Phillips understands we all have problems. For him, “psychoanalysis affirms that there is something unmanageable about being a person, and it is this that makes a person who he or she is.” But the process can also be prescriptive. “Psychoanalysis, like religion and medicine, turns panic into meaning. It makes fear bearable by making it interesting.” It does this through the talking cure. “Talking changes the way things look” both to the speaker and to the listener. It is a process with two equal participants. But in psychoanalysis sometimes this seems not to be the case. The analyst is in a position of power, the expert. Or worse- the parent substitute, the first expert. The conversation is a process to find something important- what is lacking. “In psychoanalysis the opposite of ignorance is not so much knowledge (and therefore virtue) but desire (and therefore something unpredictable and morally equivocal).” It is not the search for philosophical truth, in some Socratic sense, but something more basic- more primal and subjective. “A want…. may not be something we can know, but only something we can try out- an experiment and not a fact. Psychoanalysis cannot enable the patient to know what he wants, but only to risk finding out.” This is the process and “knowledge can’t put a stop to that, only death can.” But was talk therapy the cure or only a replacement for what ails you? “It was as though Freud had invented the psychoanalytic relationship as a refuge from intimacy- a place it could be studied, a relationship about intimacy but not ‘really’ intimate itself.” After all, the paradox was Freud “had invented a form of authority, the science of psychoanalysis, as a treatment that depended on demolishing forms of authority.” He cloaked his cure in the verbiage of science to gain legitimacy as he bordered on the periphery of the knowable- the psychic, the unconscious. “This, indeed, was one of the radical things about Freud’s work: it legitimated his patient’s responses to their predicaments making them intelligible.”
The project of psychoanalysis seemed to try to rationalize the unconscious. “People are only ever as mad (unintelligible) as other people are deaf (unable, or unwilling, to listen)…. The aim of psychoanalysis, after all, is not to cure people of their conflicts but to find ways of living them more keenly.” It is about asking the right kind of questions, not about finding the right answers. To that end, “fear, like desire, tells us very little about its object…. We unconsciously invite, or sustain contact with whatever we fear…. Once every fear is a wish, as psychoanalysis asserts, our fears become the clue to our desires; aversiveness always conceals a lure…. Fear is constructed through the ways we protect ourselves from it…. If fear is a form of anticipation, of hope inverted, then to talk about fear is to talk about our fantasies of the future and of our relationship to these fantasies.” Fear is as much about your past as your future. In fact, it is a mixture of the past and the future as felt by one’s feelings in the present and as such blends time and reality.
Phillips goes on to elucidate some of the most reoccurring themes in psychoanalysis. On dreams he asserts, “only I can be an expert on myself; in fact, I am already an expert, but I work at being a stranger. I dissimulate because I am an expert on what I cannot bear…. Nothing as personal as the contents of a dream could possibly be addressed to another person…. To say that we dream is to say that we do not know what is going on inside us.” He goes on to discuss the unconscious in general, but also specifically in the sexual realm. “Psychic life was astonishingly mobile and adventurous, even if lived life was not…. The good life, in psychoanalysis, seems to involve a talent for giving things up, but with no guarantee of satisfactory replacements.” It is through this act that there is some conquering of fear. You take agency, not to succeed, but to experiment. Life is one big experiment, in which many more failures will be bound to arise. “In Freud’s view, we become what we cannot have, and desire (and punish) what we are compelled to disown.” The only pleasures are the forbidden? But again, there must be give and take. We have agency, but do not live in a world alone. “There is a freedom- as well as a terror- in being able to be an object for others.”
In the end is psychoanalysis about discovering the unconscious self? And is that, indeed, the true self? But is there one true self? “That there can be no normal loving is potentially a liberating psychoanalytic idea; it makes room for more people and for more versions of more people.” After all, “hypocrisy has been consistently underrated. We are never one thing or another, but a miscellany.” Phillips ends by discussing the mind as the only refuge of reality. Descartes would refute Freud’s whole concept of unconscious. It was not in his world. Thinking, for him, was the only thing that was real. It alone guarantees existence. “Psychoanalysis was born, in a sense, of the relationship inside Freud between the Cartesian and the anti-Cartesian, the psychoanalyst and the dreamer.”
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