Adam Phillips

Describing the two sexes as opposite or complementary, rather than useful to each other for certain things but not for others, promotes the misleading idea that we are all in search of completion. Bewitched by the notion of being complete, we become obsessed by notions of sameness and difference, by thoughts of what to include and what to reject in order to keep ourselves whole. But maintaining this icon of ourselves confronts us with a paradoxical question: if we have an identity what are we identical to? It is as though we need to know where we are by never being anywhere else. And one fundamental means of orientation, of self-recognition, is the difference between the sexes, despite the fact that in practice they keep leaking into each other. Once you stop pointing to body parts and start talking, the apparent differences between men and women begin to dissipate. So if we aren’t different from the opposite sex, what are we?

Auden once suggested that a literary critic should declare his ‘dream of Eden’ because ‘honesty demands that he describes it to his readers, so that they may be in a position to judge his judgments.’ Even though psychoanalysis ironises dreams of Eden – in psychoanalytic theory paradise is only for the losers – it would be useful for psychoanalysts to say something about these things, about the kind of world they would prefer to live in, and why they think psychoanalysis is a good way of both spending one’s time and contributing to this Eden. It will, after all, matter a great deal to their patients what stories they tend to tell themselves and their colleagues about, say, promiscuity, or socialism, or ambition. And, of course, about psychoanalysis and the significance of its history.’

A crucial incident in Patrimony comes when Roth’s aged and ill father Herman ‘beshats himself’, as he puts it:

This complaint at the uniformity of the world is really a complaint at not having been mixed profoundly enough with the diversity of the world.

The idea that literature, or any other discipline like boxing or song-writing, could modify psychoanalytic theory – that it could be a two-way street – has always been problematic for psychoanalysts. There is, of course, no reason to think a psychoanalyst’s interpretation of a boxing match would necessarily be more revealing than a boxer’s account of a psychoanalytic session. But psychoanalysts have worked on the rather misleading principle that psychoanalysis is only useful or interesting if it is in some sense right, rather than believing that it is another good way of speaking about certain things like love and loss and memory, as songs can be (and that, also like songs, it is only ever as good as it sounds). For most psychoanalysts, including Freud, Great Artists tend to provide either vivid illustration or prestigious confirmation of psychoanalytic insights. Melanie Klein, for example, found nothing she didn’t already know in the Oresteia, and even Lacan found Hamlet reassuring.’