Product Description

We would all like to think of ourselves as freedom-loving, egalitarian and democratic. Yet Freud has taught us that everything we do and say is rich in ambiguity and ambivalence: we are riven by conflict and antagonism, within and without. But if it is true that our inner lives are one unflagging drama of desire and dependence, of greed, rivalry and abjection, then how can we ever presume to know what might be good for someone else? In these essays, the author of "Darwin's Worms", "The Beast in the Nursery" and "Houdini's Box" examines such topics as our fantasies of freedom, the nature of inhibition, and the social role of mockery. Throughout, he demonstrates how psychoanalysis allows people to speak and be heard.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #418089 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 257 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Adam Phillips's Equals attempts to relocate psychoanalysis as a natural part--and even a necessary part--of an engaged and unregimented life. Phillips is a politically aware writer. He is not a "party man" in any sense. But he has notions about democracy that inform, not just his view of psychoanalytic practice, but also his ideas about human freedom and happiness. Phillips reminds us that people suffer, not because they are in conflict with themselves, but because they have suppressed a conflict by imposing an unconscious authoritarian order over their thoughts and feelings.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to recreate emotional fluency. (One assumes the job of politics is to deal with the fallout.) Like democracy, psychoanalysis should recognise and legitimate conflict which an authoritarian (superegoistic) order would suppress. Drawing parallels between the idea of free association in democracy, and the practice of free association in psychoanalysis, Phillips writes: "hearing all those voices… may itself be a kind of happiness". Phillips's arguments are meticulous, and sometimes fussy. The general reader will find some passages obscure, but there is never the sense that Phillips is being deliberately obscurantist. His compassion--as a writer, as an analyst, and as a literary critic--is admirable. A child psychotherapist by training, his essay "Childhood Again" brings his strongest qualities together--ideological nous, close argument and compassion--in an entirely successful and memorable synthesis. --Simon Ings

Review
In this engrossing collection of essays by analyst and literary critic Adam Phillips, the author is concerned with the concepts of sociability, democracy and equality. He queries how far psychoanalysis is capable of legitimating the internal conflicts that would allow people to achieve equal and fulfilled lives since psychoanalysis itself demonstrates a profound ambivalence to democratic values. One of the dearly held tenets of modern life is that although people are patently not identical, it is possible for them to be equal. Phillips examines the notion of equality through the eyes of a number of distinguished theorists, including Lacan, Bion and Mouffe. In a successful analysis, he concludes, a person would have to be able to bear listening to what other people have to say and to achieve a way of welcoming conflict and disagreement. While psychoanalysis appears to extend the range of the permissible in thought and feeling, it actually 'ironises' the idea of freedom. This is because the Oedipus complex and the power of unconscious thoughts and desires inform all versions of psychoanalysis, demonstrating how imprisoned we are. We commonly use ridicule and mockery to protect against the emotional terror of democracy and use inhibitions to protect ourselves from internal and external conflict In the section of the book headed 'Characters', these issues are explored further within a collection of discursive reviews of books including Christopher Isherwood's Lost Years: A Memoir 1945-5 and Steinberg's Speak You Also. Inhibition features largely in the Isherwood autobiography, with Phillips describing it as an enquiry into the art of self-exposure. Since Isherwood relates his experiences in the 1940s in the third person, recording what he calls 'the brutal facts', his is a novel attempt to put his younger self into a dispassionate and inhibition-free analysis. Issues raised in the review of Paul Steinberg's book on his incarceration in a concentration camp include sociability, madness and morality. Phillips compares and contrasts this account with Primo Levi's much earlier narrative of his experiences in the same camp. Levi was only able to comprehend the brutal conditions by treating them as some kind of intolerable joke and by hanging onto his notions of morality. Steinberg on the other hand approached his situation as an exercise in adaptability and survival in which morality had been overtaken by events. Phillips refuses to compromise or take anything for granted, throwing up a veritable duststorm of questions heavily loaded with qualifications. General readers may find this book a challenge but it is one that is well worth undertaking. (Kirkus UK)