Newfangled Inner Worlds 
Adam Phillips
Malingering, the OED tells us, is something originally done by the armed forces: ‘To pretend illness, or to produce or protract illness, in order to escape duty; said esp. of soldiers and sail-ors.’ To avoid conscription (the first usage is recorded in 1820), or to escape the horrors of what the military authorities have referred to since at least the 17th century as ‘engagement’, has always required a certain amount of ingenuity. And the onus has usually been on the medical profession to decide when someone is pretending, producing or protracting an illness to avoid their duties: the implication being, as the definition suggests, that the malingerer is responsible for his condition. His illness is an artefact, and the escape artist is a weak character. ‘Genius’, Sartre said, is the word we use for people who get themselves out of impossible situations: so is ‘malingerer’.
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Adam Phillips’s Intimacies, written with Leo Bersani, is out now. A book on the pleasures of kindness, written with Barbara Taylor, is due in January.
Other articles by this contributor:
Remember me · Bret Easton Ellis
No reason for not asking · Empson’s War on God
Bored with Sex? · Nasty Turns
What You Really Want · Edmund White
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