On Adam Phillips, Or how could we ever be anything but permanently enraged?

Adam Phillips is one of my favourite writers. Just check out his short five minute interview on my favourite links page. Here I’ve compiled some quotes from a few of his books.

On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored

Adulthood, one could say, is when it begins to occur to you that you may not be leading a charmed life.

What do I want? And then, what fantasies of truth do I need to legitimate it?

…the aim of psychoanalysis is not to cure people but to show them that there is nothing wrong with them.

Hell is not other people but one’s need for other people.

The aim of intimacy is to sponsor the solitary unknowability of the True Self.

Children are not oracles, but they ask with persistent regularity the great existential question, “What shall we do now?”

Every adult remembers, among many other things, the great ennui of childhood, and every child’s life is punctuated by spells of boredom: that state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains the most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire.

It is difficult to enjoy people for whom we have waited too long.

People fall in love at the moment in their lives when they are most terrorized by possibilities. In order to fall in love with someone they must be perceived to be an obstacle, a necessary obstacle.

Truly infectious, kissing may be our most furtive, our most reticent sexual act, the mouth’s elegy to itself.

Intimacies (with Leo Bersani)

Desire…is like being told a secret about oneself that someone else has made up.

It is the contention of this book…that psychoanalysis has misled us into believing, in its quest for normative life stories, that knowledge of oneself is conducive to intimacy, that intimacy is by definition personal intimacy, and that narcissism is the enemy, the saboteur, of this personal intimacy considered to be the source and medium of personal development.

The question is…what has to happen to the consciousness of loss of power to make it a shameful experience rather than, say, a blissful one? Why, to ask an apparently daft question, would the self want to protect itself from the loss of power, from the consciousness of this loss? Loss of power, after all, might be the precondition for the longed for and feared experience of exchange, of intimacy, of desire indifferent to personal identity.

The first intimacy is an intimacy with a process of becoming, not with a person. The question raised by Bersani’s account is why is this relation so difficult to sustain, so easily sabotaged by the drive to take things personally?

On Henry James’s novella, The Beast in the Jungle (with Marcher and May Bertram as the main characters):

“The answer to all the past is that she was what he had missed.” Marcher and May Bertram are, however, superior to the world only as long as their real selves lie hidden behind the social simpler. If the reality they have been watching for turns out to be the failure to have the intimacy they present to the world, Marcher’s awful fate, his unenviable privilege, has been simply not to live as society would have expected him to live, that is, in an uncomplicated conformity to the requirements of the social simper.

On Flirtation

Exploiting the ambiguity of promises - the difference, say, between someone being promising and someone making a promise - flirtation has always been the saboteur of a cherished vocabulary of commitment.

It is one of the advantages of flirtation that it can protect us from idolatry - and its opposite - while acknowledging the draw of such grand absolutes. Flirting, in other words, is an often unconscious form of scepticism. States of conviction conceal the sense in which we are continually making our minds up.

My conversations with this woman left me preoccupied with a range of rather obvious, and clinically pertinent, questions. What kind of love affair is a person having with time, and what kind of object is it for them? Is it, for example, something that needs filling or something that tends to get wasted? Is there never enough or does a lot of it have to be killed? What makes us feel there is plenty of it or that it is running out? If we spend so much time planning to use it, what is the risk of leaving things to chance? Entrusting oneself to a person is quite different from entrusting oneself to time.

Freud and Proust are alert in complementary ways to the senses in which knowing people - or certain kinds of knowledge about people - can be counter-erotic; that the unconscious intention of certain forms of familiarity os to kill desire. It is not simply that elusiveness, or jealousy, sustains desire, but that certain ways of knowing people diminish their interest for us; and that this may be their abiding wish. So we have to watch out for the ways people invite us - or allow us - to know them; and also alert ourselves to the possibility that knowing may be too tendentious, too uncanny, a model for loving.

In order to make sense of the experience that wanting is always conflictual - that people can be wrecked by success - Freud suggests that we imagine our lives as a story in which three parts of ourselves rae always involved: that in doing any one thing we have at least three projects: we are satisfying a desire, we are sustaining a sense of moral well-being, and we are ensuring our survival.
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Firstly, it can be useful to think of ourselves as multiple personalities; of our internal worlds as more like a novel than a monologue. Each character, or part of ourselves, has different projects, and different criteria of success; so some people, for example, live as though they would prefer to be morally right than sexually satisfied, or clever rather than ordinary. In these cases it is as though an internal democracy has become a meritocracy; certain internal voices become muted because a repertoire of ways of being has been turned into a set of alternatives…. Conflict requires the forging of incompatibles. The second point that follows from this is that because our different selves have different projects, success and failure are inextricable; success for one self can feel like failure for another, and vice versa.

If somebody you are longing to see makes you wait too long for them, it is extremely difficult to appreciate them when they finally arrive; and to recuperate your desire for them.

Depression is a self-cure for the terrors of aliveness, of being alive to one’s losses and therefore to one’s desires. From a psychoanalytic point of view, imagination - the capacity for representation - begins, or rather, is initiated, by the experience of loss….
Knowing people is what we do to them when they are not there.

“For if it is true that those who are slaves to their moods, being drowned in their sorrows, reveal a number of psychic or cognitive frailties, it is equally true that a diversification of moods, variety in sadness, refinement in sorry or mourning are the imprint of a humankind that is surely not triumphant but subtle, ready to fight, and creative.”

Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

Missing Out

It is the absence of what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and sad. We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives - even if this obscures both what we already have and what is actually available - because we can survive only if our appetites more or less work for us. Indeed, we have to survive our appetites by making people cooperate with our wanting. We pressurize the world to be there for our benefit.

On Frustration

To frustrate, then, is to, in one way or another, make void a demand made of oneself; to avoid it or to make it as nothing; and it is to deceive the other person either if you have what they want and won’t give it, or if you can create the illusion that you have what they want but are merely refusing to give it. And to be or feel frustrated is to be maddened by having one’s demand negated or avoided or tantalized. In this picture it is as though a contract has been broken; as if one person always has what the other person demands of them and the only question is how to get it….
Clearly, the demand for love, the demand that love be articulated, is something of a special case….
So the issue of entitlement between parents and children, or between lovers, or between friends, can never be straightforward. The entitled are always too knowing.

Knowing what one wants is a way of not exposing oneself to change (or of taking change too much into one’s own hands, subjecting it to one’s will)….

…[A]ddiction is unformulated frustration, frustration too simply met).

There is, though, one ineluctable fact, one experience that is integral to our development, something that is structural to human relations right from the very beginning; and that is, that if someone can satisfy you they can frustrate you. Only someone who gives you satisfaction can give you frustration. This, one can say, is something we have all experienced, and go on experiencing. You know someone matters to you if they can frustrate you.

To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had (of one’s formative frustrations, and of one’s attempted self-cures for them); you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there. And what is renewed in that experience is an intensity of frustration, and an intensity of satisfaction. It is as if, oddly you were waiting for someone but you didn’t know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want…. A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of frustration in their absence.

Falling in love, finding your passion, are attempts to locate, to picture, to represent what you unconsciously feel frustrated about, and by. In this sense we are always trying to find, to get a sense of what is missing, what we need, what, in Lacan’s terminology, we lack.

We are tempted, initially, to be self-satisfying creatures, to live in a fantasy world, to live in our minds, but the only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating; but only in the sense that they are disparate from, not in total accord with, our wished-for satisfactions (the most satisfying pleasures are the surprising ones, the ones that can’t be engineered). In this picture we depend on other people for our satisfactions. But the quest for satisfaction begins and ends with a frustration; it is prompted by frustration, by the dawning of need, and it ends with the frustration of never getting exactly what one wanted. How could we ever be anything other than permanently enraged?

On Not Getting It

If it had to be formulated, in brief, we could say that the man or woman of your dreams is the person who both gets you and doesn’t get you in the way you prefer to be got. That is to say, someone who doesn’t treat you only as their favourite joke.

Groups of people tend to be defined, or to define themselves, by the things they all get. Outsiders don’t get it, and if or when they do, it is a shock to the system (as all immigrants know)…. Getting it, or not getting it - both the experience, which is acute, and the phrase, which seems not to be - reminds us of the investment we are brought up to have in understanding as a measure of intimacy and competence; and of how hard a word ‘understanding’ is to understand.

If getting it gives us some kind of pleasure, what are the pleasures of not getting it, of being, as we say, left out or in the dark, or clueless? It can be humiliating to not get it - indeed, I want to suggest that humiliation is always a form of not getting it, and that humiliation sheds a unique and horrifying light on what not getting it might be about…. We need to imagine what a life would be like in which this command [‘you must get it in order to qualify as a member of our group’] had been dropped, a life in which there was nothing to get because what went on between people, what people wanted from each other, couldn’t possibly be phrased in that way. Our lives would not be about getting the joke or the point. Or, to put it slightly differently, there would be other pleasures than the pleasures of humiliation.

There is, in other words, a freedom - a freedom from the tyranny of perfection - in not understanding and in not being understood (understanding is not always the best thing we can do with need). All tyrannies involve the supposedly perfect understanding of someone else’s needs.

My supposition is that sometimes - perhaps more often than not - we think ew know more about the experiences we don’t have than about the experiences that we do have, ‘frustration’ being our word for the experience of not having an experience.

On Satisfaction

A picture of satisfaction, we might say then, at least to begin with, is a flight from wanting; a refuge from the rigours and risks of desire; a refuge, in fact, from real satisfaction. In fantasy, in the wishing scene, we leapfrog over the obstacles, or rather we don’t succumb to them…. We fast-forward through the frustrating bits…. Our fantasies of satisfaction - our preconceptions about satisfaction - are where we hide from the possibility of real satisfaction…. Fantasy is the medium in which we jump to conclusions. And the conclusions we jump to are about satisfaction, and are themselves satisfying.

So we have to start imagining desiring not without an object of desire, but without imagining too certainly the satisfactions that might accrue, not being too quick to satisfy ourselves in fantasy; and, when we do, being able to ironize such satisfactions (not take them too literally, or too solemnly). And doing this, of course, affects our imagining of the object of desire and what we can claim to know about it. We would think about a revolution or a wedding very differently if we had too little knowledge of what would occur afterwards, when too little knowledge is what we will always have (this is what the word ‘risk’ is for); or if we acknowledged that what we know about a revolution or a wedding are the wishes it carries.

On Kindness (with Barbara Taylor)

Kindness…is the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself.

Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them.

…being too sympathetic…either endangers our lives or is against our nature. And in its more insidious versions we have come to suspect that the whole notion of kindness is a cover story - indeed, our most subtly self-deceiving cover story - for an ingeniously ruthless self-interest.

Ordinary kindness is not a manipulative bribe or a magical cure, but a simple exchange. In a parent-child relationship where no one is looking to the other to rescue him, each can enjoy the other without needing to transform him. The modern child is perceived as someone who is always running the risk of having to become a parent to her parents; someone whose concern for her parents’ well-being can be the very thing that waylays her developmental needs…. It is as if now parents are more dependent on their children than children are on their parents; that what we are left with after two hundred years of the intensive study of children is a world in which parents are frightened of their children, of their vulnerability, their neediness, their frustration, and their rage - and in which parents look to their children for so-called self-esteem, to give their lives point and purpose.

Indeed, the experience of sexual jealousy - the ambivalence that explodes out of it - invites us to ask our question the other way round: Why are we ever unkind? And one answer would be, to secure, insofar as it is possible, our emotional (psychic) survival. The fundamental threat to our survival is, for want of a better way of putting it, loss of love, the threatened or actual loss of what our lives depend upon, which begins most urgently in childhood…. We are at our most merciless, to ourselves and to others, when we are sexually jealous…. The horror of it, in other words, is not only the loss of the loved person, it is the loss of the individual’s capacity for kindness. The origins of self-hatred are often to be found in failures of kindness.

Those who love without hating cannot be believed in, cannot be trusted. Kindness entails the acknowledgement of hatred. It is kind to see people as they are and not as one would like them to be.

If there is a kindness instinct, it is going to have to take onboard ambivalence in human relations. It is kind to be able to bear conflict, in oneself and others; it is kind, to oneself and others, to forgo magic and sentimentality for reality. It is kind to see individuals as they are, rather than how we might want them to be; it is kind to care for people just as we find them.

“A sign of health in the mind,” Donald Winnicott wrote in 1970, “is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us.” To live well, we must be able to imaginatively identify with other people, and allow them to identify with us. Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity…. We depend on each other not just for our survival but for our very being.
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Modern Western society resists this fundamental truth, valuing independence above all things. Needing others is perceived as a weakness…. Dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.
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But we are all dependent creatures, right to the core. For most of Western history this has been widely acknowledged…. “Individualism” is a very recent phenomenon.

The ironies are not subtle ones. Capitalism is no system for the kindhearted. Even its devotees acknowledge this while insisting that, however tawdry capitalist motives may be, the results are socially beneficial. Untrammeled free enterprise generates wealth and happiness for all. Like all utopian faiths, this is largely delusory. Free markets erode the societies that harbour them.

Equals

If the best thing we do is look after each other, then the worst thing we do is to pretend to look after each other when in fact we are doing something else. One of the many disturbing things about psychoanalysis - as a description of who we are, and as a kind of help - is that it shows us why it is often so difficult to tell these things apart. Or rather, it shows us that this distinction, upon which most of our morality depends, is often spurious because we are always likely to be doing both things at once (and several more). Love is not enough, because love is fraught with hatred. It is to what is being taken when we take care of another person that Freud drew our attention.

On Being Laughed At

That modern societies, like the modern individuals that constitute them, are the site of competing claims makes conflict inevitable. What it doesn’t in and of itself explain is how we can get such pleasure from cruelty. If cruelty is the worst thing we do, what then is enjoying our cruelty? To be able to laugh at another person, to learn to do this, would seem to be a remarkable cultural artefact (if not necessarily an impressive cultural achievement). Sociability without mockery and teasing and taunting would be both dreary and verging on the pointless….

We may, unless we are consensual sado-masochists, deplore humiliation, or claim to; but we cannot help but enjoy what we cheerfully call making fun of people. We are always reassured when people can, as we say, laugh at themselves. There is a violence we do to ourselves and others that is both enlivening and strangely consoling. There is the good mockery of everyday life that regulates our self-importance, and so relieves us of too much responsibility for the world. And there is the bad mockery that foists something upon us that we would rather, if we could choose, protect ourselves from.

Laughing at someone is - like all real pleasure - a stolen pleasure. But when we laugh at someone they feel stolen from.
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So what is this daylight robbery that at its best is simple teasing, and at its worst is degrading humiliation? As ever, it must be impossible to speak for every case; generalisation makes a mockery of differences. And yet to describe laughing at someone as stealing is also to say that it takes from them their protection from being stolen from. As though somebody were to take photographs of you that you couldn’t stand, and then circulated them. What has been stolen is your freedom to supervise, to control the representations of yourself. The other person or people no longer care to protect, or wholly disregard, the images of yourself that you believe you need to sustain you. Humiliation strips the self of its safeguards; ordinary teasing frees the self of its safeguards.

It is a question, as it often is, of anticipated catastrophe; what, we must ask, is the imagined devastation that will occur if the mocker doesn’t mock? If he isn’t laughing at his victim, if he stops arranging his humiliation, what does he fear might happen? What might they do together? The so-called psychological answer might be, he will see too much of himself, too much of something about himself, in his chosen victim. The political answer would be, he would turn democratic. What mockery reveals, in other words, is the emotional terror of democracy. That what is always being ridiculed is our wish to be together, our secret affinity for each other.

Around and About Madness

When the British psychoanalyst John Rickman…remarked that madness is when you can’t find anyone who can stand you, he was asking a couple of questions. Firstly, what makes us feel that we can’t stand someone? And this becomes, for the sake of diagnosis as it were, a question about how we know, about how we describe what it is about them that we can’t stand. And secondly, what do we tend to do when we can’t stand someone? Answers to the second question constitute what we now call the history of madness, which is more or less a history of fear, at least in the modern era.

In the other modern account, madness is described as a person’s ingenious though debilitating self-cure for the obstacles thrown up by his individual development. And as all development is deemed to be traumatic these mad solutions will turn up, to a greater or lesser degree, in everyone’s life (these solutions are normally called a person’s character)…. In the depths, in our hearts, as passionate creatures we are mad; in excess of the cultures we create, and always beyond our most searching descriptions of ourselves. In this view, who we are is a mockery of what we make, because who we are is fundamentally uncontainable (all our cultural forms are just ways of getting away with something). The notion that we are truly and deeply mad is, of course, far older than the notion that, given a chance, we are eminently sane…. And the ways we have found to protect ourselves or cure ourselves - called defences, or symptoms, or eccentricities - are themselves mad…. So the sponsors of this account are always, one way or another, trying to make a case for some kinds of madness being better than others; the madness of sexual love for example is preferred to the madness of agoraphobia, or obsessive-compulsive working habits, and so on.

If you can’t find anyone who can stand you, you can’t find anyone who believes you’ve got anything they want. Groups consist of people who, for better and for worse, need each other’s company. What we call madness highlights our infinite anxieties about exchange with other people. The anxiety of influence is as nothing compared with the anxiety of exchange.

The Soul of Man Under Psychoanalysis

Eliot writes: It is human when we do not understand another human being, and cannot ignore him, to exert an unconscious pressure on that person to turn him into something that we can understand: many husbands and wives exert this pressure on each other. The effect on the person so influenced is liable to be the repression and distortion, rather than the improvement, of the personality; and no man is good enough to have the right to make another over in his own image.

This is the quotation from Eliot rewritten: It is human when we do not understand ourselves, and cannot ignore ourselves, to exert an unconscious pressure on ourselves to turn us into something that we can understand: many husbands and wives exert this pressure on each other. The effect on the person so influenced (oneself, that is) is liable to be the repression and distortion, rather than the improvement of the personality; and no man is good enough to have the right to make another over in his own image.

Making It Old

Trauma is when the past is too present; when, unbeknownst to oneself the past obliterates the present. It is the traumatised person - all of us, to some extent - who says that there is nothing new under the sun; that nothing ever changes. It is the art of art to make the past bearably present so that we can see the future through it. The problem, in other words, is not in making the past present, but in making the past into history.