Freud As Novelist

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday September 16, 2006

Reviewed by Richard King, Richard King is a West Australian reviewer and writer.

Treating psychoanalysis as a branch of literature produces some spectacular results.

Side Effects

By Adam Phillips

Hamish Hamilton, 318pp, $49.95

BUYING A BOOK by Adam Phillips can be as bewildering an experience as reading one. Put at its crudest (as Phillips would say, before setting down some brain-shattering aphorism), it is a question of where in the hell to look: in the psychology section? In philosophy? In literary criticism? It is a testament to the complexity of Phillips's writing that it remains resistant to classification.

"Do you have any Adam Phillips?" I asked my local second-hand bookseller, who strode off confidently in the direction of Politics. It turned out she thought I meant Phillip Adams. Where Phillips goes, confusion reigns.

Literature and psychoanalysis have always been his twin fixations and this new collection of lectures and essays explores the relationship between the two. Even its understated title is explained by way of a literary anecdote. Phillips quotes from John Haffenden's biography of the poet and critic William Empson. "[Empson] would not forget the secrets of a happy childhood: one day, for instance, to the great glee of a friend's son, he stood on his hands and said the boy could have anything that fell out of his pockets."

This, Phillips writes, is like psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis can also be a way of not forgetting one's happy childhood and as a therapy works by attending to our "side effects" - to what falls out of our mental pockets in the process of free association.

For Phillips, literature and psychoanalysis exist in a com-plementary relationship. Literature gives us a window onto the unconscious and the study of the unconscious gives us literature. The latter point is particularly important for it is Phillips's mission to rescue Freud from the doctrinaire scientism of academe and create instead a psychoanalysis that is more imaginatively enabling than it is "true". Psychoanalysis, he says at one point, is itself a "regulative fiction"; it helps us to tell stories about our inner lives.

The many and various points of contact between the literary and the psychoanalytical produce some spectacularly intellectual fireworks. At one point, for example, Phillips applies the idea that a poem is never finished (a poem, said Paul Valery, is only ever abandoned) to the notion of "endings" in psychoanalysis, with a view to complicating the concept of "cure".

Elsewhere he notes how the notion of trauma has come to inform contemporary biography, allowing a predominantly secular society to go on believing in a defining agency.

Then there is his wonderful lecture (the first of two) "On Expectation". Comparing Dickens's Great Expectations with Freud's analysis of sexual development, Phillips suggests that what we think of as our "first impressions" are in fact revealing of our need to create coherent selves. "If you want to see the fragility of the ego, Freud says look at the way the child deals with his first impression of the difference between the sexes.

"If you want to see just how much of an artefact character or identity is, Dickens says look at what Pip does with his first impressions of his own name. Faced with these first impressions the child replaces reality with his own invention By calling himself Pip, Pip can go on being the seed of himself."

Phillips is particularly exercised by the nature of the creative process and how it relates to psychoanalysis. In "On Not Making It Up", he attempts to delineate "the varieties of creative experience" and suggests that writers broadly divide into Prometheans (or modellers) and midwives (or carvers) - into those who impose themselves on reality and those who attempt to absent themselves from it. Since the narration of one's personal history is fundamental to psychoanalysis, we must ask ourselves the following question: is the "patient" a Promethean or a midwife? The answer, Phillips writes, is that he is both. The mind is "a battle between two artists". "The ego is a modeller, the part of ourselves that imposes form and meaning on our lives. But the past - our desire, and our memory that is of desire - insists, like a carver, on liberating its own forms."

At the level of the individual sentence, Phillips is a Promethean through and through. Locally, his thought has incredible clarity. When it comes to the bigger picture, however, Phillips is less inclined to closure. At times, this can be irritating but it is futile to wish it any other way. To resist the cliche and the second-hand thought is Phillips's modus operandi and goes to the heart of his view of the world. Phillips brings a kind of "negative thinking" to the a priori and the taken-for-granted. Like Empson, he looks at the world upside down and the reader must be satisfied with what falls from his pockets.