Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis

In the Preface to this collection of essays Phillips comes right out and describes the duo of language and psychoanalysis as warp and woof. Without one, the other loses form - and meaning. Each and both are his focus here, and he manages in this book to ably wear two hats: that of an enthusiastically literary (he read English as an undergraduate) psychotherapist, and also an essayist on literary topics who is - not at all by accident - unapologetically psychoanalytically-oriented. He is playful and he writes with clarity and precision. You never puzzle out a Phillips sentence; you reread because you were pleased the first time. In addition his clinical experiences (as a child psychotherapist) inform some of the pieces.Sometimes he is elegantly simple - to set the hook, and is almost epigrammatic, as when he asserts, "One way of describing growing up would be to say that it involves a transition from the imperative to the interrogative - from 'Food!' to 'I want' - to 'Can I have?'" In addition, the Phillips knack for successfully and bracingly arguing both sides of a story is out in full force. Some of the subjects under discussion are poetry and psychoanalysis; narcissism (not such a bad thing); anorexia nervosa; clutter (as "the obstacle to desire" and the "object of desire"); agoraphobia; poet Frederick Seidel's one book of published poems; grief and melancholy; jokes, and an appreciation of Martin Amis (which jauntily starts out, "For three words once, in 1987, Martin Amis sounded like D.H. Lawrence.") Several (among them "Christopher Hill's Revolution and Me") are autobiographical, and all are thoroughly engaging. There are 28 essays. Some are book reviews. Some discuss writers or thinkers I'd never read. One of Phillips' abilities is to reference someone with whom you are unfamiliar, and make that person come alive in the course of the essay. You will not be lost, or lose interest.You can dip into this book, come back to it, skip around, or steam through it. Phillips is flexible, and so is this collection. From Phillips' essay on American psychotherapist and essayist Leslie Farber, in which he mentions Farber's writing style: "Out of languages at odds with each other, if not actually at war with each other - the languages of Freud, of Sullivan, of Buber; of autobiography, of existentialism, of phenomenology, of a too-much-protested-against romanticism - Farber has found a way of being at once easily accessible to his readers, and surely but subtly unusually demanding of them." Phillips was also describing himself.A very worthwhile book.

Adam Phillips takes the title of his book -- PROMISES, PROMISES -- from the last entry in this collection of essays, where he outlines the underlying theme of his collection. He says, "For me - for all sorts of reasons - there has always been only one category, literature, of which psychoanalysis becomes a part." He says in reading, one carries out a solitary act, a meditation of sorts. In reading literature -- whatever that is, and the lines have become clouded in recent years -- one engages a person who is not present in the room. On the other hand, psychoanalysis where one engages someone who is in the room is "literature restored to practicality -- the absolute antithesis of art for art's sake..." All these essays deal with some aspect of psychoanalysis and frequently Phillips uses the published word - 'literature' - to illustrate his point. Sometimes, an essay is a "talk" Phillips has given to a group, such as "On Translating a Person" originally presented as the Gwyn Jones Memorial Lecture in Cardiff Wales in 2000. In this essay, Phillips refers to a book by Raymond William entitled 'Materialism and Culture', about Welsh society. Because Phillips is from Wales (and Jewish), he is interested in how Williams "translates" the Welsh culture. Phillips says "What Williams is alerting us to is that what he calls the emergence of 'structures of feelings' depend upon the culture forms available for use. And each of those forms carries with it a history and a class consciousness." Phillips applies this idea to psychoanalysis where he says the individual has a "consciousness of history, a consciousness of alternatives, a consciousness of aspirations and possibilities: a wish for translation." He says, "Psychoanalyst don't think of themselves as translating people. The analyst interprets, reconstructs, questions, redescribes, returns the signifier..but he rarely describes what he does as translating the patient's material." Yet, the analyst is assisting the analysand to interpret his own life, to read his own text, to translate. In the end, who decides if the translation is a good one? Many of the essays are reviews of books-most biographies and a few autobiographies. A few works of non-fiction are included. I particularly enjoyed "Doing Heads" a review of Patrick McGrath's book 'Picador Book of New Gothic' which describes how horror stories moved from the exteral world to the internal world with the arrival of Edgar Allen Poe who dealt with "the terror inside." All of these essays explore the challenge of knowing the self, establishing an "identity" by reading and absorbing literature and/or by taking a more pragmatic approach and entering analysis. In the first, the writer who is not present facilitates the reader's interpretation and understanding. In the latter, the analyst who is present facilitates the act of reading and interpreting the self. In both situations, the reader is free to choose how and what s/he will interpret, absorb, and apply. Ph

In the Preface to this collection of essays Phillips comes right out and describes the duo of language and psychoanalysis as warp and woof. Without one, the other loses form - and meaning. Each and both are his focus here, and he manages in this book to ably wear two hats: that of an enthusiastically literary (he read English as an undergraduate) psychotherapist, and also an essayist on literary topics who is - not at all by accident - unapologetically psychoanalytically-oriented. He is playful and he writes with clarity and precision. You never puzzle out a Phillips sentence; you reread because you were pleased the first time. In addition his clinical experiences (as a child psychotherapist) inform some of the pieces.Sometimes he is elegantly simple - to set the hook, and is almost epigrammatic, as when he asserts, "One way of describing growing up would be to say that it involves a transition from the imperative to the interrogative - from 'Food!' to 'I want' - to 'Can I have?'" In addition, the Phillips knack for successfully and bracingly arguing both sides of a story is out in full force. Some of the subjects under discussion are poetry and psychoanalysis; narcissism (not such a bad thing); anorexia nervosa; clutter (as "the obstacle to desire" and the "object of desire"); agoraphobia; poet Frederick Seidel's one book of published poems; grief and melancholy; jokes, and an appreciation of Martin Amis (which jauntily starts out, "For three words once, in 1987, Martin Amis sounded like D.H. Lawrence.") Several (among them "Christopher Hill's Revolution and Me") are autobiographical, and all are thoroughly engaging. There are 28 essays. Some are book reviews. Some discuss writers or thinkers I'd never read. One of Phillips' abilities is to reference someone with whom you are unfamiliar, and make that person come alive in the course of the essay. You will not be lost, or lose interest.You can dip into this book, come back to it, skip around, or steam through it. Phillips is flexible, and so is this collection. From Phillips' essay on American psychotherapist and essayist Leslie Farber, in which he mentions Farber's writing style: "Out of languages at odds with each other, if not actually at war with each other - the languages of Freud, of Sullivan, of Buber; of autobiography, of existentialism, of phenomenology, of a too-much-protested-against romanticism - Farber has found a way of being at once easily accessible to his readers, and surely but subtly unusually demanding of them." Phillips was also describing himself.A very worthwhile book.