Vol. 16 No. 3 · 10 February 1994
pages 13-14 | 4317 words
The Shock of the Old
Adam Phillips
- Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience by Christopher Bollas
Routledge, 294 pp, £14.99, April 1993, ISBN 0 415 08815 1
- Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory by Malcolm Bowie
Blackwell, 161 pp, £35.00, October 1993, ISBN 0 631 18925 4
For the patient in psychoanalysis the most disabling insights are the ones he cannot forget; and for the psychoanalyst, by the same token, the most misleading theories are the ones he cannot do without. Mental addictions, that is to say, are supposed by psychoanalysis to be the problem not the solution. People come for psychoanalysis when there is something they cannot forget, something they cannot stop telling themselves about their lives. And these dismaying repetitions – this unconscious limiting or coercion of the repertoire of lives and life-stories – create the illusion of time having stopped. In our repetitions we seem to be staying away from the future, keeping it at bay. What are called symptoms are these (failed) attempts at closure, at calling a halt to something. Like provisional deaths, they are spurious forms of mastery.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 4 · 24 February 1994
From James MacGibbon
The trouble for the layman when reading about psychoanalysis is that so much of the theorising is obfuscating, however clear it may be to the professional. I was puzzled by Adam Phillips’s review of books by Christopher Bollas and Malcolm Bowie (LRB, 10 February). What does he mean when he writes: ‘For the patient in psychoanalysis the most disabling insights are the ones he cannot forget?’ If they are disabling surely the analyst has failed. In my experience of Kleinian analysis some thirty years ago insights into one’s own character are often surprising, even shocking, but not disabling for they enable one to recognise character defects, come to terms with them, sometimes even change them for the better. Then (in parenthesis): ‘The best and the worst of psychoanalytical theory always verges on the mystical.’ In my experience ‘the mystical’ is the reverse of the truth. My analyst was very down to earth. Equally confusing is the statement that psychoanalytical ‘disciples’ – a term oddly suggestive of religion – ‘enact the catastrophe their leaders’ (another odd term) ‘are trying to avert.’ I don’t know about ‘Freudians becoming ascetic prigs’ and Winnicottians becoming ‘rigorously spontaneous’, but I do know that Kleinians do not ‘become enviously narrow-minded’ – whatever that term may mean. And who, anyway, does the envying? Adam Phillips speculates in the last sentence of his review: ‘Perhaps the function of psychoanalysis in the future will not be to inform but to evoke.’ Evocation is one way of informing the patient about himself and coming to know oneself is not a had concise definition of the function of psychoanalysis.
James MacGibbon
Manningtree, Essex
