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London Review of Books

What Can You Know? subscriber-only content

Adam Phillips

  • The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn  Buy this book

‘Tell me who you desire and I will tell you your history’ has become the shibboleth of post-Freudian autobiography, in which the lust for personal history has overridden the other, older kind of lust. Since everyone has a history it is now assumed that everyone has an autobiography in them. In this new solipsism we don’t want other people, we want to ‘recover’, ‘acknowledge’ or ‘mourn’ our losses; it is not new bodies we are after but knowledge of the only past that really matters, the individual past, from which much is expected. People become interested in autobiography, Freud implies, when they lose confidence in sexuality, when sex becomes a problem, the implication being that if we could have the right kind of sexual relations then the past wouldn’t bother us quite so much. Doubts about sex are doubts about the future.

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Adam Phillips’s On Kindness, written with Barbara Taylor, is out in January.