On Adam Phillips

June 4, 2014 6:28 AM

Symptoms are forms of self-knowledge. When you think, I’m agoraphobic, I’m a shy person, whatever it may be, these are forms of self-knowledge. What psychoanalysis, at its best, does is cure you of your self-knowledge. And of your wish to know yourself in that coherent, narrative way. You can only recover your appetite, and appetites, if you can allow yourself to be unknown to yourself. Because the point of knowing oneself is to contain one’s anxieties about appetite. Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips interviewed by The Paris Review.
posted by shivohum (21 comments total)

I did an event with this guy at Wisconsin. He was really interesting! I had breakfast with him beforehand and within five minutes he asked me if my son was circumcised. Now that's a psychoanalyst.
posted by escabeche at 6:42 AM on June 4, 2014 [4 favorites]

It is very difficult to surprise oneself in one’s own mind. The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.

Its been a long time since I've read something this incisive and insightful.
Thanks for posting this!
posted by Chrischris at 6:48 AM on June 4, 2014 [4 favorites]

Anybody who’s got young children, or has had them, or was once a young child, will remember that children are incredibly picky about their food. They can go through periods where they will only have an orange peeled in a certain way. Or milk in a certain cup... One of the things it means is there’s something very frightening about one’s appetite. So that one is trying to contain a voraciousness in a very specific, limiting, narrowed way. It’s as though, were the child not to have the milk in that cup, it would be a catastrophe. And the child is right. It would be a catastrophe, because that specific way, that habit, contains what is felt to be a very fearful appetite. An appetite is fearful because it connects you with the world in very unpredictable ways. Winnicott says somewhere that health is much more difficult to deal with than disease. And he’s right, I think, in the sense that everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.

Even so, I wouldn't call this self-knowing.
posted by Brian B. at 7:17 AM on June 4, 2014

Fortunately I got past the quote passage here and read more. My lame, unpointed, non-snarky, party-less, not-of-the-moment, post-best-y comment is - ohh, I like this, thanks for posting. Thanks.
posted by wallstreet1929 at 7:18 AM on June 4, 2014

Very interesting remark about psychoanalysis being in better health, in his opinion, since it became 'unfashionable' and now has no glamour, no money, no public for it. I often felt in the 9 years I saw my analyst that we were the only two people in the world who gave a shit about whether it 'worked' or was interesting or worthwhile or anything, and that suited us both just fine (she also cut me a good deal on the price since nobody was beating down her door for sessions, probably all believing that Freud had been 'discredited').

I read psychoanalysis as poetry, so I don’t have to worry about whether it is true or even useful, but only whether it is haunting or moving or intriguing or amusing

A good analyst will tell you right at the start that they have no idea whether the sessions will be useful or not.
posted by colie at 7:39 AM on June 4, 2014 [4 favorites]

Have you read his books of essays? Really good reads, almost all of them
posted by C.A.S. at 8:13 AM on June 4, 2014

all believing that Freud had been 'discredited'

Freud was unwavering in insisting that it is "science", when it is clearly something else. If it's discredited, it asked for it.
posted by thelonius at 8:58 AM on June 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

Psychoanalysis is not discredited in 2014 because of what Freud might have thought it was in 1902.
posted by colie at 9:12 AM on June 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

I don’t think the project is to make people feel better. Nor is it to make people feel worse. It’s not to make them feel anything. It’s simply to allow them to see what it is they do feel. And then what redescription might change.

I think that's the best description I've ever read of the nature of talk therapy. Thanks for posting this, I really enjoyed reading it. There would be a lot less anxiety-related AskMes if people didn't feel forced by society to know themselves and were instead allowed to just be.
posted by billiebee at 9:24 AM on June 4, 2014 [3 favorites]

This might be life-changing for me. Thank you for posting.
posted by tofu_crouton at 10:41 AM on June 4, 2014 [4 favorites]

I looked at his books on Amazon, and some are hated--with terrible reviews--while others are very highly rated. It's not often I see such disparate ratings for non-political books. As a longtime agoraphobe, that word in the FPP jumped out at me...heading to the greatest used bookstore in the South later today, so I wrote down a few titles. Thanks for posting.
posted by whatgorilla at 10:48 AM on June 4, 2014

I'm really curious about Missing Out, which is quoted a few times in the interview.

The beginning of the blurb from Amazon describes it as "a transformative book about the lives we wish we had and what they can teach us about who we are".

The positive reviews for it seem to be generically positive: the premise of this book is good, reading it helped me, etc.

The negative ones say the premise is good, but the writing is "unapproachable", "incoherent" and "overly self indulgent" (a criticism he mentions in the interview). One reviewer goes as far as posting some of the offending sentences:
"What experiences are made possible by not getting it, and what getting it, whatever it is, might protect us from."
"Frustration is always, whatever else it is, a temptation scene;"

These complaints are highly ironic for a book about how to be comfortable with incoherence and 'not getting it'. I very much want to read this now.
posted by tofu_crouton at 11:08 AM on June 4, 2014 [3 favorites]

Fascinating interview. Thanks.

Analysis should do two things that are linked together. It should be about the recovery of appetite, and the need not to know yourself.

Very interesting. I'm in the midst of searching for a therapist myself, and I would agree with the latter but not the former. I suppose things might be different for addicts and people with OCD, etc., who have LOTS of appetite?

Perhaps it's taking that step after accepting your appetites without anxiety. Also, what's the different between appetite and ambition. I mean appetite, like ambition, can never be sated, i.e. you will never be full or happy "enough." So shouldn't we be trying to eliminate/reduce it?

Anyway, fascinating. I want to read more.
posted by mrgrimm at 11:22 AM on June 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

I loved this article and it gave me a lot to think about. I'll be returning to it in the future.

In the mean time, I'm going to go re-read one of my favorite poems, To a young fisherman by Jacob Israel de Haan.
posted by Strass at 11:45 AM on June 4, 2014

Can someone tell me which Phillips collection to read?
posted by Hobbacocka at 11:46 AM on June 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

They cover quite a range, his first one "On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored" isn't a bad start. "Darwin's Worms" is good, but much different and on heavier themes. "Monogamy", "On Flirtation", are good. He writes well about Freud, Winnicott, and childhood.

Maybe look at other review sources besides Amazon, he's a longtime LRB contributor and most of his work will be reviewed.
posted by C.A.S. at 12:20 PM on June 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

I read Freud/Jung as a student (though none of the others mentioned). I didn't find a way to use their ideas as a foundation for psychoanlysis and doubt I'd like the others mentioned. Yet I share a similar outlook that I attribute, rightly or wrongly, to having read philosophy (L. Wittgenstein in particular). The comments on meaning and not over thinking on self are particularly reminiscent of LW. The comments on appetite reminded me of the start of the Power section of Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti.

Which is all apropos of nothing in particular and therefore, essential to mention. Thanks for the link.
posted by bigZLiLk at 12:23 PM on June 4, 2014 [2 favorites]

Perhaps it's taking that step after accepting your appetites without anxiety. Also, what's the different between appetite and ambition. I mean appetite, like ambition, can never be sated, i.e. you will never be full or happy "enough." So shouldn't we be trying to eliminate/reduce it?

Appetite is always what is whetted, satiated for a time.
Ambition is what ultimately grows from these short term fixations.
posted by coolxcool=rad at 5:41 PM on June 4, 2014

I think it was in Toward a Psychology of Awakening by John Welwood that I read about a patient who had some kind of complaint about his sex life (or lack thereof). In talking to the psychologist, he revealed that he was slightly averse to sex out of fear. He had never allowed himself to be a sexual person, and he was afraid that he might unleash an appetite, that he might like sex too much, that there might be a deep well of wanting that he would have to incorporate into his life.

In the book, the author links it to the Buddhist concept of the "hungry ghost".

In this case, the anxiety came without even knowing if he had an appetite or not! He was just afraid of living life at all, for fear of potential appetites.

This story stuck with me in the ten years or so since I read it. I want to read more of Phillips so that I can contextualize this idea within Western psychology.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:53 AM on June 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm really curious about Missing Out, which is quoted a few times in the interview.

I was at the library yesterday, and I was like, "Oh yeah, who was that analyst interviewed in the Paris Review ..." bleep bloop bleep bloop phone magic ... "hey, it's at 155.1P541."

It's quite good so far. It requires careful reading, but it's definitely layman's language. I don't do well with high-concept nonfiction, but I can handle this one.
posted by mrgrimm at 9:39 PM on June 6, 2014

Thanks for sharing this.

"Patients come because they are suffering from something. They want that suffering to be alleviated. Ideally, in the process of doing the analysis, they might find their suffering is alleviated or modified, but also they might discover there are more important things than to alleviate one’s suffering."
posted by josephtate at 9:51 AM on June 7, 2014 [1 favorite]