Adam Phillips and Leo Bersani on Intimacies
Some day I might write that very long review essay about Adam Phillips, almost all of whose books I have read and re-read.
One that had hitherto escaped my attention is a slender volume co-authored with Leo Bersani in 2008: Intimacies. Herewith just a few thoughts from it.
The book is characterized by an anti-historical approach which is surprising to find in psychoanalysis. By that I mean they begin by asking whether or not "psychoanalysis has misled us into believing, in its quest for normative life stories, that knowledge of oneself is conducive to intimacy" (vii).
More strongly still, the authors assert that "There are other satisfactions than the satisfactions of personal history" (3). This is not to say that history is irrelevant or can--or should be--escaped. But it is to take up again a theme developed across many of Phillips' books: the danger of imprisonment in the past, in the stories of our past which presume to determine who we are, what we are and are not allowed to think about ourselves.
This is a danger which can in fact drive some people to analysis and therapy, but even there sometimes certain stories get reinforced if, e.g., one is especially wedded to a diagnostic history. It requires careful clinical discernment to know when to set aside diagnostic history and labels because they end up doing more harm than good, forcing people to believe something that may not work to their total good.
This becomes clear towards the end of the book when the authors note that "as a clinical practice, psychoanalysis is committed to the unsettling of the individual's hard-won (i.e., defensive) self-knowledge" (93).
Another theme common in much of Phillips' writings--but here expressed in a more explicitly Lacanian vein--is the fear we have of being too much for ourselves. In this book, both Bersani and Phillips recognize "the fear of jouissance, despite and because of the longing for it,...is not to be underestimated" (97).
Finally, perhaps the most interesting question raised by and in the book is this: must we understand ourselves in order to be happy? The authors do not quite put it this way, but instead note the assumption of most standard analytic therapy is that "whatever is strange about myself I must make familiar; recognition must replace bewilderment" (99). This they take to be the gist of Freud's famous (and famously mistranslated) "where id was, there shall ego be."
But why? One of the things Phillips has helped me to see over the years is that a certain degree of self-forgetfulness is very much to be welcomed. Put in concrete terms, I have realized--never more so than during this pandemic--that one way to even temporarily lift one's mood is to go do something concrete for someone else, forgetting about your own struggles for a time. Make soup for someone in a shelter, or help shovel the driveway of your elderly neighbor. Such seemingly "banal" things can in their own way be therapeutic.
One that had hitherto escaped my attention is a slender volume co-authored with Leo Bersani in 2008: Intimacies. Herewith just a few thoughts from it.
The book is characterized by an anti-historical approach which is surprising to find in psychoanalysis. By that I mean they begin by asking whether or not "psychoanalysis has misled us into believing, in its quest for normative life stories, that knowledge of oneself is conducive to intimacy" (vii).
More strongly still, the authors assert that "There are other satisfactions than the satisfactions of personal history" (3). This is not to say that history is irrelevant or can--or should be--escaped. But it is to take up again a theme developed across many of Phillips' books: the danger of imprisonment in the past, in the stories of our past which presume to determine who we are, what we are and are not allowed to think about ourselves.
This is a danger which can in fact drive some people to analysis and therapy, but even there sometimes certain stories get reinforced if, e.g., one is especially wedded to a diagnostic history. It requires careful clinical discernment to know when to set aside diagnostic history and labels because they end up doing more harm than good, forcing people to believe something that may not work to their total good.
This becomes clear towards the end of the book when the authors note that "as a clinical practice, psychoanalysis is committed to the unsettling of the individual's hard-won (i.e., defensive) self-knowledge" (93).
Another theme common in much of Phillips' writings--but here expressed in a more explicitly Lacanian vein--is the fear we have of being too much for ourselves. In this book, both Bersani and Phillips recognize "the fear of jouissance, despite and because of the longing for it,...is not to be underestimated" (97).
Finally, perhaps the most interesting question raised by and in the book is this: must we understand ourselves in order to be happy? The authors do not quite put it this way, but instead note the assumption of most standard analytic therapy is that "whatever is strange about myself I must make familiar; recognition must replace bewilderment" (99). This they take to be the gist of Freud's famous (and famously mistranslated) "where id was, there shall ego be."
But why? One of the things Phillips has helped me to see over the years is that a certain degree of self-forgetfulness is very much to be welcomed. Put in concrete terms, I have realized--never more so than during this pandemic--that one way to even temporarily lift one's mood is to go do something concrete for someone else, forgetting about your own struggles for a time. Make soup for someone in a shelter, or help shovel the driveway of your elderly neighbor. Such seemingly "banal" things can in their own way be therapeutic.
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