Interview transcript – Professor Adam Phillips, University of York

Interview transcript – Professor Adam Phillips
University of York
4th March 2009

Jennifer O’Mahony (JO) interviews Adam Phillips (AP)

JO: Can I have some basic biographical information, I found some but if you could just map out your career for me, (AP: As an adult? Not from birth? Or do you want the whole lot?) as an adult, since graduating, because I know what you did at university.

AP: I read English at university, then at that stage I got in to do a child psychotherapy training, but because I was very young they said go away and grow up, so I did a year’s research at York, and I came to York because my then girlfriend was here Hugh Haughton was one of my best friends and I was interested in doing the research.

I had no plan to do a PhD, but I wanted to use that year as pleasurably as possible so I came here. Then after a year we moved back to London and I did a three, or was it a four year, a four year child psychoanalytic training and I did that basically at the Middlesex Hospital department of Child Psychiatry where I had a training post, and I had seminars at the Hampstead Clinic and the Tavistock Clinic which meant I had a genuinely eclectic psychoanalytic training.

The training involved being in analysis four times a week for four years, then I had supervision, then I saw all those children aged nought to 16 and after that when I qualified I worked in Guy’s Hospital, in the Department of Child Psychiatry, in a school for what was then called maladjusted children called Beremond (sp?).

I worked in Camberwell Child Guidance Clinic. I worked in Charing Cross hospital Department of Child Psychiatry. I did that for 17 years, that was the health service child psychotherapy work, and then I went into private practice where I am now, and then I just saw adults. So I see adults four times a week and I write one day a week. That’s my professional life.

JO: OK, So you’ve never actually been an academic of English literature?

AP: No.

JO: Because obviously I know you’ve done things for editions of John Clare…

AP: Yes, but I’ve never actually taught literature in a university, apart from now.

JO: So would you consider doing that in the future?

AP: Not full time. I love doing this, (JO: yes)… sort of doing in briefly. I don’t want to be an academic and I didn’t want to be an academic, partly because I really love reading and I wanted it to be a private pleasure, I didn’t want to have to talk about it.

JO: OK. Well that almost answers my second question. You said you practise psychoanalysis four days a week, and write one day a week. Why do you structure your week in this way, I like that you write on Wednesdays, in the middle of the week. Is there a particular reason for that? Do you consider one or the other ‘work’?

AP: Well, yes, I consider psychoanalysis to be work (JO: OK) as in I find it difficult. I love doing it, but it’s difficult. Writing I find incredibly easy, um, which is why I’ve written so many books in such a short, in such a short [    ] writing time. I really don’t know, it’s a very interesting question, I don’t know why because obviously it looks like, and it is, the middle of the week, um, maybe it is for that reason.

It originally was Saturdays. Before I had children it was Saturdays (JO: right) for obvious reasons, now I’ve got children I don’t want to spend weekends working so it’s the middle of the week. It works for me having a very short amount of time to write. It wouldn’t, you know, it’s not that if I had more time my writing would be better or I would do more of it. I think it really works just that day.

JO: Yes it’s intense (AP: yes). I find that, I like to compress things into blocks. OK, um, one thing I’ve notice in everything I’ve read, well not everything, nearly everything that I’ve read of yours is that you love the phrase “Or, to put it another way” – You always use it. Is all your writing about putting things differently? Is this what psychoanalysis is?

AP: Yes. That’s exactly right. It is what psychoanalysis is. It’s a continual process of redescription. So, it’s not that you go on saying the same thing in different ways, it’s that every time you think you’ve said the same thing a different way it’s different. So it’s that way round but I think that is exactly what psychoanalysis is.

JO: OK. And obviously undergoing training to be a psychoanalyst you have to have analysis, I think you said four times a week? Do you think that everyone should undergo analysis at some point in their lives?

AP: No

JO: No

AP: No, I really think psychoanalysis is only for the people who like it and want it. I don’t think it’s a kind of universal panacea, a universal treatment, and I think lots of people don’t like it, and it only works for some of the people some of the time. But, when it does work it is a wonderful thing. But it isn’t for everybody.

JO: And how do you know if you want it?

AP: Well I think the only way you can know is… um… well I think there are two bits. One is: when one is troubled by something, one has, one has inherited ways of dealing with it. In other words one has a relationship to help, which comes from childhood, right?
So presumably in the first instance, if, depending on what kind of family you come from etcetera, if you’re troubled by something you will a) hope it’ll pass b) talk to your best friend c) talk to your mother, your sister, whatever. You might then try aromatherapy, you might take up knitting, you know, etc? (JO: yep) You’ve got to think of it for most people as a last resort. So, everything else has failed, so they think, why not?

JO: OK

AP: And there are people who know right from the beginning that they want to talk and that they believe in talking. And those people will go straight for it. Because they’ll know something about the power of being listened to. Because that’s what works in psychoanalysis, being listened to.

JO: Freud didn’t undergo analysis. Is this where the flaws in his work lie, if you consider there to be any, which I assume you do? (AP: yes) (JO laughs) yep. And why must psychoanalysts undergo analysis?

AP: Yes, it is an interesting question. I mean I don’t think, I think Freud did pretty well, considering (JO laughs). So I don’t think… and I think there are lots of ways of being analysed, unofficially, that’s to say he had conversations with people throughout his life that were not analysis, but they were close, I think.

The other thing is… um… I think analysts should be analysed because it’s the only way you can find out what it’s like; it’s the only way you can learn how to do it, by apprenticeship, and you have to have the experience and that means partly the experience of both the incredible pleasure and suffering of beginning to get a sense of the complexity of one’s own mind, feelings and so on, and you have to have a tolerance for that, in fact you have to have a positive interest in it to be able to bear the full range of your feelings.

And… you have to have the experience of both speaking as freely as you can and being listened to over a long period of time. It’s the only way to learn it I think (JO: OK.. um (begins to ask new question)) Other than studying English literature (JO laughs) which is the other best way.

JO: Well, I mean as you say they are in some ways very similar… I’ll just move on, this is something I said to you in one of the letters I sent you. You say that in ‘On Desire’ in Side Effects that perverted people know what they want, so how would this affect what they read, if psychoanalysis is similar to reading and psychoanalysis is a substitute for sex… if you follow the logic.

AP: I do… um… No that’s a very good question. I think that it’s like sex in that you have a sense of what you want to read, just as you may know who you desire (JO: yes), but, in the process of reading that chosen book if the experience is real you’ll be surprised. In other words you’ll get something unanticipated out of it.

So I might think I want to read this novel by John Banville with quite a strong sense of what I might get from it, of what the experience might be like, and what the writing will be like. If you’re having a real reading, something will be disconcerted. You’ll be certainly surprised and possibly amazed at what you didn’t anticipate. So there’ll be a real exchange; something will come to you from outside… and that, it’s really that exchange, it’s about how much you can bear the idea of having something outside you that you need and want that you can have an exchange with.

JO: OK

AP: Do you see what I mean?

JO: Yes, I do, I do. Do you feel that, I mean this is a criticism that has been levelled at you, that you write about… um… not that you just write about other people but that you almost take yourself out of your work, so do you feel that your work has an overarching theory? Is there a ‘Phillips approach’ or is it simply a way of reading, or how would you classify your work in this way? Or would you?

AP: You can see why it’s hard to answer that, because it’s me.

JO: Yes (laughs)

AP: And I can’t see myself, but I think it’s much more a style of writing, I haven’t got a theory, um I haven’t got a new way, and I don’t think there should be a new way. I think it’s about producing new sentences, new ways of writing. I don’t mean I set out to produce a new way because I didn’t, I just wrote, and that’s how it’s turned out. Um… and I do think, I think my writing style is distinctive but I can’t tell you what’s distinctive about it because I just do it, so in a way I’m dependent on other people to tell me or to give me their impressions.

And I really think that… there’s in one tradition of psychoanalysis which is broadly speaking scientific the idea is to have a new theory about…people (JO: noises of agreement) and Lacan, Winnicot and Klein are all people who’ve added theories. All I want to do is add sentences… um… because I think theory is overrated and I think what happens is theories become fetishes to deal with people’s anxieties.

Because the thing about theory of course is it gets repeated. Well Freud says when things get repeated it’s because they’re traumatic and you can’t get over them. Now anybody who comes up with a new theory that sticks it’ll be repeated repeated repeated repeated. So all Kleinians quote Klein all the time, all psychoanalysts quote Freud. Well why do they repeat themselves?

JO: Because it’s a… it’s like a fetish. It satisfies itself and then you don’t have to think about it anymore.

AP: Exactly, yes, it forecloses something. So I think there should be less theory in psychoanalysis, and more just interesting sentences, of all sorts, not only mine.

JO: In Monogamy, you say that, and I’m paraphrasing, you may want to correct me, you say that the question of fidelity is the only one that we really have to contend with in modern society. Have we learnt to live without the need… if that’s the case, and I’m not sure that it is, but have we learnt to live without the need for a rigid self?

AP: I think some people have, it’s a bit, it’s to do with class, this, partly, and education, I think some people have, but I think there are some things that nobody can get round, and I think the main thing no one can get round is sexual jealousy. No one can get around being dependent on other people and no one can get round sexual jealousy. So whether we’ve got selves or not, what comes out in the wash is these two experiences and I think those are intractable.

JO: OK, but as you say, that’s going along class lines, so for example for some people in society God is still a question.

AP: Yes

JO: For you it’s obviously not.

AP: And for some people survival is still a question, so people are going to have different preoccupations but I think broadly speaking many middle class people are very preoccupied for all sorts of reasons with whether they are able to be faithful to the people they love and like. And I don’t mean only sexual fidelity, but loyalty among friends, say, that those preoccupations around close relations are very powerful.

JO: And do you think that’s because of an absence of, of God or of needing to have a moral structure for any reasons of guilt. If that’s taken away, what’s left?

AP: Yes, I think all those things. I think what a certain group of us have been left with are personal relationships, that’s basically it.

JO: OK. I just wanted to talk on more of a stylistic point about Freud. What do you think of the self-consciousness that he sometimes exhibits, and I was reading something the other day by Derrida, and he was kind of attacking him for it. When Freud says things like, “I fear what I am writing is self-evident”, so he, he’s like acknowledging this, but at the same time is he… almost giving himself licence then to completely reinvent what he’s saying and say actually you may think this is obvious but in fact, I’m Freud, I know it’s not.

AP: Yes, yes I think there are lots of things going on. I mean on the one hand it’s clearly rhetorical. It’s a way of both reassuring the audience, and reassuring himself. I think it’s based on a variety of a liberal conversation. I, Freud, am going to write what I think, you probably already know this, or you may disagree, and now we’ll carry on. I mean I think it works in that kind of conversational way so if you like he’s got the reader in mind.

The other thing I think is quite important that is in some ways underestimated is that Freud was very freaked out by what he was writing. It’s much more… people seem to think he’s an incredibly authoritative, authoritarian person, which may or may not be true, but he’s also an incredibly freaked out person because actually what he’s come up with is very, very disturbing.

He’s a sort of ordinary Jewish man with a family (JO: laughs), the most ordinary man in the world who has started having these thoughts about things, and it’s really, really disturbing him. So he needs a style that is really, really composed and contained, and relatively measured. (JO: yes) Because what he’s writing about is really mad.

JO: No, I agree.

AP: You can’t underestimate that; it really is mad this stuff and it’s really wild, in a way that is only vaguely dawning on people now, I think.

JO: Well I mean when I read On Sexuality for the first time even I felt like some kind of… something quite morbid to be doing, and I wasn’t quite sure why… er, but anyway (AP: yes) maybe it’s just more about me – said vv quickly

JO: Just to move on now to Equals, I used it in one of my essays I wrote about oppression in Egyptian, modern Arabic fiction, so I just wanted to ask you, if psychoanalysis makes us in your words “able to more than bear conflict and to be able to see and enjoy the value of differing voices and alternative positions” – could, just taking psychoanalysis out of the theoretical box, could governments benefit from psychoanalysis as a matter of course? If Stalin or Pol Pot had undergone analysis would they be less likely to do the things that they did?

AP: Well, I think that… they wouldn’t have wanted it.

JO: But if they’d been forced to… (laughs) You can’t do that can you?

AP: No, but I think that psychoanalysts have been very grandiose about what psychoanalysis is capable of doing. I mean I can remember for example when I was training, one of my supervisors said to me if only there was more child psychotherapy in Ireland, there wouldn’t be a political problem. (JO: laughs) Now this is obviously mad, and from the outside of course we think things like if only Hitler, Stalin or whatever had had a good therapist, or indeed a good mother (JO: laughs), they’d be much nicer people and these terrible things wouldn’t have happened. Well I think that’s very, very unlikely.

I do think it would be good to be educated to value conflict, and to distrust violence. I think that is a real possibility. So that anything that makes us want to resolve a conflict, like becoming a fundamentalist, say, anything that abolishes the idea that there are always at least two points of view is going to end up as violence, it seems to me.

And an awful lot of violence is the attempt to resolve an unbearable conflict and I think it would be very good for us all to be brought up, this is never going to happen, or at least to be educated if not brought up to understand the way in which conflict is pleasurable and morally better than the resolution of conflict. So that’s staying in conflict and not resolving it.

JO: In ‘Promises, Promises’ [NB. essay not book] you say: “we are reading for interpretation, or for transformation. In reading, I would say that actually this experience is temporary, it’s in the event of it happening, whereas in psychoanalysis it’s more than that. Do you agree?

AP: I’m not sure. I think that um… I know what you mean about the temporary thing in reading but I think it’s also possible that it’s actually unpredictable. You could read a book or either of us could read a poem now or whatever and be powerfully affected by it, and in three minutes time we could forget about it. But actually in a way what [I was hoping I was] saying is that the way one cooks things or metabolises things or digests them is very unpredictable. So that I could read this poem now and in twenty years time I could be walking down a street in Bristol and it might occur to me. Or something related to it could attach itself to other things. It’s as though all one’s experience is potential experience. You never know where it’s going to end up or what it’ll infiltrate or pervade (JO: yes) and that’s why it’s interesting, because it’s an unpredictable metabolism.

JO: Yes, I think that’s true. Have you read Derek Attridge’s book (AP: yes), The Singularity of Literature, I think that ties in very much with what he says in that with what you are saying.

AP: I like that… if I could just go on… I very much like Freud’s idea of dream work. Do you know about that?

JO: Um… (begins to say something)

AP: Basically this. This is what Freud called in the Interpretation of Dreams the ‘dream day’, in other words this is today. (JO: OK) and all sorts of things might happen just today, but tonight you might dream about (points to green chair sitting next to him) that chair. Now that chair hasn’t interested you remotely, but if you then go to your analyst and talk about it, you will find that it’s full of significance, a whole range of stories come out of it. What this means is that we’re going through our lives having experiences that we’re unaware of, right?

Now I think that’s a better model for reading. So I might read a book and I might say to you, now Moby Dick is my favourite novel but I might dream about, you know an Agatha Christie, the cover of an Agatha Christie book I saw at the station. When I go to my analyst and associate around this it proliferates infinitely more than my favourite novel does when I talk about it so it’s as though we don’t know beforehand what’s significant to us. That’s what psychoanalysis is about, the way in which one is literally unconscious of one’s experience. So the things that matter most to you may not be all the things that matter most to you, that some of them you are radically unconscious of.

JO: And that I think is what is wrong with the way that literature is taught in schools because you’re basically taught to learn a list of ten quotes (AP: exactly) and say these are what this novel is about which completely precludes any sense of getting anything new out of it.

AP: Yes, it’s a total destruction, and a totally irrelevant way of reading (JO: yep)

JO: One thing I read that you wrote that was actually what made me write to you was this question: “can the reader let herself be read by the book?” – I just kept thinking about it and I’m not sure that I’ve come up with a solution or an answer yet (JO drops pen on floor, then picks it up) but you’d probably say that I didn’t need to anyway or that that’s not what the question is anyway. So, do you have an answer to that question?

AP: Every time you read a book, it’ll be different to you. Um… in that sense, the book’s reading you. And what that means is, or one way of thinking about it is that you’re reading yourself through the medium of the book. So in the experience of reading this book, thoughts occur to you.

They may not be directly relevant to the book but these are thoughts you’re having while reading the book and indeed after and before. So this is an organised experience around the reading of this book, and you’re using it like you’re using everything in the cultural field, to have certain kinds of experiences but you don’t know what they are, and that’s the sense in which the book reads you, or the piece of music does to you what you think you’re doing to it, because it’s a medium through which you do something.

So it’s a real external object that affects you. And of course it’s not literally reading you because it’s not an agent in the way that a person is (JO: yep) but nevertheless your thoughts and feelings mediated through that book are coming back to you in your own mind… it’s like a conversation. That’s what I think I’m getting at.

JO: OK, so again it relates to Derek Attridge’s book in that it’s completely unpredictable because you come to the book with expectations which are… some of them might be fulfilled, so might not be, but in the end you don’t think about them anyway because there’s something new happening… um… in the event of reading it.

AP: Yes, exactly. Ideally, something else takes over.

JO: This is again from ‘Promises, Promises’. You say that the problem isn’t literature or psychoanalysis, “the problem is thinking that we know what we want from either – believing that we can orchestrate our own transformations”. Does this mean that thinking that we ‘know what we want’ is futile? Should we cease to do that? And if we do… that then how do we plan our lives?

AP: Well, we can’t help but think what we want and we need to do that, but… um… the problem is believing that, well there are two problems. One is getting what we want, which is a catastrophe, because that means you haven’t got anything, you’ve just got something in your own mind. But the other thing is, in the project of trying to get what we think it is we want, ideally other things turn up that we didn’t know we did want that satisfy us. And the trouble with a known want is that it’s actually living in one’s own mind, whereas… so it’s as though the known want is like a sort of tunnel that sets you off into the world. And ideally something else happens in the pursuit of that known want, and that is what I think I’m on about.

JO: But if you do that self-consciously, knowing what you want in order for things that you don’t want… but think that you don’t know that you want to happen, but will happen, and then you know you want them, aren’t you then self-consciously doing that?

AP: Well you might be, but it could be self-conscious in a way that simply goes on getting what you want, so to speak.

What I’m talking about is a kind of violence, or a kind of cruelty (JO: OK). It’s a form of bullying, really, which is: ‘I am determined to make you exactly what I want you to be, and every time you’re not that I’m either going to ignore it, or I’m going to punch you. And that can be with everything one has a relationship with, both books and people. So it’s something to do with believing you get more from outside than from something inside.

JO: And that’s a healthy way to be?

AP: It’s a better way to be, but it’s unpredictable. The advantage of things in your own mind is that you think you know what they are.

JO: But you don’t.

AP: Yes, so buying a fridge is different from having a relationship with somebody (JO: laughs) So when you buy a fridge you can expect certain things and if you don’t get them you can complain. It’s completely different with a person.

JO: Freud says in Civilisation and its Discontents that one of the reasons for unhappiness is “The inadequacy of our methods of regulating human relations in the family, the community, and the state”. What do you think coping mechanisms… what inadequacy do they fill? And are the inadequacies in the relationships, or in the self, or both?

AP: Well I think they’re in both. On the one hand the biggest problem, which psychoanalysis was invented to… think about is that people use their children for these sexual satisfactions they can’t get with their partners. And, I don’t mean literally enacted sex, but erotic relations, so that all of us as children have been burdened with, and have projected into us, incomprehensible desires of our parents.

And our parents didn’t know they were doing this, so that’s one bit. The other bit, in psychoanalytic terms, is that relationships are structurally impossible. In this sense people can’t be very happy with each other and so on.  Now there’s a very simple thing in the middle of this, in that if someone can satisfy you they can also frustrate you, and if they can frustrate you, you are going to be very cross with them… and that’s ineradicable.

JO: But worth it.

AP: But hopefully worth it. For some people it’s not worth it and they end up being cynical and bitter and disillusioned, but ideally it’s worth it, as in you… the pleasure outweighs the frustration and you can bear the frustration without becoming too violent. That’s, we’re all going to be contented with that.

JO: But some people can give you neither, and they’re not worth the time. Some people can’t satisfy you or frustrate you and they’re just…

AP: Yes, they’re irrelevant. (laughs?)

JO: Why don’t you use email?

AP: Because I want less communication, not more, and because I don’t want to talk… I don’t have the illusion of talking to people I don’t know. I don’t mean, at all, but basically I don’t want to know more people I don’t know. Plus, given the nature of my job I think I could get all sorts of emails I don’t want (JO: yes). Plus, I don’t want to wake up in the morning and have a hundred emails to answer. Because I want to be free to be in my own delirium, to be in my own world. Not all the time, but enough. I don’t want extrinsic demands, so I want to shield myself from that.

JO: yes, I think you’re really lucky because once you’ve embarked on one thing, once you start using email, you… I don’t know, I think that people growing up, who are my age, have grown up with a mobile phone, email, Twitter, Facebook, and it’s just relentless set of things that you have to update and tell tiny… tell people tiny things about your life and it’s exhausting.

AP: Yes, exactly. And it feels like, it’s like a temptation that, were I to do it, that would be that, no going back.

JO: Completely compulsive as well, you can’t get away from it.

AP: Yes, yes.

JO: I find. Again, it could just be me. OK, so you said you do have children (AP: Yes). Considering that you have been a child psychotherapist and considering how much psychoanalysis is preoccupied with the child, does it worry you, frustrate you, or do you just find it a lot more interesting now that you actually have children. I’m not implying that you have some kind of like Anna Freud relationship (AP: No, no!) (JO laughs)

AP: With my own children, all I want to do is entertain them and look after them. I don’t have any particular wish to um… I have no wish to psychoanalyse them. I’m sort of interested in knowing them in a way, but um… it doesn’t impinge. I do [    ]I don’t have all sorts of thoughts, because of course I have all sorts of thoughts (JO: yes) and some of them are informed by the person I am and the work that I do. I don’t have anything akin to a therapeutic conversation with my children. I basically want to have laughs with my children, primarily, and secondarily to look after them, that’s it.

JO: OK, and what about when they get older?

AP: Well, we’ll see. And I love the idea of being able to talk to them about the things that interest them. That really appeals to me a lot, but I don’t… I’ve got friends, and I’ve got a partner, and I’ve got a world. So I don’t need them for conversation, though I love having conversations with them. But I wouldn’t want my children to be… I’d want them to be interested in the simple meaning of life but I wouldn’t want them to be, ideally, tormented souls. I don’t want them to be shallow, but a version of that.

JO: And by psychoanalysing them they would be tormented?

AP: No, that they would seek out psychoanalysis if they were troubled. And they would want psychoanalytic conversations if they were troubled, everybody’s troubled, that’s what it is to be a person, but I think it’s perfectly possible if you’re lucky, and it is entirely to do with luck, to life a life in which there are certain things you don’t need to think about.

JO: Yes, if you’re lucky.

AP: All that means is that I’m not beglamoured by tormented souls. I feel for them, but I don’t think that’s the best way to live.

JO: No. OK, final question. Are interviews a form of psychoanalysis? Am I psychoanalysing you? Why would I want to do that?

AP: Yes, they are. But so’s all conversation. And why would you want to do that?

JO: Well I don’t know, (laughs) that’s why I’m asking you!

AP: I mean, I don’t know either but I assume, from what you’ve said, the books have interested you, and you want to find out about me.

JO: Yes, I suppose so. Or I want to find out about me…

AP: Of course, but they’re not mutually exclusive. Inevitably, we’re doing both.

JO: What’s that thing you say… Psychoanalysis is a conversation with yourself in the presence of someone else.

AP: Yes.

JO: OK. Thanks.

[Ends]

Audio here