Serious Play
A review of One Way and Another: New and Selected Essays by Adam Phillips. London, England: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. 395 pp.
“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”
-Donald Woods Winnicott
Reading Adam Phillips is like being on a play date with an extremely bright literary friend who is only too happy to include you in his on-going psychoanalytic musings. Phillips has written 20 books, most of which are collections of essays. Phillips's engagement, like many essayists, is with words in conversations with himself, the reader, and his subjects. Psychoanalytic theory is his primary playground within which to explore philosophic and analytic paradoxes of what it may mean to be human. And the essay is the privileged form Phillips uses to best articulate the capacities and limitations we have as analysts in engaging the unconscious.
Phillips's essays are a wondering about, and a wandering through things. To the extent that he is typically not trying to prove or promote any one thing in particular but rather is juggling several ideas at once his essays can be among the most playful of this literary form. Unlike the case report or research paper, which are designed to show causal relationships between what is done and what happens next, his writing is an opportunity to privilege possibilities. In one of the most forceful pieces among this collection of 26 essays, “Coda: Up to a Point,” we learn that Phillips writes essays, whose definition he cites from the Oxford English Dictionary as “[t]he action or process of trying or testing; an assay... An attempt, endeavor. ..” because he believes it is the literary form most conducive to questioning the idea of unitary truth and singular expertise as it relates to any subject particularly psychoanalytic investigation. “What the literary essay offers the psychoanalyst, and that the psychoanalyst has refused, is the opportunity to be neither definitive nor right, but in a psychoanalytic way” (p. 304). Phillips asserts that a good way to spoil play, and psychoanalysis, is to act, and to write, as if you are certain of what you are doing. This theme of false knowing, and his insistence on a more modest and nuanced appraisal of psychoanalytic expertise reverberates throughout Phillips's writing.1 In “The Mastermind Lectures,” Phillips states, “[w]hen psychoanalysis is being wholeheartedly valued it is not being taken seriously; because the understanding of psychoanalysis involves a continued resistance to it. To accept psychoanalysis, to believe in psychoanalysis is to miss the point. Indeed, psychoanalysis makes us wonder what we may do with ideas, propositions, sentences, if we don't have to believe or disbelieve them” (p. 237).
One Way and Another is a perfect title for this collection. In fact, it is an apt description of most of Phillips's writing in that he tends to tilt against established authority and the binary absolutism of “one way or another” by embracing multiple perspectives across diverse disciplines to further the conversation. One of many examples of this is “Talking Nonsense and Knowing When to Stop,” in which Phillips applies Valery's statement that a poem is never finished but only abandoned to psychoanalysis. One has the impression Phillips could go on, with pretty much any subject, without tiring and without ever losing either his curiosity or his eloquence.
It should not be concluded from this that Phillips eschews discipline for over-inclusiveness, or is, in any way, eclectically sampling ideas and impressions for no purpose other than to have a heady improvisational romp. The central paradox of play is that one has to take it seriously in order to pull it off. The players need be committed, with a nod and a wink, to what it is they’re up to. Likewise, his work is exacting and requires its readers to keep a keen eye on the subject while going off in different calculated directions simultaneously. The form has to be privileged if the function is to be successful. And success means that the reader, like the analysand, will be enticed to embrace, and to be more curious about, uncomfortable feelings and personal assumptions.
In Winnicott, when Phillips (1988) writes “[p]erhaps in becoming himself the psychoanalytic writer will, of necessity, have a delinquent relationship to the tradition, using it as he needs it” (p. 17), he not only is describing his and Winnicott's relationship to psychoanalytic writing, but also Phillips' relationship to the dialectic literary essay. Various thinkers over many centuries have used the essay for their own purposes of articulating, both the specific nature and the value of truth. The essential conceit, or setup, is that the logical structure of the literary essay suggests an intellectual precision analogous to a mathematical proof. The format is derived from the ancient Greek construction men and de, which is translated, “on the one hand/on the other hand,” setting up, depending on the author's aim, a contrast, a contradiction, a false or a true dichotomy. This linguistic arrangement gives a kind of gravitas to words, in the way that formal attire tends to make bodies appear more elegant. Whether truly elegant or not, one doesn't know until the content is appreciated apart from the form—if, in fact, one can make that distinction. Plato used this literary device in the dialogues to reveal the objective nature of truth, as he did in his criticism of the Sophists, who also employed this technique in numerous writings to “make the weaker argument appear the stronger.” Readers will differ, of course, on whether they classify these essays more in line with the former or the latter.
Two things have become clear in reading Phillips's essays: The first is that Phillips is more interested in literature per se than psychoanalysis, or rather is interested primarily in the literature that is psychoanalysis, and second that literary dialogic and dialectic play are his passion. This privileging of literature and aesthetics over a particular psychoanalytic orientation or collection of so-called techniques separates Phillips from almost all of his psychoanalytic colleagues. It is this play of and with ideas that the form of the literary essay champions, and that Phillips employs brilliantly to his advantage; to resist the allure of certainty for the stimulation of possibility. To keep things up in the air for as long as possible.
When Winnicott, who had a profound impact on Phillips, writes about play, he describes a transitional space wherein what is fact and what is fantasy is not defined by clearly demarcated boundaries, but by the tacit understanding that both only exist in relation to the other. Winnicott viewed the ability to play as crucial for the mother and the infant, and used this as his primary description of what psychoanalysis was all about: “it has to do with two people playing together” (Winnicott, 1971/2001, quoted in Phillips, 1988, p. 15). It is in this spirit that Phillips engages in a dialogue with the reader, and himself, on both weighty and light-hearted matters, not seeking solutions, but exploring how rich, exacting, and aesthetically pleasing language can do justice to psychoanalytic theory by making it come alive.
Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.
- Rainer Maria Rilke (2014)
Phillips is not associated with any particular psychoanalytic school, and he has no preferred psychoanalytic orientation. He does not like to be called “doctor” (he isn't one), although he is invariably mistaken for one whenever he gives a talk. He doesn't use email. He won't do public supervisions. He is, in fact, openly suspicious of psychoanalytic training and psychoanalytic institutes, and of any behavior or thinking on the part of the analyst that suggests certainty and undeserved authority in areas of unconscious goings on or in other areas in which the claim of expertise seems exaggerated. He is, one might say, fanatically anti-fanatical. A wonderful, and complex example of this is “Narcissism, for and Against,” in which he reviews the split in the psychoanalytic literature between a modest and wary appraisal of what to expect in our relationships with others (Freud, Lacan, Laplanche, Bersani), and the assumption that we should take our relationships with others for granted (Klein, Winnicott, Bowlby). Essential to this discussion is how we do, and should, regard ourselves, and what, if anything, the notion of narcissism adds to our inquiry.
When Phillips deconstructs narcissism, he reveals how categories and jargon in psychoanalysis collapse nuance into defensive posturing.
When people write about narcissism, in other words, they are persuading us about what we should value, what forms of exchange we should aspire to. They are writing about, in other words, what, ideally, we should be giving our attention to. It is worth, therefore, considering the narcissism of psychoanalysis. And, indeed, the fact that no one is more narcissistic than the enemies of narcissism. It is part of the function of narcissism—the aim of narcissism—to expose by provocation the narcissism of those with whom it comes into contact. (p. 130)
Rather than speak in terms of pathology and its opposite,2 or of specific interventions that would seem to support the privileging of certain theories, Phillips's essays focus on a continuous examination of his and his patients’ language, and the ideas they generate. How these two languages help define and guide the clinical project and foster other, more interesting and relevant questions, as opposed to promoting any ideologically privileged assumption of how one should be, constitute the central subject of Phillips's work. The world of psychoanalytic theory, and the larger world of literature of which it's a part, exist, in these essays, as primary referents for Phillips's ability to play with and deconstruct his and his patients’ narratives. Phillips's essays often are attempts to psychoanalyze psychoanalysis, taking the central contribution of Freud's work that nothing is ever what it seems and continuing shifts in perspective and interpretation are necessary to attempt to embrace the multitudes of truth that truth is heir to.
This is a book of many voices, by a man of many voices who speaks with and through all of them. Like an individual analysis superimposed on a group therapy, free and exceedingly thoughtful associations are in constant discourse, with never an end in sight and no one with an interesting point of view ever turned away.