The Cure for Psychoanalysis by Adam Phillips;

Author:Adam Phillips;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Afternoon Q&A

Ed Corrigan: Well, so, shall we open up the floor for some questions?

Question: So maybe this question relates a little bit to what you’re just talking about now, about the Middle Group and the sort of way in which working in terms of the Middle Group tradition is maybe on the margins in some way, as opposed to the centre, and maybe that sort of bridges into the question that I have for you which I’ve been formulating leading up to today and listening to you today talk about writing. And in particular about your essay ‘Coda: Up to a Point’ in One Way and Another where you talk about the form of the essay and psychoanalytic writing. You know, I’m somebody who comes to analytic training as a poet and so I very much consider studying literature and poetry to be a part of my analytic upbringing, and so it seems natural for me to want to write about analytic ideas and perhaps my clinical work. And yet, I have had a real struggle in finding some kind of a form in which the content of what I would like to write is about the experience of doing analysis and being in analysis is in some kind of dynamic relationship with the form and the structure, where there’s room for the unconscious and where my patients don’t become deadened in some way. And so, in talking about luck, it felt lucky in a way to come upon ‘Coda’ from One Way or Another because I felt like in it you take up the history of psychoanalytic writing and the way in which the literary essay has somehow not been recognised as legitimate or sort of on the margins in some way and I felt like, maybe for you, in devoting yourself to the form of the essay, you were sort of working through or had found your answer to this question of how to write about analysis. So, I guess I have the question about what the form of the essay for you with all of its, the way that it moves and the rhythm of it and all of the different things it can contain, I wonder about what the experience and practice of devoting yourself to the literary essay has done for your clinical work? You know, that in some way you bring your experience and use the form of the essay, but I have this question about how it then loops back and informs your work as an analyst.

Adam Phillips: It’s very difficult to talk about this from inside it, because all I can do is do it. I was very struck when I went into psychoanalysis how terrible most of the writing was. And this seemed to me to be a very, very interesting fact because what we do is amazingly interesting, it’s the stuff of novels, poems, dramas, etc. So, it’s a lot of psychic work to make it boring. (laughter) That’s really a project, conscious or unconscious.

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