Phillips subject matter is varied, but, predictably, he always comes back around to the subconscious of the human mind and what makes us all tick inside. This collection of essays is set around the theme of what is most important to us is not always what is central to us. “Free association, what is said by the way, what is said as aside from the matter in hand, what is said ‘off topic’, is where the action of meaning and feeling is.” There is something about our means of communicating to each other when speaking that is special. Sometimes we let the cat out of the bag. And sometimes that cat is the most momentous of things. “The said cannot be unsaid in the way the written word can be revised.”
Trained as a psychoanalyst, Phillips subscribes to “Freud’s definition of the repressed: it is that which you cannot help but include; even if, or especially if, you include it by warding it off.” In his essay, “On Not Making It Up”, Phillips takes on the idea of subjective truth and memory. He wrestles with the psychologist William James’ notion that “the question about belief is not whether it is true but, rather, how would my life be better if I believed it?” The past is useful, indeed necessary, even if it is not real. Or rather, even if the past is not exactly the same past as it was when it was the present. “Truth is the name you will give to whatever turns out to have been good to believe.” Phillips goes on to wonder, “the issue of trauma can be stated quite simply: is a life interrupted by events, or are the interruptions the life?”
In Phillips’ “Two Lectures on Expectations”, he plays around with the ideas of first impressions and second thoughts. First impressions are really more about the subject than the object. “One’s first impressions are a (disguised) disclosure of one’s personal history…. It is as if, unbeknown to ourselves- that is, often quite unpredictably- our individual histories predispose us to respond in specific ways to specific signs…. These first impressions impress one because they make the past present in refigured form; these first impressions are history in the making.” Second thoughts, on the other hand, take time to develop and as such are much more well formed and polished. But are they any more reliable or true? And are they any more useful to our lives?
In his essay, “Paranoid Moderns”, Phillips takes on the individual’s struggle for relevance in modernity. “Modernism is more akin to a cumulative trauma, the trauma of secularization (the loss of a plot, a fear of a life without magic, the profitable displacing the meaningful.)” He posits that “paranoia is the self-cure for insignificance.” A world of contingency and luck is unsatisfying for the individual soul. Like a child, we crave to be the center of something (or rather everything). If there is no God, who is controlling the show? The show that one is the star of every single day. Historicism, communism, fascism, and other deterministic theories of history removed contingency as a fear from the individual psyche. It was all going to work out in the end, because that is the only way it could ever be. Luck and agency played no part. It was fate.
Phillips argues that the modern struggle for the individual is to find some meaning in life. “There was a time when people had a place and knew their place; and then there was a time, which we are still living in, when for various reasons they didn’t…. More and more people have to find a place in the world instead of simply inheriting one. Prestige is up for grabs. The project of the modern, unmoored, displaced individual is to find his value in the eyes of other people, and to resent this.” The fiction for us is to create meaning- to insist on being special. However, “people may be unique, but their uniqueness may be insignificant.”
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