalysis. Although he does not see himself as a writer, he clearly has an extraordinary facility for writing. This, in turn, leads some to wonder whether his words don’t slip a little too easily out on to the page, and whether his love of paradox, aphorism and playfulness might in fact be a shield for shallowness.
His new book is subtitled Essays On Literature but whether the essays are about TS Eliot or Edward Lear, Hamlet or Dr Johnson, they all come back, via one route or another, to psychoanalysis.
Phillips has a jaunty one-footin, one-foot-out approach to his profession. His more hard-line, beetle-browed colleagues must find this additionally infuriating.
In the past, he has been quoted as saying: ‘For me, psychoanalysis is only one among many things you might do if you’re feeling unwell – you might also try aromatherapy, knitting, hanggliding.’ Now, he compounds this frivolity, over and over again, with lines that almost amount to quips or lighthearted injunctions not to take his chosen profession too seriously. He talks of ‘the need not to know yourself’ and seems to shy away from making sense of the unconscious, talking about ‘the disabling temptations of sense-making’.
‘The analyst who demands sense from the patient… is at best distracting him and at worst violating him,’ he continues. Sometimes it is almost as though the man who first stood up as defence counsel for psychoanalysis has just turned himself into the prosecuting counsel or, rather that he has switched his hat and then switched it back again, and so on and so forth in the manner of a music-hall turn. Phillips has a mellifluous style, as gentle as a stream in summer, flowing its way around any hard rocks it may encounter. Though he admires Sigmund Freud and has edited his works for Penguin, his discipleship is far from strict; he seems happy to cherry-pick from the great man’s thoughts and strictures, discarding anything unpalatable or discredited. At one point, he suggests that it was Freud’s original English translator
‘Lear’s nonsense is a freedom not to make sense’
James Strachey, who made him seem so forthright and intransigent. Phillips’s Freud is a far more benevolent fellow, as valuable for his weaknesses as for his strengths, perhaps more so.
‘One thing one learns from Freud’s writing – and indeed from the practice of psychoanalysis – is the value of weak theory: theories that are obviously not quite right invite conversation; strong theory creates a fight-or-flight situation.’ Does he really mean this? If so, he seems to be suggesting that half-truth is better than truth or at least that murkiness is better than clarity. Or is he joking? His writing thrives on a playful see-sawing between soft and sharp, vague and forthright. He is – as he might put it – vehement only in his disapproval of vehemence.
His pursuit of paradox is unstoppable, popping up everywhere. On one page, psychoanalysis ‘is too rational an account of irrationality’ and on another it is ‘a story about how there is nothing less desirable than an object of desire’. Readers will respond to his push-me/pull-you statements with either irritation or excitement, depending on their disposition. Phillips would probably think that both responses are equally valid and that to react in either way is preferable to not reacting at all.
In his essay on the nonsense verse of Edward Lear, he argues that ‘Lear’s nonsense is also a freedom not to make sense’ and regrets that ‘psychoanalysis, in all its forms, radical and otherwise, has put its money on sense-making’.
His favourite form of punctuation is the question mark. At one stage, he quotes Lear’s famous limerick: ‘There was an Old Man with a beard/ Who said, “It is just as I feared!/ Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren/ Have all built their nests in my beard!”’ And then he asks: ‘If a beard can be a nest, several nests, what is a desire to grow a beard a desire for?’
Some people may find this teasing style simply irritating. They would doubtless say that a fair number of Phillips’s generalisations don’t stand up to scrutiny: they mean either too much, or nothing at all. What does he mean, for instance, when he says: ‘To be ashamed of oneself is to be in a state of total conviction’?
But to look to Phillips for logic and consistency is like going to an aquarium in search of frozen fish. He obeys nobody’s rules but his own and – rare among intellectuals, rarer still among analysts – makes you feel good to be alive.