Adam Phillips

Most psychoanalytic literature is a contemporary version of the etiquette book; improving our internal manners, advising us on our best sexual behaviour (usually called maturity, or mental health or a decentred self). It is indeed, dismaying how quickly psychoanalysis has become the science of the sensible passions; as though its aim was to make people more intelligible to themselves rather than to realise how strange they are. When psychoanalysis makes too much sense, or makes sense of too much, it turns into exactly the symptom it is trying to cure: defensive knowingness. But there is nothing like sexuality for making a mockery of our self-knowledge. In our erotic lives, at least, our preferences do not always accord with our standards. We are excited by the oddest things, and sometimes people.

After all, one can only say something if one has learned to talk.

There has always been a resistance, at least among psychoanalysts themselves, to thinking of their work as mind-reading or fortune-telling. Despite the fact that most ordinary conversation is exactly this, or perhaps because it is, psychoanalysts have wanted to describe what they do as different, as rational even: dealing with the irrational but not dealing in it (‘On waking,’ Ferenczi writes mockingly to Freud, ‘one wants on no account to have thought something quite nonsensical or illogical’). It was important to Freud that psychoanalysis should not become a cult of the irrational. The unconscious may be disreputable, but the psychoanalyst must not be. And yet Freud’s description of the unconscious was a threat to, and a parody of, the more respectable versions of professional competence. If a psychoanalyst knows what’s in the unconscious, or knows how it works, she has a specific expertise. But if the unconscious is what cannot be anticipated, can there then be experts of the unknown? ‘The weather,’ as Freud puts it here, ‘of course never comes from the quarter one has been carefully observing.’

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.

The first chapter of Ernest Jones’s misleadingly entitled autobiography, Free Associations, ends with a bemusing paragraph about the Welsh ‘servant who acted also as a nurse’ during Jones’s early childhood: ‘One of my memories of this nurse was that she taught me two words to designate the male organ, one for it in a flaccid state, the other in an erect. It was an opulence of vocabulary I have not encountered since.’ As this superbly-edited correspondence shows, this childhood memory was a kind of symbolic omen, an uncanny foreshadowing of Jones’s later preoccupations. The translation of psychoanalysis – both trying to get it across and turning it into English – was to be Jones’s mission.’