In Writing: New and Selected Essays

by Adam Phillips

For Adam Phillips - as for Freud and many of his followers - poetry and poets have always held an essential place, as both precursors and unofficial collaborators in the psychoanalytic project. But the same has never held true in reverse. What, Phillips wonders, at the start of this deeply engaging book, has psychoanalysis meant for writers? And what can writing do for psychoanalysis?

Phillips explores these questions through an exhilarating series of encounters with - and vivid readings of - writers he has loved, from Byron and Barthes to Shakespeare and Sebald. And in the process he demonstrates, through his own unique style, how literature and psychoanalysis can speak to and of each other.

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Essays, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Philosophy

400 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2000

About the author

Adam Phillips is a British psychotherapist and essayist.

Since 2003 he has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.

Phillips was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954, the child of second-generation Polish Jews. He grew up as part of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins and describes his parents as "very consciously Jewish but not believing". As a child, his first interest was the study of tropical birds and it was not until adolescence that he developed an interest in literature. He went on to study English at St John's College, Oxford, graduating with a third class degree. His defining influences are literary – he was inspired to become a psychoanalyst after reading Carl Jung's autobiography and he has always believed psychoanalysis to be closer to poetry than medicine.

Adapted from Wikipedia.

Phillips is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. He has been described by The Times as "the Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis" for his "brilliantly amusing and often profoundly unsettling" work; and by John Banville as "one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time."

Reviews

[james · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Expounding is what we do when we can’t play.’

‘The narrowing of the mind that was the old language pre-empting the new thought, the old concealments preventing the new disclosures.’

‘… how the self forms and performs itself in language, as … an effect of language; how it, as a plural, is literally made up; how … it can “grasp [itself] only by means of an image-repertoire”, as a drama of signs.’

‘If we lost faith, or even interest in the understanding project, what else might we do with each other?’

//

I bought my copy of this in june 2018 while on a lunch break during a copywriting internship at canary wharf magazine (drafting 200-word paragraphs to accompany luxury watch/yacht ads), feeling completely lost & despondent. I can remember picking it up in a waterstones & something about phillips’ writing style — perhaps his clarity, his concision, his care — resonating almost libidinally. I bought it without knowing why. it then turned out that, having at this time not yet read much freud, eliot, H.D., pound, barthes, lacan, emerson, winnicott, or half of the other writers/analysts phillips draws from, the text was alienating & I finished only a couple of essays.

returning now feels somehow like a testament to — or a means by which to calibrate — the distance between that 2018 creature & me. I feel a great kinship with that boy, but it’s fascinating just how ill-equipped he was to engage with the material here. & what a shame! the essays on emerson, barthes, & eliot in particular are so fresh & free, & phillips’ attitude towards his own psychoanalytic practice — being himself a lit grad — is so forgiving & liberating. I love his approach to the essay form, & his curiosity in his subjects; his words seem to emanate a kind of benevolence? perhaps the key is his willingness to find the open questions to which attempted answers invariably give rise, to follow these threads with a light touch. digression is secular revelation.

[David Sogge · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the umpteenth collection of texts by an enormously productive intellectual who is said to turn out a new essay or lecture roughly every ten days. Given such quantities, it’s unsurprising perhaps that quality can get short shrift. For in this new book, much of the prose is terrible. It is littered with pointless asides, sub-clauses, re-phrasings and repetitions, some of them pimped up with alliterations (“wildest and most woeful and wonderful”, “punctured and punctuated” etc.) and even gratuitous puns (seam=seem). An obstacle course? A swamp with few hard places to stand? I’m not sure of the apt metaphor. Yet for all that, the author can illuminate obscure things brilliantly. He is at his best where the distances are short, or at least self-evidently bridgeable, between psychoanalytic knowledge and specific pieces of literature. The essay on Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience is a case in point; its clear construction and prose got me almost effortlessly to a better understanding of the matters at hand. (But is improved understanding among readers what the writer actually aims for? In his essay on T.S. Eliot, Oscar Wilde and Freud, Phillips tells us that “understanding is the way we foreclose curiosity”. Uh-oh.) At the same time some of his most intriguing and powerful remarks left me frustrated. In the essay on Byron, for example, he states (in parentheses) the following : “an interest in childhood is always also an interest in misogyny”. This unqualified assertion, coming from a professional whose specialization is child psychiatry, is astonishing; yet it goes completely unexplained. A throwaway line. At some moments I was brought nearly to the point of throwing away this seriously interesting, but exasperating book.

[Hanan AL-Raddadi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is interesting if you are interested in the writers Phillips is talking about.

[Mina-Louise]

I'm developing a tiny crush on Adam Phillips.

[Ajp · Rating 4 out of 5]

“In Writing” is a collection of Phillips’ literary criticism (in contrast to his other collections of essays on psychoanalysis itself). What Phillips brings to a book of poetry, or fiction, or essays, is a level of attentiveness that is similar, I imagine, to the sort of attentiveness he brings to his patients. Moreover, Phillips’ own writing aims to be enigmatic and evocative, like the poets he enjoys. The point of analysis – therapeutic or literary – is not comprehension, he writes, but inspiration. Thus, for Phillips, his ideal reader will be inspired by his writing, rather than cured (since there is nothing to cure) – will discover “what they themselves are thinking, feeling” through their reading.

[Aaron Ambrose · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did a bit of skimming - reading writing about writing - or worse, writing about writing about writing - isn’t automatically interesting to me. But Phillips is almost always chewing on a bowlful of questions that usually taste intriguing, if not satisfying. The Paris Review interview with Phillips was a special pleasure. Phillips really IS a cheerful person who is motivated by curiosity and kindness, and to me that puts an extra special polish on the bluntness of his never-ending amused balloon popping.

[Em Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could fill a book with bits I want to quote from this book but that would just be this book. Interestingly reading Phillips on literature makes me want to read more Phillips rather than more literature which was different from my experience with McCarthy. But then I'd read Phillps' shopping lists.

[Wendy Rohm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb as always.

[Scout Riches · Rating 5 out of 5]

We love you Adam Phillips