'Psychoanalysis Is One More Way of Taking People Seriously': Adam Phillips in Conversation with Emma Williams
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| Title: | 'Psychoanalysis Is One More Way of Taking People Seriously': Adam Phillips in Conversation with Emma Williams |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Phillips, Adam, Williams, Emma |
| Source: | Journal of Philosophy of Education. Feb 2022 56(1):180-189. |
| Availability: | Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 10 |
| Publication Date: | 2022 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Descriptive |
| Descriptors: | Psychiatry, Child Psychology, Authors, Biographies, Emotional Disturbances, Mental Health, Mental Disorders, COVID-19, Pandemics, Health Services, Educational Environment, Philosophy, Socialization, School Role, Student Interests, Educational History |
| DOI: | 10.1111/1467-9752.12624 |
| ISSN: | 0309-8249 |
| Abstract: | Adam Phillips is a leading psychoanalyst and author. Phillips was educated at Clifton College and studied English Literature at Oxford University. He trained to be a psychoanalyst at the Institute of Child Psychology. Across the course of his professional career, he has worked at Guys Hospital, with a school for 'maladjusted children', at Camberwell Child Guidance Clinic and at Charing Cross Hospital in the Department of Child Psychiatry. He now works in private practice. Phillips is the author of many works, including "Terrors and Experts" (1997), "In Writing: Essays on Literature" (2016), "Attention Seeking" (2019) and his most recent book, "The Cure for Psychoanalysis" (2021). He also served as the General Editor of the New Penguin Classics Translations of the works of Sigmund Freud. The conversation begins by exploring the way mental health has become a topic of public interest as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The opportunities and challenges in Phillips's experience working with schools and for young people's mental health services during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s are then discussed. Questions about the nature of psychoanalysis are introduced, and the discussion turns towards the relationship between philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis. There is a brief discussion of connections between Phillips's work and the philosophy of Stanley Cavell. Phillips's essays on schools and education are explored in connection with ideas of omniscience, sadomasochism and 'experiments in living'. The conversation ends with a glimpse of school as a place to cultivate one's interest and one's sociability with others. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Entry Date: | 2022 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1333992 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwGl6aJizWEhjAWS8HW8XCdjAAAA4zCB4AYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHSMIHPAgEAMIHJBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDB0tzLBEsmOlEXU48wIBEICBm7l5Iwc1rsy3l6pMcZJMwOGh00LSYbkH0W1brVKaXx2GvfZkgH6eXK0FTt0WqdOHE21G9vJJn5t1-eU07fLhywPBa4c7WsAL51r3-ohzNRjuR9cTVxaYI-4q6elFFq37i0Tkr_6BKHq1eO_L5A-HE1C5oeJT1Q1YxrgqnU3AZZgQ8icIUU1dIgjtMOUcVZZEtbCqds0IBUhzj9hU Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0156555620;7r501feb.22;2022Apr29.06:59;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0156555620-1">'Psychoanalysis is one more way of taking people seriously': Adam Phillips in conversation with Emma Williams </title> <p>Adam Phillips is a leading psychoanalyst and author. Phillips was educated at Clifton College and studied English Literature at Oxford University. He trained to be a psychoanalyst at the Institute of Child Psychology. Across the course of his professional career, he has worked at Guys Hospital, with a school for 'maladjusted children', at Camberwell Child Guidance Clinic and at Charing Cross Hospital in the Department of Child Psychiatry. He now works in private practice. Phillips is the author of many works, including Terrors and Experts (1997), In Writing: Essays on Literature (2016), Attention Seeking (2019) and his most recent book, The Cure for Psychoanalysis (2021). He also served as the General Editor of the New Penguin Classics Translations of the works of Sigmund Freud. The conversation begins by exploring the way mental health has become a topic of public interest as a result of the COVID‐19 pandemic. The opportunities and challenges in Phillips's experience working with schools and for young people's mental health services during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s are then discussed. Questions about the nature of psychoanalysis are introduced, and the discussion turns towards the relationship between philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis. There is a brief discussion of connections between Phillips's work and the philosophy of Stanley Cavell. Phillips's essays on schools and education are explored in connection with ideas of omniscience, sadomasochism and 'experiments in living'. The conversation ends with a glimpse of school as a place to cultivate one's interest and one's sociability with others.</p> <p>Keywords: Cavell; education; Freud; mental health; philosophy; psychoanalysis</p> <p> <bold>Emma Williams (EW)</bold>: We are currently living through the COVID‐19 pandemic, and people have come to talk about this in relation to mental health. To what extent do you think that this interest in mental health has to do with the pandemic, and how far is it to do with larger processes of change in society and culture?</p> <p> <bold>Adam Phillips (AP)</bold>: The phrase 'mental health', of course, is itself very weird, because it's hard to know what the 'mental' refers to, and when presumably people use this phrase, they're talking about how they feel emotionally—what their thoughts are like, how anxious or agitated or depressed they are. I think it isn't surprising when people are in lockdown and isolated—whether by themselves or their immediate families—that two things happen. One is, of course, that people are left living in their minds much more than they usually do. But also they're prone to regress with the people they're with. And I think people begin to start feeling things they don't remember having felt before.</p> <p>I think the other side of this coin is that in order to manage being locked‐down, and therefore being isolated, people have to shut down themselves. So what happens is that people adapt by closing down and then they feel empty and closed‐down. So they then become preoccupied, of course. Because everybody lives in a state of frustration, everybody becomes very preoccupied with what they don't have—with their frustration—and at a certain point to stop the frustration turning into rage, people then begin to give themselves a psychic anaesthetic. So people become a bit blank or bored—or something like that.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: The public mental health conversation has brought about a proliferation of advice in terms of hints, tips and techniques for looking after one's mental health. We hear how it is important to take a walk, speak to a friend, take time out etc. Do you think these approaches can address the kinds of problems people are experiencing?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: It depends in a way on what you take the problem to be, because some problems are deeply rooted in people's histories, some problems are not really problems and some problems have causes and consequences that people are unaware of. So I think it's hard to generalise about this really. I do think that the point of having a culture and society is that it represents resources to deal with difficulties in living, and who knows what's going to be useful for a given individual?</p> <p>People should have access to what is available. Somebody who does what I do may have something that somebody finds useful. As might someone who does aromatherapy. As might someone who's interested in bird‐watching. We never know who's going to say the interesting or useful thing. But I do think that we're the only resource we've got. And so I think that part of the art of this is seeing it as a communal problem. And therefore it's very much about how people—in the best sense—can use each other to help each other or fortify each other.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: Do you think the current levels of suffering and unhappiness are the signs of a crisis that is entirely new, or do you think these are problems that have been around in one way or another for some time?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: I think that there's a crisis in the sense of people finding it more and more difficult to live. So there's a crisis in health, so to speak, and obviously we live in a very polluted environment as well. But the scale of envy and competition in this culture is too much for them to bear.</p> <p>To put this as crudely as possible: I think that capitalism drives people mad. Once you live in a world in which competition trumps collaboration, it's as though there's no shared project; we're all competing with one another for limited resources. So I think it's good that it's become a matter of concern in the public realm that people are really suffering. I think it's also important that there are many descriptions of what they're suffering from, because the risk is of thinking that what we need are solutions to mental health problems, whereas actually we need political solutions, and the mental health problems are symptoms of a political catastrophe that is occurring.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: Then it's not as though the pandemic has suddenly caused this mental health epidemic?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: No. We've got to differentiate between symptoms and causes here. People express their distress in symptoms, in unhappiness, and, at one level you can think that there's a certain amount of unhappiness that everyone has to bear by virtue of being a person, but then there are culturally sanctioned unhappinesses.</p> <p>There's a reason why there's a huge mental health/drug industry:partly because a lot of people are suffering and partly because a lot of people are being exploited by it.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: I'd like to talk to you about the idea that schools today might be a kind of 'culturally sanctioned unhappiness', but before that perhaps I can ask you about your own experience working with schools and in young people's mental health services for the National Health Service.</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: This was during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. I was working as a child psychotherapist for the NHS in child guidance clinics and hospitals, child psychiatry departments. But of course we did a lot of outreach work, and I also worked in a school, which was then called a school for maladjusted children (of course, it wouldn't be called that now). These were all children who were not yet in prison or in hospital—so, troubled children. In that school, I didn't see the children. I saw all the teachers for an hour a week to talk about their work. So I got very interesting bulletins about the children.</p> <p>Then I did groups in other settings. In those days and in the areas I worked in, there was a great deal of material deprivation, so most of the children I saw and most of the teachers I worked with were working in schools where a lot of people were really very poor and had suffered trans‐generational exploitation, brutality etc. Not everybody, but a lot of people. And a lot of the children, of course, came from very unhappy families and homes, so there were a lot of what we would call traumatised people.</p> <p>When I worked at Camberwell Guidance Centre, which was on the North Peckham estate, there were a lot of very impoverished people. A lot of the children I saw were African‐Caribbean, and the extraordinary thing in those days was of course that there were no Black workers and there was no discussion of racism at all. And I also worked in what was then called the Juvenile Bureau, which was with the police who worked with children who were underage. They referred children to us, and the children had to come, so it was a non‐starter in terms of psychotherapy. So I would say to the children, 'I wouldn't come if I were you, but you've got to', and I would then tell them what I could do, and would get them to decide if there was anything I could do with them.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: You mentioned that many of the young people you saw were Black. Could you say more about how psychoanalysis can help in discussions of race and mental health?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: Yes, but the trouble is that psychoanalysis came out of a white supremacist culture as a lot of things do. It is very striking how little psychoanalytic writing there is about racism. When I trained, there was no discussion about racism at all. But I do think that psychoanalysis has got useful accounts of why people hate people, and of what people do with the unacceptable parts of themselves. You can't explain it all by projection; obviously, it is not as simple as that. But I do think that psychoanalysis is essentially about how we manage the unacceptable in ourselves and in other people. That it seems to me would have a lot to say potentially, but, or and, it needs to be re‐described and translated out of some of its origins, I think, to be able to engage people properly. Because the risk is that psychoanalysis colonises racism. That it appears to be the total explanation of racism and it isn't that simple.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: What were some of the positive aspects of your work with young people during that time?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: There were a lot of opportunities, and there were a lot of very good people who worked in the services in those days who were quite idealistic. So, for example, at Camberwell we started a drop‐in clinic, so you could literally walk in off the street and be seen by somebody, often seen by somebody several times. And these were wonderful clinics. I don't mean that everyone was cured; I just mean that they were good and they were valuable. As always, demand was way in excess of supply, so there were quite long waiting lists. When I started I could see children and families for as long as I wanted to. By the time I left, people were saying, 'We'll pay for three sessions.' In other words, capitalist neo‐liberalism had taken over and it became all about outcome studies and profitability. And therefore it was really depressing, and I left.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: It sounds like we could draw a parallel between what was happening to health care as a result of 'outcomes studies' and what was happening to education at that time.</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: Yes. It was happening everywhere. The thing that we are now drowning in was beginning. The key words were 'outcome studies'. And psychotherapy doesn't work by those criteria—it's a different thing. So effectively what was being studied was our efficiency, and the model was to cure people as quickly as possible and get them back to work or school. There was no interest in the meaning of the symptoms or no sense that the symptoms themselves might be a protest against the system. The assumption was that the world is fine, but people have got to get back into it. So anybody who was suffering from anything was deemed to have a problem as though the machine had gone wrong, as opposed to them communicating very important thoughts about the world they were living in.</p> <p>*</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: Perhaps it will be helpful at this point to look more specifically at your conception of what psychoanalysis is. Indeed, it is noticeable in your work that you see a connection between psychoanalysis and (a certain idea of) education. How important is that relation in your conception of psychoanalysis? Is it part of what drew you to work in this field?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: Of course, I don't really know the answer to why I was drawn to psychoanalysis. I'll obviously say something about it, but I don't know why I was drawn to it except that I was really interested in it. I knew I didn't want to be an academic. I don't mean I had a choice (I don't know if I was then clever enough), but I was choosing between being an academic—I thought then I might become an academic—and then I discovered psychoanalysis. Then it became clear to me that, in both, I would be using texts to talk about the meaning of life with people.</p> <p>I thought that psychoanalysis was really another version of education. I thought it started where education stopped. It was very much about what stopped people digesting their experiences—what the obstacles were to their sociability. And I loved my education, and I really believe in education. I think it's the best thing going—not all kinds, but some of it.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: Another distinct feature of your approach to psychoanalysis is the way you keep alive its relationship to philosophy and literature. This is something I wanted to ask you about further. As a way of introducing this dimension, perhaps I can refer us to the appreciative review essay Stanley Cavell published on your book <emph>Terrors and Experts</emph> in the <emph>London Review of Books</emph>.[<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref1">1</reflink>] Cavell highlights the way you keep in view the relationship between psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature in your writings. Could you say something about this review essay, and your interest in Cavell in your own work?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: Well, the experience of discovering that Stanley Cavell had read one of my books was astounding to me. It's a bit of an exaggeration but it was a bit like being discovered, in the sense that he was a hero of mine obviously and then suddenly he's reviewed my book. So that was astounding—is astounding. And I thought, as always with Cavell, if you happen to like his stuff, everything he writes is interesting. And it's not that I felt he understood me but I did feel that here were lots of things that I thought I was doing that he got. For example, he talks about the link with ordinary language philosophy—and the ordinariness of the encounter between analyst and therapist. The idea that psychoanalysis is not about esoteric knowledge or being a genius or a guru—it's the opposite. Psychoanalysis is one more way of taking people seriously. I love in Cavell the mixture of incredible erudition and sensibility and a really broad interest in things. You get a sense of a genuinely democratic intelligence even though he's also very mandarin in some ways. But whatever it is he's on about, to me he's on about something very, very important. And so the review was illuminating and interesting. I was delighted he liked the book—but it was an interesting piece of writing, I thought.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: A more critical question Cavell raises in that review article is about your description of psychoanalysis as telling stories (to ourselves, about ourselves). To me, Cavell seems a little resistant to that way of accounting for what is going on in psychoanalysis.</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: The word 'story' for me is like the word 'play'. It slightly makes me cringe in a way, because it's so overused—and I'm not really interested in stories; I'm interested in sentences. But I think that one version of psychoanalysis says that the project is to be able to find some kind of satisfying narrative of your life and of your thoughts and feelings. Another kind of analysis says that that is exactly the problem—the creation of coherent narratives is the most defensive thing we do. And I think that both are interesting, but I favour the second view in the sense that I think that trying to establish our coherence is the problem. Not that one wants to idealise disarray, but I do think that people can be too coherent, and that when we seem most plausible and coherent, we are in fact at our most defensive. And that's the kind of thought you can have when you read psychoanalysis. And that's what I love—the romance of things being both genuinely unknown and evading one's cognitive grasp.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: Perhaps we could try to pursue these ideas a little further. In your introduction to <emph>The Penguin Freud Reader</emph>, you have written that: 'Freud is the writer for people who want to find out what words may have done to them, and may still be doing.'[<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref2">2</reflink>] Can you explain what you mean by that?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: It's obvious in a way—I don't mean your question is obvious—but the picture that is being presented here is obvious, which is that we do live in a world of words before we understand them and can use them. And I don't know whether you know of a philosopher called Michel Henry, who wrote a book called <emph>The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis</emph>. It's anti‐Lacanian in the sense that it says both that the capacity of representation is useful and that it's the problem too. We have an affective bodily life that is way in excess of our representations of it and just different from our representations of it. It's as though language is both our best tool and a foreign body we take into ourselves. I think that's very compelling: that there really is a bodily life that eludes our capacity for representation. And things go on between people that are just other than the verbal exchange—as well as the verbal exchange. That seems to be both interesting and true. Also, it seems to be very important to include that. So with psychoanalysis—the 'talking cure'—Freud is very interested in the effect of people's words on other people and on themselves. And of course what we've made of the words we've heard and overheard because we've been talked to all our lives, and this must be extraordinary to begin with. I think that clearly this is what Freud—and this is what Lacan picks up on—is really exercised and interested in: the fact of how powerful words are, how hypnotising they are, how transformative they can be. When you move from hypnotism to psychoanalysis, you move from trance, either to another kind of trance or to a belief in verbal exchange. It's as though Freud is trying to work out what are the limits of verbal exchange. What can we do for each other with words?</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: Does this also involve the idea that we are not fully in control of our words and that they can betray us and get away from us?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: Yes—or, in other words, they speak on our behalf. And also there's obviously an experiential mystery here, which is that words just occur to us. For example, you may have written certain questions, but we have not prepared this conversation because we couldn't. And in this conversation all these words have occurred to us to exchange. That's extraordinary—obviously the most ordinary thing in the world, but weird—because obviously they're coming from somewhere and we depend upon what occurs to us.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: Does this help to explain why psychoanalysis for you is closer to literature and philosophy, than to medicine? The interest psychoanalysis takes in language and words and what they can do makes it less like a medical profession?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: It just seems to me that there's an obvious progression here, or overlap. It's weird in a way that psychoanalytic writing is so often so boring. Because the material of psychoanalysis is the material of art: that is what literature, music and painting are made of. So for me it's a continuum; there are differing and competing forms of representation and descriptions of who we are and who we want to be.</p> <p>*</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: Perhaps we can move on to look at some of your essays, and some of the things you have said about education. One example is your essay 'Psychoanalysis as Education'.[<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref3">3</reflink>] There, you talk about 19th‐century ideas of education as 'ideological programming', and you say it is a story about education we have inherited. Could you say some more about that?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: Well, it's the difference between—it isn't the right word but—brainwashing and learning. That's to say, if I'm being compelled to learn something off by heart and I'm being intimidated into doing this, then I've got to invent a self that can manage this demand. It's an extrinsic demand to my nature. I have to do it because I'm frightened if I don't. As opposed to whatever it is I find myself wanting to learn, and in that sense the student chooses the teacher. I think you know pretty quickly who's got something to teach you. You have to manage the people who've got nothing for you and you learn from the people who have. And I think it's the difference between compliance and genuine interest. So I may learn lots of things that I'm not particularly interested in but that I need to learn if I want to sustain my relationship with an institution or a person. And then there's everything that's noncompliant. It seems to me noncompliance is where the action is—where there's a feeling of enhanced aliveness or enhanced possibility. Everything that unduly pre‐empts a sense of possibility or everything that smacks of omniscience is to be distrusted.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: And a certain approach to education adopts an omniscient position with respect to the child?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: Yes. We're stuck with the asymmetry of adults and children. Adults have to know what's best for children, and no adult knows what's best for another adult in my view. Broadly speaking, it's to do with the difference between the need to coerce and persuade and convince somebody, and being interested in them.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: But what about the idea that there is a received body of knowledge that children should learn—'the best of what has been thought and said'—and that this is something good for them?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: I know—but I wonder about this. I mean, clearly children are being acculturated into a particular society. But we know that it is a political issue about what people assume people need to know to become members of society. The moment that I am interested in is when children (or indeed adults) come across something that they feel enlivened by. They don't know why, but they're suddenly really interested in stamp collecting, Proust, the weather, whatever—it's something that gets to them. And that seems to me the moment of education. Everything else, I think, you have to develop a false self to manage it. So, for example, I was not interested in or good at maths. If the world had been designed according to my needs, I would obviously have learned the basics, but they would have been very basic. I wouldn't remotely have considered doing O Levels. I thought a lot of my time was wasted given how much pleasure I found in other things I was interested in. It seemed to me murderous to have to spend time doing things one was not interested in or moved by.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: Are there better or worse things to be interested in? Is it a good thing if a young person gets very interested in shopping, or their appearance, or posting pictures on Instagram, for example?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: This, it seems to me, is when education comes in. Whoever we are we decide—we've decided on our experiences—that we don't like shopping, or we don't like pornography, or whatever it is. So I think the onus is on us to present and provide a compelling account of an alternative—and not to stop them doing it, not to be bullied out of it. That is what education should be doing. It should be offering alternative versions. Not with a view to coercing people but with a view to interesting them and seeing if it comes to life.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: So schools should be places for young people to find things to value and take an interest in?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: Yes, and for re‐describing the things they are interested in such that they can be seen in different aspects.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: Another interesting point you make in 'Psychoanalysis as Education' is that psychoanalysis could be better conceived as a contribution to the 19th‐century debate about education, rather than a contribution to medicine.[<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref4">4</reflink>] You suggest how free association and dream work could be the means for another kind of education. Could you expand on that? How far could this kind of education happen in schools today?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: I don't know enough about contemporary schooling to speak with any kind of authority on this. But I think what's very 'educational' is two people speaking as freely as they can to each other. It's not going to get you an A Level or a job. I do think that lots of very interesting things happen when one is encouraged to free‐associate. Let's imagine that education was based on our dreams. Every night we are making something extraordinary in our unconscious. As Nietzsche said, 'Every man is an artist in his dreams', so there's no shortage of material. Clearly, we do need lots of stuff from outside—but also whatever the interplay is between the outside and the inside, it's full and is rich with material.</p> <p>It's the difference between whether one values information over evocation. I'm just temperamentally more interested in evocation. It's not that I'm not interested in information—it's just that it's not that interesting to me. I don't really want to know facts. Some facts I want to know, but a lot of facts I don't want to know. Whereas feelings, atmospheres, thoughts etc. are things that appeal to me. Things that are more indefinite, I think—things I don't have to submit to.</p> <p>It's as though—in psychoanalytic language—the question is, 'Is there an alternative to sado‐masochistic relationships?' I mean, does my being strong need to make you feel weak? Is that the basic model, one way or another? Because that seems to be a terror of mutuality, of free exchange between people. And I think that a lot of education—a lot of a lot of things—are sado‐masochistic. Somebody's in charge and knows, and somebody doesn't know, and one has to inform the other without losing their prestige. Something like that.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: Does this mean there is something problematic about teaching, then? From a psychoanalytic point of view, is it inherently disturbed in some way?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: In psychoanalytic language, it would be about transference. You are being invested with all sorts of wishes, hopes, fears etc. and you are in a position of authority. You apparently know something they don't. It is a bad picture of relations between people, and it's useful at doing certain things. But I agree there is something very tricky about it. It is like Nietzsche's account of Socrates as the ugliest man, that this is just a huge act of seduction. It's very interesting and productive. It's not just about two people imparting knowledge to each other. It is that as well, but it is certainly not only that.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: In your book <emph>Attention Seeking</emph> you refer to John Stuart Mill's idea of 'experiments in living'.[<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref5">5</reflink>] Could you say more about your interest in that idea? Where and how might there be places for 'experiments in living' in schools?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: Yes. I think it's a great idea, because I think that people should be taught—made interested in—risks. And it's really useful (and of course psychoanalysis is good on this), on the one hand, to know what are the conscious risks that one shies away from but also, on the other, what one's unconscious repertoire of risks is—and what's inhibiting them? And these are useful things to know because that's where the unknown future exists. The future exists everywhere, but it's there in terms of action. There's a very interesting psychoanalyst called Roger Money‐Kyrle; he was an early Kleinian. He talks about what he calls 'the irrelevance of inhibition', and it's a very interesting thought because in a way inhibition is of course very relevant but also it may not be. And so if you're encouraging children and adults to make experiments in living, you're not programming them, you're giving them the opportunity to try something out and come to their own conclusions about it. And what it discloses is, of course, that everything's an experiment in living. What else could it be? But it's useful to be aware of this because, then, one can more intently embark upon this—if one wants to.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: I assume, though, that what we are talking about here is not something that one could have as a project. It's not like someone should wake up in the morning and think 'today I'm going to have an experiment in living!', or something like that?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: No, you can't do that. But you can live your life as if, when possible experiments in living turn up, you take them—try them out.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: I wonder whether we can connect this to something you observe about Emerson's philosophy in your essay 'Emerson and the Impossibilities of Style'. You say: 'for Emerson the original sin is of stasis, of renewal refused, of form as fixity.'[<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref6">6</reflink>] Could you say a bit more about this idea in relation to children and experiments in living?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: It's an ongoing dilemma, this. Because if you think of this in terms of child development, children are not revolutionaries; children are not Deleuzian philosophers. They need—in my view—a certain amount of stability and reliability. But from that significant reliability, they can then make experiments in living. If they've got unreliability they're terrified. So they either become compulsive risk‐takers or they never take a risk in their lives. So I do think that child development is really useful and interesting because it gives you pictures of developmental stages. I think it's not odd that there's a temptation towards fixity, but what's difficult is to experience the pleasures of non‐fixity. We truly need both, but the risk is that one occludes the other, that what really runs our life are more and more certainties. Emerson seems to me astonishing. When you read Emerson, you think this is clearly the world we're living in.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: Yes. One thing that strikes me as important in Emerson too is the acknowledgement of the tension—that is, that along with the imperative to keep things moving, there is also recognition of the fixed nature of things.</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: But it's a paradoxical thing, because things have to be kept moving—but things are moving. It's a very weird fact, but we're changing every single second of our lives. But we can't experience that—psycho‐biologically—we are changing. And what Emerson is trying to attune us to is the scale of the flux that we're living in, and that being an inspiration rather than a nightmare.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: I wanted to ask you something about your essay 'Should School Make You Happy?'[<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref7">7</reflink>] What was that essay was responding to? What ideas are you looking to develop?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: I imagine that that essay must have come out of many things: my own experience of school, my children's experience at school and all the children I saw who were at school. I do think the question of happiness in relation to education is very interesting: whether it has to be our primary value, and if it is our primary value, what do we then have to do? Because you could think that school is an education in being happy, or education is finding out what makes you happy—which would be a perfectly useful, plausible way of thinking about it. But, of course, there are a lot of good things that don't make us happy, and that seems to me the thing that needs to be opened up here.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: So happiness shouldn't be understood as an agenda for schools or educational institutions?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: It could be really rather disturbing in a way because school could be like a benign version of Mao's training camps, forcing people to be free. It seems to me that happiness is not a great aim—it's a great side effect.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: There is also the question about what happiness is: How do we define it?</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: Yes, of course. Freud says happiness is very subjective. The problematic idea is collective happiness. We all have to share what makes us feel better.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: From a more cynical perspective. we could say the happiness agenda (and the mental health agenda, for that matter) is just a way of ensuring young people function appropriately in a neoliberal society. 'Curing' people is really a matter of getting them to be more productive—</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: —and getting them back into the consumption cycle.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: This brings us around to some of the things discussed at the start of the conversation and the problems that were affecting the young people you were seeing when you were working for the NHS and with schools.</p> <p> <bold>AP</bold>: It seemed clear pretty quickly that a lot of the problems children have in school were either emotional problems to do with their homes or they were genuine critiques of the school as an institution. In other words, I didn't think that the children were the problem exactly. I thought that the children in their inhibitions and disabilities were voicing something about what was going on in their world. They didn't know that, but that was what actually was happening.</p> <p>For me, the only point of going to school is to have friends and find out if there's anything that interests you. Just that. Education is all about sociability. You go to school to make friends and practise sociability. The learning bit is pretext. It is really about what you enjoy about other people, how you get to enjoy people's company and what inhibits you from doing that. Now obviously schools are not orientated to that, but I think this should be their thing. All the learning stuff ... the priority should be about relationships, about how people get on with each other, and all these subjects we learn are mediums through which we do this. That would be my bias, if I was in charge.</p> <p> <bold>EW</bold>: Adam Phillips, thank you very much.</p> <ref id="AN0156555620-2"> <title> Footnotes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref1" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Stanley Cavell's Review Essay 'Finding Words' was published in the <emph>London Review of Books</emph>, 20th February 1997. Available online at: https://<ulink href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n04/stanley-cavell/finding-words">www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n04/stanley-cavell/finding-words</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref2" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Phillips, A. (Ed.)<emph>The</emph><emph>Penguin Freud reader</emph>. London: Penguin, p. 7.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref3" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Phillips, A. (2004) Psychoanalysis as education. <emph>Psychoanalytic Review</emph>, 91(6), p. 784.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref4" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Phillips, A. (2004) Psychoanalysis as education. <emph>Psychoanalytic Review</emph>, 91(6), p. 786.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref5" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> Phillips, A. (2019) <emph>Attention seeking</emph>. London: Penguin, p. 10</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref6" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> Phillips, A. (Ed.) (2018) Emerson and the impossibilities of style. In his:<emph>In</emph><emph>Writing: Essays on Literature</emph>. London: Penguin, p. 98.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib7" idref="ref7" type="bt">7</bibl> <bibtext> Phillips, A. (2010) Should schools make you happy? In his: <emph>On balance</emph>. London: Penguin.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By Adam Phillips and Emma Williams</p> <p>Reported by Author; Author</p> </aug> |
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| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: 'Psychoanalysis Is One More Way of Taking People Seriously': Adam Phillips in Conversation with Emma Williams – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Phillips%2C+Adam%22">Phillips, Adam</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Williams%2C+Emma%22">Williams, Emma</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Journal+of+Philosophy+of+Education%22"><i>Journal of Philosophy of Education</i></searchLink>. Feb 2022 56(1):180-189. – Name: Avail Label: Availability Group: Avail Data: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 10 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2022 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Descriptive – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Psychiatry%22">Psychiatry</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Child+Psychology%22">Child Psychology</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Authors%22">Authors</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Biographies%22">Biographies</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Emotional+Disturbances%22">Emotional Disturbances</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Mental+Health%22">Mental Health</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Mental+Disorders%22">Mental Disorders</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22COVID-19%22">COVID-19</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Pandemics%22">Pandemics</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Health+Services%22">Health Services</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Environment%22">Educational Environment</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Philosophy%22">Philosophy</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Socialization%22">Socialization</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22School+Role%22">School Role</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Student+Interests%22">Student Interests</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+History%22">Educational History</searchLink> – Name: DOI Label: DOI Group: ID Data: 10.1111/1467-9752.12624 – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 0309-8249 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: Adam Phillips is a leading psychoanalyst and author. Phillips was educated at Clifton College and studied English Literature at Oxford University. He trained to be a psychoanalyst at the Institute of Child Psychology. Across the course of his professional career, he has worked at Guys Hospital, with a school for 'maladjusted children', at Camberwell Child Guidance Clinic and at Charing Cross Hospital in the Department of Child Psychiatry. He now works in private practice. Phillips is the author of many works, including "Terrors and Experts" (1997), "In Writing: Essays on Literature" (2016), "Attention Seeking" (2019) and his most recent book, "The Cure for Psychoanalysis" (2021). He also served as the General Editor of the New Penguin Classics Translations of the works of Sigmund Freud. The conversation begins by exploring the way mental health has become a topic of public interest as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The opportunities and challenges in Phillips's experience working with schools and for young people's mental health services during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s are then discussed. Questions about the nature of psychoanalysis are introduced, and the discussion turns towards the relationship between philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis. There is a brief discussion of connections between Phillips's work and the philosophy of Stanley Cavell. Phillips's essays on schools and education are explored in connection with ideas of omniscience, sadomasochism and 'experiments in living'. The conversation ends with a glimpse of school as a place to cultivate one's interest and one's sociability with others. – Name: AbstractInfo Label: Abstractor Group: Ab Data: As Provided – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2022 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ1333992 |
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| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Identifiers: – Type: doi Value: 10.1111/1467-9752.12624 Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 10 StartPage: 180 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Psychiatry Type: general – SubjectFull: Child Psychology Type: general – SubjectFull: Authors Type: general – SubjectFull: Biographies Type: general – SubjectFull: Emotional Disturbances Type: general – SubjectFull: Mental Health Type: general – SubjectFull: Mental Disorders Type: general – SubjectFull: COVID-19 Type: general – SubjectFull: Pandemics Type: general – SubjectFull: Health Services Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Environment Type: general – SubjectFull: Philosophy Type: general – SubjectFull: Socialization Type: general – SubjectFull: School Role Type: general – SubjectFull: Student Interests Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational History Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: 'Psychoanalysis Is One More Way of Taking People Seriously': Adam Phillips in Conversation with Emma Williams Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Phillips, Adam – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Williams, Emma IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 02 Type: published Y: 2022 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 0309-8249 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 56 – Type: issue Value: 1 Titles: – TitleFull: Journal of Philosophy of Education Type: main |
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