Reports of the death of psychoanalysis are exaggerated, as Adam Phillips’ elegant, elusive writing shows
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Wednesday, April 3, 2024
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Psychoanalytic ideas were dominant in several academic fields, held in esteem by intellectuals, and well known, if notorious, among the general public.
Key Points:
- Psychoanalytic ideas were dominant in several academic fields, held in esteem by intellectuals, and well known, if notorious, among the general public.
- Boiled down to its essence, psychoanalysis is an approach to understanding the mind’s dynamics and treating its ailments.
- Review: On Giving Up – Adam Phillips (Penguin) But although its influence has shrunk, reports of the death of psychoanalysis are exaggerated.
- Almost all are in humanities fields: screen and cultural studies, gender studies, criminology, linguistics and history and philosophy of science.
A celebrated literary figure
- The prolific writings of Adam Phillips epitomise this modern day humanistic expression of psychoanalytic thinking.
- Phillips, who has worked for many years in England as a psychotherapist, is also a celebrated literary figure.
- He has received high praise as “the best living essayist writing in English”, “one of the finest prose stylists in the language” and “our greatest writer in psychology”.
- The hallmark of Phillips’s work is taking an idea or phenomenon, often ordinary or obscure, and patiently investigating its hidden complexities.
On Giving Up
- On Giving Up is not, in fact, about giving up in any systematic way.
- The lead essay inspects the many forms of giving up, from renouncing a vice to abandoning all hope.
- Giving up can be a form of “enlightening disillusionment”; failure at one task but success at something else.
- There are a few false notes: is suicide really the “only paradigm” for giving up and is it true “no one writes in praise of giving up”?
Hypnotic style
- Phillips’s style throughout the book is almost effortlessly fluent and erudite.
- The theoretical dimension of his work musters a variety of literary critics and French writers, but always circles back to Freud and his commentators.
- For psychoanalytic aficionados, he is especially drawn to the British and French mystics: Wilfred Bion, Jacques Lacan and D.W. Winnicott.
- After a while, despite the simple words and the smooth sentences, the experience becomes hypnotic.
Curiosity versus knowledge
Clues to why Phillips’s work is so clever and thoughtful in the reading but also so insubstantial in what it leaves behind can be found in two ideas he presents at each end of the book. In the prologue he cites with approval the psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s distinction between narrow and wide attention and near the conclusion he develops a distinction between curiosity and knowledge.
- A related issue arises when Phillips draws a distinction between curiosity and knowledge.
- A true psychoanalyst, after all, “is someone who is, above all, curious about curiosity.” It is hard to argue against the value of curiosity, but to place it in opposition to knowledge is odd.
- Normally, we might think curiosity drives us towards knowledge and knowledge rewards and reinforces curiosity rather than dulling it.
- It is not obvious why psychoanalysis or any other approach to studying the mind could not aspire to be both a form of (widening) curiosity and a form of (narrowing) knowledge.
- But in Phillips’s work we see a highly developed psychoanalytic curiosity that abstains from making clear knowledge claims.
Psychology versus psychoanalysis
- I’m sure he would agree what he is doing is not psychology in the usual senses.
- Psychoanalysis of Phillips’s variety doesn’t aspire to be any kind of science and it sets itself up as a radically different approach to the study of mind and behaviour.
- A psychology of giving up, for example, would be less astute in unravelling the inner complexities of self-sacrifice and renunciation than Phillips’s psychoanalytic account.
- Such an approach is not inherently preferable to Phillips’s form of psychoanalysis, but it is decidedly different, and not because it is deficient in curiosity.
Nick Haslam receives funding from the Australian Research Council.