Adam Phillips

We wouldn’t think of anything as a tragedy if we did not have a deeply ingrained sense of order already there to be affronted. Tragedy in life, and as art, exposes by violation our mostly unconscious assumptions about how the world should be; and how often we take for granted that it is as it should be – a world in which, say, no one ever takes revenge, or dies. ‘If we were all wicked,’ A.D. Nuttall writes, ‘there would, perhaps, be no problem.’ But the ‘perhaps’, as he knows, points to the problem. There is – the title of his shrewd and learned book acknowledges it – an unnerving, and not quite so easily explained, disparity between our profound fascination with tragic art and absolute horror of real tragedy. It is a difference calculated to expose our more unsettling assumptions about the value of art, and about what we might be doing when we are enjoying something that appals us.’

I can swim like the others only I have a better memory than the others. I have not forgotten my former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it my ability to swim is of no avail and I cannot swim after all.

For anyone interested in the history of psychoanalysis, or indeed, in how people start having new kinds of conversation, The Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society are an inexhaustible source of amusement and instruction. From 1906 to 1915, in his role as official secretary to the Society, Freud’s keen and earnest young student, Otto Rank, recorded the first formal psychoanalytic discussions by the first men who thought of themselves as psychoanalysts. A surprisingly wide range of topics is covered in the three hefty volumes published in America in the early Sixties: from, as perhaps one might expect, masturbation and female assassins – ‘Federn comments that to slips of the tongue and the hand, we must now add slips of shooting’ – to works of philosophy, psychology and literature. There are early moments of what would become an influential new genre, psychoanalytic seriousness – ‘According to Bölsche, clothes are the cause of nudity’ – and glimpses of esoteric romance: ‘the genitalia are said to be the first gods, and religious feeling is derived from the ecstasies of intercourse.’ It is clear, despite the almost palpable presence of Freud in these pages – ‘our great father in Vienna’, as Wittels calls him in his memoirs, ‘the greatest psychological genius of all time’ – that a lot of these people were relishing the demand that they speak their minds, and on such diverse topics. A profession that encouraged people to say whatever occurred to them is bound to be interesting to observe when it wants to keep to the point.’

In a contemporary review of The Renaissance in the Pall Mall Gazette, the critic Sidney Colvin wrote that ‘the book is not one for any beginner to turn to in search of “information”.’ ‘Information’ was in inverted commas not because there were no facts or respectable opinions in the book, but because Pater did not seem to believe in information, as it was customarily understood in criticism of the arts. As most reviewers seemed to agree, he wasn’t doing something new, he was doing something badly. ‘In the matter of historical fact,’ Denis Donoghue writes, joining in, as it were, ‘Pater also took liberties, so many that it is a pity he did not derive more satisfaction from them.’ But Pater was satisfied not by getting it wrong, but by not having to get it right. It was his style to affirm invention over accuracy and, indeed, satisfaction over argument.