Can Psychoanalysis Help You Get the Life You Want?
In “Monogamy,” a collection of a hundred and twenty-one aphorisms on coupling and uncoupling, the psychoanalyst and prolific writer Adam Phillips suggests that the faithful and the promiscuous aren’t so different. Both are “idealists,” he writes, “deranged by hope, in awe of reassurance, impressed by their pleasures.” The book criticizes monogamy as “a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to a minimum,” but it doesn’t exactly defend infidelity. Phillips’s real target may be monotony, the offspring of rote rule-following. “We take monogamy for granted,” he writes, and “treat it as the norm,” sleepwalking into a future without considering whether it actually satisfies us. Ironically, Phillips’s strongest defense of sexual exclusivity is that a steadfast union might offer the same turnabouts and dramas, the same incandescences and crashing disappointments, that you’d normally pursue via cheating. “Perhaps we value monogamy because it lets us have it both ways,” he writes—novelty and continuity, enchantment and disillusion, the lives we live and those we merely visit in our dreams.
What do we want from the lives that we secretly imagine for ourselves? “A difficult mixture of the all too familiar and the experimental, the mostly reassuring and the partly disinhibited,” Phillips contends in “The Life You Want” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), his latest book. When we were children, he continues, our parents recognized some parts of us and not others (athleticism but not musicality, for instance, or cheerfulness but not guile); now we go around both upholding and rebelling against those received regimes. We alternately display and downplay our encouraged aspects, hide and flaunt our uncountenanced ones. “Haunted by the versions of ourselves” that remain unembodied, Phillips writes, we wish to be who we are and also who we aren’t, splitting the difference even in fantasy.
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Admen and bad romance novelists would like us to think that wanting is straightforward—indivisible, intuitive, and perhaps best remedied by credit card. For Phillips, however, wanting isn’t so simple; it has byways and switchbacks, weight and depth. What if we want something forbidden? What if the objects of our longing are socially acceptable but undermine who we’d like to be? What if we try to attain our aims and fail? What if we succeed and are disappointed, or the intensity of our delectation causes us to lose ourselves? And then, Phillips warns, there is the scandalous origin of our wanting: “our helplessness, our abjection . . . and our dependence.” We cannot satisfy ourselves; we must make demands on others; worse, others make demands on us. Interacting with one’s peers “is never exactly what one was hoping for,” Phillips observes wryly in “Missing Out,” a book from 2012 “in praise of the unlived life.” Socializing involves no fewer than “three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of the fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized satisfaction.” And that, he adds, is when everything goes well.
Yet “it is only in states of frustration that we can begin to imagine—to elaborate, to envision—our desire,” Phillips writes. He’s articulating the traditional Freudian account of fantasy guiding us toward our best-case scenario: the “ordinary unhappiness” of reality, or what Phillips calls “the possibility of a more realistic satisfaction.” But one also feels his work pulling in a less orthodox direction, toward the pleasure of longing itself. For Freud, wishful thinking was an abandonment of reality. For Phillips, it’s an information source, one we jettison too quickly in our quest to be cured. “The Life You Want” finds Phillips chafing at his field’s prescriptiveness and dismayed by our inclination to submit to other people’s preëmptive conclusions about what we want. “Old-fashioned psychoanalysis always had a known destination,” he observes. There’s a risk that the patient gets up from the couch having discovered not her druthers but what Melanie Klein or Jacques Lacan or Sigmund Freud thought her druthers should be. “Describing the life we want,” Phillips cautions, “can sometimes be the most compliant—i.e., defensive—thing we ever do.”
Phillips is a figure for our therapy-soaked era, even if, for him, therapy feeds into and enables life, whereas we often seem to view life as feeding into and enabling therapy. He’s spent decades translating specialized concepts for general audiences—demystifying transference and projection, peeking under the hood of everyday occupations such as tickling and being bored, drawing on classic works of literature to illustrate the relevance of his field to ordinary experience. A shaman of the psychoanalytic Slate pitch, he often adopts an impish persona, issuing counterintuitive pronouncements about the benefits of quitting, pessimism, or shame. He once told The Paris Review that his adolescent study of English literature prepared him “to ironize the ambitions of grand theory.” Elsewhere, he has remarked with an unmistakable air of indulgence on how much of human endeavor—from art and prayer to political activity—is explicable as a form of attention-seeking.
In his published writing, which extends to more than twenty books, Phillips shows a love of mischief and tomfoolery. His wordplay is sporadically self-delighted; his pose of guileless receptivity caused Joan Acocella to compare him, in this magazine, to a child wondering what would happen if he pushed a pencil up his nose. He believes that we are incorrigibly self-defeating, that we constantly obstruct our own knowledge because we fear being in a position to sate our wayward desires. Hence, perhaps, the contrarianism, a commitment to reversing whatever expectation the reader might be imagined to hold, in an attempt to disarm and deprogram, possibly even cure her.
Phillips is a Freudian, but a selective and partial one, preferring to emphasize his predecessor’s sensitive, more literary aspects. The Austrian doctor was interested “in sentences, in the fact that language is evocative as well as informative,” Phillips told an interviewer, after he was tapped to edit a volume of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Freud. In “Becoming Freud,” a slender, circumlocutory biography, Phillips conjures a “champion” for patients, “someone who, like a good parent, or a good art critic, could appreciate what they were up to.”
He can be flippant about psychoanalysis, in one essay describing the analyst’s interpretation of the analysand as a “sophisticated form of interruption” undertaken to make the analyst feel “important.” In “Irreverence,” an essay from the new book, he depicts the titular concept as a way of testing authority (whether your target can withstand such shot-taking) and also a love test (whether your target will want to remain on reasonably good terms with you). If “the irreverent are wholly dependent on those they mock,” he writes, irreverence is also, potentially, “a sign of growing up.”
By that standard, the most recent work, animated by the question of what therapy should be and how it might help you get the life you want, is pretty mature. With nose-thumbing insouciance, Phillips recruits the pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty—or an imagined version of him—to vocalize his discontent with the strictures of his discipline. Rorty used the phrase “God terms” for ideas, such as human nature or objective reality, that alienate us from our agency by appealing to a higher truth. Phillips, a Londoner, takes him as a stand-in for American optimism about the power of positive thinking. “The Life You Want” sets out to shape Freud into a more amenable ancestor, someone better suited to Phillips’s purposes. It’s what Rorty would call a creative “redescription” of the goals of psychoanalysis, redescription being the quintessential pragmatic activity, a flexible trying out of different stories or perspectives until you find one that works for you. As Phillips freely admits, this redescription—and perhaps redescription in general—might be naïvely wishful, not a bending of reality but a flight from it.
Freud’s biggest contribution to psychoanalytic thought might be his portrait of a persecutory, enigmatic, and disturbing unconscious. For Rorty, the Freudian id is another God term, a bad-faith bid to “delegate and outsource our purposes and our imagination and our intelligence to something beyond ourselves,” as Phillips puts it. Rorty, he writes, prefers to envision the unconscious as a team of partners or interlocutors, all of them “really useful, helpful and informed.” The prospect delights Phillips, but he’s skeptical: Does pragmatism’s redescription merely baffle our efforts to understand and transform our darker impulses? It’s when we refuse to face what we really want, he worries, that we grow pliant and manipulable, vulnerable to the lure of instant gratification and denied the chance to make something tonic out of our frustration.
Freud theorized that our lives are a project of tempering and downgrading desire, an ongoing compromise between fantasy and reality. By contrast, Phillips writes that the Rortian seeks “the most inclusive conversation possible” with our unconscious selves, one that “will further and proliferate our purposes and increase our sense of autonomy.” Strikingly, we should try to “proliferate” our purposes, not just advance them. If the father of talk therapy aimed to mitigate our wanting’s intensity, Rorty sought to intervene in its monomania. Phillips lays this out in “Too Bad, or On Seeing the Worst,” a chapter about an essay, by the Romanian author Emil Cioran, speculating that our elemental self, our “daimon,” might never have wanted to have been born in the first place. A Freudian might ask, lugubriously, how we might endure such pain. Phillips seizes the opportunity to wonder what we might gain from expressing a permanently unattainable desire. (“Having been born,” he writes, “is the one problem we can never solve.”) Perhaps, he offers, a loosening is possible—some breathing room, some permission to look around at what else might appeal. Via Rorty, he invites us to consider that we can desire many things and to live in a way that tests this hypothesis, releasing ourselves from the stranglehold of our single-minded obsessions.
“We have ourselves put the authorities deep down inside us,” Phillips writes in “The Life You Want.” In “Against Self-Criticism,” a 2015 essay for the London Review of Books, he picks a fight with the Freudian superego, whose ceaseless opprobrium, he claims, objectifies the rest of the psyche, reducing it to a single blameworthy victim. In fact, he writes, there is more to our inner ensemble than convict and executioner, or prisoner and despot. Each of us contains a “repressed repertoire” of “fragmentary alternative selves,” Phillips proposes. “Where judgment is, there conversation should be. Where there is dogma there is an uncompleted experiment.” Instead of letting your superego browbeat the other dramatis personae into submission, Phillips intimates, you should emulate a podcast host, moderating a respectful discussion among your mental parts.
His ideal of the psyche, in which all self-fragments get a hearing, can be extrapolated onto a society whose members are free to debate one another as they decide their paths forward. In his book “Equals,” he writes that “being listened to can enable one to bear—and even to enjoy—listening to oneself and others; which democracy itself depends on.” Psychoanalysis is misnamed as a “talking cure,” he submits. Really, it is a “listening cure.” Unsurprisingly, one of the political forms he’s most interested in is the relationship between analyst and analysand.
Self-criticism, Phillips writes in his L.R.B. essay, is “our most unpleasant—our most sadomasochistic—way of loving ourselves,” an attempt to win over the authorities when we fear we can’t otherwise live up to their expectations. In his telling, the patient often wants to comply with the heroic, omniscient analyst in order to avoid thinking for herself; the analyst must guard against this dynamic and against his own desire to dominate the patient. For Phillips, analysis is meant to help us “with our idealizations, with our craving for authority, our wish to idolize and be controlled.” The threat is that the analyst instead comes to resemble the superego, a “boring and vicious soliloquist with an audience of one.”
In “The Life You Want,” Phillips’s anti-authoritarian tendencies motivate him to rescue the idea of resistance, which in psychoanalysis refers to the conscious and unconscious strategies that patients use to impede the therapeutic process. “Resistance,” the volume’s culminating essay, notes that the analysand may have healthy reasons for evading her desires—she may be hoping to preserve a cherished value, for example—and that resistance can prolong and thus enrich the work of the cure.
This last argument enacts a familiar rhetorical move. Phillips often takes something apparently undesirable, such as guilt, and reframes it as a prelude or a precondition, a way station in a necessary developmental process. (Recall how he creatively redescribed frustration as the midwife to “realistic satisfaction.”) But his defense of resistance ultimately settles into a different shape and leaves him opposing the priorities of traditional psychotherapy. Phillips does not, finally, claim that recalcitrance on the couch crystallizes a patient’s understanding, thereby reducing her suffering. Resistance may not reduce her suffering at all. Rather, it demonstrates that she will proceed on her own terms and in her own time. Resistance “is integral to our singularity,” Phillips writes; the opposite of “defeatedness,” it’s a step toward “following one’s inclination and curiosity and refusing to be intimidated.” Here, departing from Freud, he casts freedom as more curative than the truth.
What do we need psychoanalysis for, then? For Phillips, the answer comes back to the intricate turnings and archeological layers of desire. Rorty believes “that we are good at knowing what we want,” Phillips writes, a contention that erases our ambivalence and underestimates our “need for safety.” Moreover, he claims, the Rortian vision of desire is informed by a shallow and too innocent view of the unconscious. Insensible to our Stygian instincts, pragmatism is always threatening to shade into permissiveness, a “kind of capricious, impulsive egotism.” It’s true that, without Rorty, Freud can appear “omniscient and impoverishing.” But without Freud, Phillips suggests, Rorty can’t surface the sunken richness of our wanting, its destructiveness, its haunting strangeness. Pragmatism fails to listen to desire. As a result, an essential texture of life escapes its grasp.
Like monogamy and infidelity, or our lived and unlived lives, psychoanalysis and pragmatism need each other. The plenitude, variety, and pluralism that are the highest values of liberal democracy require the force and insight of the psychoanalytic tradition, and vice versa. It’s unclear, though, that any of these pairs can be fully reconciled. The best case, Phillips implies, might be a conversation—not the idealized sort that results in unanimity or even acceptance, but a realistic one that grants the participants their full difficulty and irrationality and acknowledges that alignment might remain out of reach.
Still, the fantasy of a more perfect union persists. In one chapter of “The Life You Want,” Phillips describes the Freudian dream work. During the day, he explains, “we unconsciously pick things out that will be used in the making of our night’s dream.” This idea, that our unconscious gathers material during the day to dream with at night, suggests that what Rorty wants for us—to proliferate our purposes, to look around at what else we might want—is, in Phillips’s reading of Freud, already ours. By subjecting our inner worlds to such devoted scrutiny, the author of “The Interpretation of Dreams” emphasizes, in Phillips’s words, “the sheer scale of our interests,” the possible lives we formulate even when we don’t realize we’re doing so. “The Life You Want” is itself a sort of dream work, which synthesizes opposing elements into a poetic, if wishful, whole. ♦