Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and these 27 essays, relating to lectures and reviews, have a strong psychoanalytic focus. In the preface Phillips suggests that psychoanalysis has got over its honeymoon belief that it is a universal panacea, and can now enjoy its relish of sexuality with amusement, as well as the straddling of conflicts rather than their resolution. It will be, he says, as useful as anyone finds it to be. This view sets the tone of the book. It is heavily based on Freud but there are occasional references to Lacan, Winnicot and Bion. There is little reference to the unconscious or the id and superego. On the whole it is rather mystical.
Much of it reads like organised free association, but beautifully written. Yes, I know that seems like a contradiction, but then so much of the writing of Phillips contains contradictions or some sort of paradox. Indeed, it seems to me that one of the problems with psychoanalysis is that it is difficult to be wrong as anything can be explained, and there is no evidence with which it assesses any idea or claim. Everything seems possible and this must make it very attractive to those who practise it — how nice to have virtually no constraints.
Consider these typical views expressed by Phillips: psychoanalysis does not cure people but shows them what is incurable; the understanding of psychoanalysis involves a continual resistance to it; what happens in therapy has more to do with the therapist’s past than the patient’s; brief therapy is no worse or better; what could be more mine and not mine than my own desire?
So how does one evaluate the technique and its ideas? You will not find the answer here. Psychoanalysis is described as a form of therapy that works by attending to side effects like what falls out of the patient’s pocket when he turns upside-down. Evidence of the value to patients of psychoanalysis is nowhere in this book, nor is there any attempt to provide evidence for the validity of its ideas. Nor are there any examples of what happens in a therapy session. Free association is at its core, but again no examples are given, nor any evidence for its value. As Freud explained, the nonsensical, the irrelevant, and the trivial are all to be included. It is also puzzling that other psychiatric conditions such as depression or schizophrenia or autism get no attention in this book. But there is the claim that there is an intimate connection between the patient’s suffering and the symptoms of the illness — but again no evidence or examples.
There is also, it is claimed, the fundamental sexual passion for our parents, Oedipus and all that — but again where is the evidence? We are, according to Freud, averse to ourselves because our desires are fundamentally transgressive; sexuality is always threatening to destroy us. Darwinian evolutio, however, makes clear that avoidance of incest has evolved in order to avoid excessive deleterious mutations. Nevertheless, Phillips goes along with the idea that education is the attempt to persuade people to lose interest in their parents’ bodies. Yet he writes also that psychoanalysis is the impossible profession, as it educates us about the impossibility of education. The patient, Freud says, does not remember what he has forgotten but acts it out.
Freud wanted the case-histories he wrote to have the stamp of science. On that score he believed he had failed, as an analysis involves what cannot be replicated, like free association. It only happens once. Yet the development of the embryo only happens once, but scientific theory explains it.
What, Phillips asks, if we did not dream? What effect would it have had on our lives? Dreams, he claims, tell us the truth about ourselves, but they could not be more misleading; they provide an opportunity to talk about obscure desires and versions of ourselves. Free association lets the dreamer know what is not in the dream, yet dreams are the most direct way of getting to our desires. But what about other theories such as the one suggested by Francis Crick, that they remove certain undesirable modes of interaction between cells in the brain, and so erase certain memories? Not that different from Freud for whom a good memory is one that forgets properly.
Essentially a book that could be used for finding clever and elegant antinomic quotations — and to keep you puzzled.
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