The spacebar, the backspace key and a couple of vowels take the most punishment on your average keyboard. On Adam Phillips’s laptop the question mark key probably suffers a similar fate. The prolific British psychoanalyst and essayist is forever posing questions, sometimes toying with an extended series in a single paragraph. Answers are in shorter supply: for Phillips, resolving doubt is less urgent than exploring it.
Readers of Phillips’s recent collections — On Giving Up, On Wanting to Change and On Getting Better — will have a good sense of what this one has in store. An idea or concept is held up to the light and inspected from many angles, its complexities unpicked, and some undogmatic and sometimes elusive truths extracted about human experience. The style is elegant and literary, shaped by psychoanalysis not only in its vocabulary but also in its free-floating attention. Phillips grazes topics rather than attacking them carnivorously.
The seven essays in his latest collection, The Life You Want, tackle a wide range of topics and include a couple of relatively short offcuts alongside the more substantial pieces. No single organising theme emerges, but some of the longer essays overlap in speaking to the process of acquiring knowledge and the relationship between psychoanalysis and pragmatist philosophy. Shorter pieces dissect escapism (not just avoidance but a form of curiosity) and irreverence, which Phillips views ambivalently, distinguishing one form that skewers illegitimate authority and another that sadistically mocks and degrades.
An essay on the nihilist Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran, author of The Trouble with Being Born, entertains the idea that “our nature… makes us radically unsuited to the lives we are capable of living.” What can it mean not just to no longer want to live, but also to not want to have lived at all? A study of the power of negative thinking, the essay asks whether, if “life is not worth the endurance it requires,” then enduring it is the best way forward. Several theorists of human self-destructiveness weigh in, including Freud on our supposed death drive, but none are as colourfully bleak as Cioran himself (“We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying. Everything.”).
Two essays exploring the acquisition of knowledge tackle it from different sides. “Psychoanalysis for Beginners” examines how people first become interested in psychoanalysis and what it is about their initial encounter that creates a lifelong attachment. “Psychoanalysis tends to be either not your cup of tea,” Phillips writes, “or the only hot drink in town.” People can’t know what it is before encountering it but somehow, as an ill-defined “found object,” it resonates with them, even if they may have misunderstood it. It is important for trainee analysts to interrogate what they thought psychoanalysis was when they found it, Phillips argues, before they shape it into a more definite and sewn-up “prescribed object”.
This advice may be especially apt for psychoanalysis, but it could also apply to any belief system or calling. What inchoate understanding (or fantasy) of Marxism, or of being a teacher, writer or doctor, inspires us to take them up as identities, before we have any real knowledge of what they entail in practice, setting in motion a life project that may have begun with a misstep? How often are our minds and life-courses set on a particular trajectory by an innocent and clueless misreading?
A similar view of learning as a process of resonance with found objects features in the essay “On Not Being Taught.” Teaching can be understood as informing or as evoking, Phillips argues, and he clearly favours the less didactic option. Learning often occurs when we are idiosyncratically affected by some aspect of what we are exposed to rather than by absorbing an intended instruction. Writing is, or perhaps should be, the same: “The writer or the lecturer’s purposes are merely the occasion, the opportunity for the purposes of the reader and the listener,” and neither are “the privileged authority on their own words.”
Teachers can’t know entirely what they are teaching students, students inevitably transform what they have received without fully understanding it, and teachers should want that transformation to occur. From the teacher’s standpoint, “the aim would be to turn the desire to imitate into the desire to improvise.” So too parents and psychotherapists: if they see their task as teaching and define learning as the successful reproduction of knowledge, then their children and patients are unlikely to learn in their desired way.
The encounter between the pragmatism of philosopher Richard Rorty and the psychoanalysis of Freud — coded American and European, respectively — repeats across a few essays. It’s an odd coupling. Psychoanalysis emphasises looking backward, examines how we are determined by our past, and sees human agency as undermined by the unconscious. Rorty, representing the intellectual tradition that extends back to William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce, argues that we should choose how to think based on what is useful for advancing the life we want and rejects claims that we are determined by our past as bad faith.
Phillips seems drawn to but frustrated with Rorty. He suggests that the American philosopher misunderstands the nature of the unconscious, believes naively in the autonomy of the self, and is too confident that we generally know what we want. Rorty “can sound like an ambitious patriotic capitalist in a supermarket.” Nevertheless, Phillips claims that the pragmatist view counteracts the tendency for psychoanalysis to impose a limiting or even “coercive” view of human nature and human possibilities. Both strands of thought value individuality deeply, creating a potential for common ground. A marriage of these strange bedfellows “seems unusually promising,” Phillips writes.
Like psychoanalysis, The Life You Want will not be many readers’ favourite hot beverage. Its mix of literary, psychological and philosophical references guarantees a slender audience, but it offers a distinctive reading experience. In accord with his essay on teaching, Phillips does not instruct but evokes. Readers are unlikely to find themselves closer to the lives they want at the end of the book, but they can expect to have had their minds stirred up in interesting ways. •
The Life You Want
By Adam Phillips | Hamish Hamilton | $45.00 | 160 pages
