Psychoanalysis, the so-called "talking cure", has been receiving a bad press of late, even in these pages. For some critics it is a genuine promise cruelly broken, for others, and they are increasingly numerous, it is an elaborate hoax played upon gullible, well-heeled members of the unhappy middle classes by a guild of unscrupulous and self-seeking charlatans led by the daddy of them all, the one whom Vladimir Nabokov used to like to call "the Viennese quack", Sigmund Freud. What is seen as the fad of fashionably unhappy people is of course an easy target. For example, it was never quite clear, certainly not before the Soon-Yi scandal, whether we were expected to take seriously Woody Allen's 14 years - was it? - of bi-weekly therapy sessions, or if it was not secretly a means for him to gather comic material. There is also the question of whether people who submit themselves to psychoanalysis are sick, or just discontent; whether they are adults who cannot cope with life in the big world, or spoilt children who never grew up. Either way, shouldn't they just buck up and get on with things, as the rest of us do?
Adam Phillips is the former Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, and the author of a series of penetrating, provocative, highly polished and wonderfully entertaining books, including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, On Flirtation, The Beast in the Nursery, and Darwin's Worms. As the critic Frank Kermode has said of him, "Phillips has virtually invented the essay as a suitable form for penetrating psychoanalytic enquiry". He is a marvellous writer, and, what is almost as rare these days, a marvellous reader, too; the epigraphs sprinkled through Promises, Promises, his latest essay collection, are drawn from sources that range from John Updike to Santayana, from Walter Benjamin to J.B. Priestley; he must be a great underliner.
One of Phillips's main strengths is that he scrupulously avoids displaying how strong he is. His main mode is a kind of pensive playfulness. He is never earnest, yet always serious, even at his wittiest. This typically eclectic collection deals with such topics as the links and disjunctions between poetry and psychoanalysis, the psychic effects of the London Blitz - apparently the opposite of what you might think - psychoanalysis as translation, eating disorders, the poetry of Housman and J.H Prynne and Frederick Seidel and Hart Crane, with narcissism, with cloning, with mourning, with jokes, and much more. He does a service to his embattled profession not by haranguing or whining, but by showing how subtle and various and interesting a subject psychoanalysis can be, in the right hands, in the right minds.
In his preface Phillips states his intentions clearly: "The version of psychoanalysis that I want to promote . . . is more committed to happiness and inspiration (and the miscellaneous) than to self-knowledge, rigorous thinking, or the Depths of Being." He also makes an important distinction when he declares that the kind of psychoanalysis he favours will value "truthfulness but not truth", truth being one of those big words that gave Stephen Dedalus, and still give the rest of us, so much trouble. Phillips is aware that psychoanalysis and literature, though they share some important traits, are distinct from each other - "there are two things, psychoanalysis and literature, and psychoanalysis is both of them and literature is not" - yet he is interested in all kinds of imaginative writing, and derives as much stimulation and instruction from novels and poetry and criticism and biography as he does from the clinical works of Freud, or Melanie Klein, or David Winnicott, or Jacques Lacan. He does not share in Freud's obsessive pursuit of scientific rigour, and hence academic respectability, nor does he seek to convince us that his discipline holds a special position among the social sciences: "psychoanalysis has gone from presenting itself as a supreme fiction - or a privileged method of interpretation - to being itself one fiction, one method among many others." Phillips's psychoanalysis is not the high consistory so jealously promoted by Freud and his followers.
Psychoanalysis, at its best, should be a profession of popularizers of interesting ideas about the difficulties and exhilarations of living. And, as a so-called treatment, it should be more about living day-to-day as oneself than about being initiated into a sophisticated or prestigious theoretical system. Listening to what people say, which is more or less what psychoanalysis consists of, should be above all a reminder of fellow feeling.
One of the effects of Phillips's work is to show us, as Freud at his best and most humane showed us, how intricate and multifarious, how sly and playful and mischievously inventive, the human psyche is. In a wonderful little essay on cloning, "Sameness Is All", he writes of an eight-year-old girl, referred to him for therapy because she had a phobia against school - what eight-year-old hasn't? - who informed him that when she grew up she was "going to do clothing". Making clothes for people, he asked? "No, no," the little girl says, "clothing . . . you know, when you make everyone wear the same uniform, like the headmistress does . . . we learned about it in biology." When you do "clothing", her teacher had told the class, you don't need a mummy and daddy, you just need a scientist, a man . . . " Thus, Phillips observes, she had neatly solved the mystery, and the problem, of parental sexuality, and partly assuaged the pain of the loss of uniqueness which she had suffered with the recent birth of her baby sister. Through "clothing", "no one's special but everyone's safe," she told the therapist. For the little girl, says Phillips,
"clothing" was a uniformity imposed by powerful individuals, either the female headmistress or the male scientist. And . . . if specialness or uniqueness was what was lost at the birth of a sibling then "clothing" was the last punitive act in the drama, a drama that actually begins with the parents' sexuality. You lose your place in the family when your sister arrives; then you begin to experience your school uniform as the ultimate proof of your loss of individuality. She wanted to "do clothing" perhaps because then she would at least be the active agent not the passive victim . . .
In this instance of what Harold Bloom approvingly calls "strong misreading", and the therapist's strong reading, one hardly knows which to admire more, Phillips's powers of insight and interpretation, or the little girl's powers of invention. What a strange and colourful country is the human imagination.
One of the finest, most thought-provoking and, indeed, most alarming pieces here is "Bombs Away", about the Blitz, and more specifically "about what British psychoanalysts - especially the increasingly important child analysts - used the war, wittingly or unwittingly, to articulate about the child's putative nature", or, more poetically, "how the Blitz got into the poem that is psychoanalysis". Briefly - and in these matters brevity is often betrayal - the conclusion most psychoanalysts came to is summed up in a quotation from Ernest Jones, Freud's collaborator and translator - some would say traducer - who remarked "how very much easier it is for the human mind to tolerate external danger than internal dangers", a finding that seemed proven by the decrease in suicides and mental illness in London during the war years. (Incidentally, or perhaps not incidentally, there were similar marked decreases in Northern Ireland in the early years of the Troubles.) Does it follow, Phillips asks, that Jones - indeed, do psychoanalysts - think that war is a good and necessary thing?
Or rather, does war between nations, or between opposing factions in psychoanalytic societies, function as a cure for the intolerable war going on all the time inside the individual? Being a person is virtually or potentially intolerable unless you are lucky enough to live in a time of war. Or putting it the other way round, what, from a psychoanalytical point of view, is peace?
Phillips's answers, or essays at answers - he is never dogmatic, either - to these profound and frightening questions make for a fascinating exercise in straight thinking about crooked issues. Phillips is a master of the aside, and nowhere more so than in this piece, as when, for instance, he parenthetically wonders if "the first couple that the child experiences - the child's first primal scene - is the mother's internal relationship to the enemy, the unacceptable within herself".
It is impossible to exaggerate the richness and diversity of this collection. In a depressingly anti-intellectual age, when good writing, and even literacy itself, is dismissed as elitist and discriminatory - when did discrimination, which is the critic's first duty, become a pejorative term? - we should treasure a writer as relaxed, accommodating and yet uncompromising as Adam Phillips. What he says of the inexplicably under-rated Leslie Farber might equally well be said of Phillips himself, that he "is one of the very few writers after Freud who can make us feel that to be serious about psychotherapy - which . . . means to write always lucid, pointedly amused essays - is to be serious about the things that seem to matter most".
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times