“Houdini’s Box- The Art of Escape” by Adam Phillips

In this short book Phillips switches back and forth between chapters “analyzing” Harry Houdini and an unnamed male patient with a sexual fetish and commitment issues, while ruminating on life as continual escape. In the life always focused on escape there is a constant basic tension. “What we want is born of what we want to get away from.” Phillips also reminds that the act of escape is a verb- a doing. “Getting free was the adventure, not being free.” There are two parts to every successful escape- a beginning and an end or a before and an after, if you like. “A person running away from something, the psychoanalyst Michael Balint once remarked, is also running towards something else.” What we are running away from maybe more known to us than what we are running to. We may be more sure of that (and the why). “Phobias remind us, in all their unreasonable urgency and their frantic commitment to safety, just how fundamental a sense of our avoiding things is to our sense of ourselves…. It is as though if we can keep ourselves sufficiently busy escaping, we can forget that that is what we are doing. The opposite of fear, one could say, is choice.” Sometimes escape is the easiest option. Sometimes that is because it is no option at all. Whatever escape is, however, it is only a beginning. “One can escape into doubt about what one wants, or one can escape from doubt about what one wants.” Escape is the easy part. It is only then that one’s options truly begin. Phillips concludes by pondering the fate of Emily Dickinson. No one knows what she was escaping from. Her escape was inward, into seclusion- physically, emotionally, and intellectually. “There is, she seems to say, no freedom in the notion of escape; it merely reveals what the prison is really like.”