This is a collection from a gathering at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis billed as, ‘A Day with Adam Phillips’. The book contains the essay he delivered that day, “Winnicott’s Magic: Playing and Reality and Reality”, along with some commentaries, the transcripts of an interview, conducted by Edward Corrigan, and of a couple Q&A sessions from fellow practicing psychoanalysts, before concluding with a final essay by Phillips. It is all typical Phillips, in the best of ways.
In his lead essay, Phillips quotes Winnicott, “We have yet to tackle the question of what life itself is about. Our psychotic patients force us to give attention to this sort of basic problem. We now see that it is not instinctual satisfaction that makes a baby begin to be, to feel that life is real, to find life worth living. In fact, instinctual gratifications start off as part-functions and they become seductions unless based on a well-established capacity in the individual person for total experience, and for experience in the area of transitional phenomena.” Phillips expands, “For Winnicott the question psychoanalysis addresses is how, if at all, developmentally the individual finds life worth living…. Winnicott is saying that it is not a consensual fact that life is worth living; indeed, finding it worth living is a basic problem…. But we can’t agree about what life is about, or that if we could that it would be worth living; yet each individual given the chance — the chance provided by an early environment, the chance provided by the psychoanalytic setting — can find out for themselves what they feel and think about this…. The individual makes his own original answers to the question out of the cultural traditions he or she has access to.”
Phillips next poses a tangential question. “What would it be like to live in the world less compliantly, or to live in a less compliant world? All the many versions of psychoanalysis, it seems to me — unsurprisingly perhaps, given its historical moment — organise themselves around this question. A question we might think of, historically, as in part the legacy of the reformation.” Phillips pivots to discuss Winnicott’s expertise, play. “Winnicott is saying in Playing and Reality that instinctual gratification is an insufficient substantive belief, norm and value promoted by traditional psychoanalysis. And that what he wants to offer in its place, or additionally, is play.” Winnicott, himself, states, “Psychoanalysts who have rightly emphasised the significance of instinctual experience and of reactions to frustration have failed to state with comparable clearness or conviction the tremendous intensity of these non-climactic experiences that are called playing.” Phillips posits, “Playing was the medium for the true self — the self that could be, feel real, and could find out whether potentially their life was worth living and reality was not merely or solely something demanding compliance…. For Winnicott, playing and reality make each other work, bring out the best in each other like a good couple.”
During the Q&A period, Phillips, in an aside, discusses his overarching project. “My project, so to speak, if I have one, is to work out what it would be to be kind to the patient from the patient’s point of view…. We should be much more curious, in a sense much more curious about what people think they’re coming for and what else they might be coming for apart from what they already know…. This project is about not knowing what you’re talking about and having to work this out collaboratively.” Phillips comments on the superego, “I think it is striking, and it’s what prompted the paper [on Winnicott], how incredibly unimaginative and vicious the superego is. And how much the superego pretends it knows who we really are. So, the superego is an essentialist and a bully and extremely narrow-minded and therefore very stupid…. One of the main things that’s going on in psychoanalysis is an understanding of what this superego’s a self-cure for…. The superego seems to operate as a kind of organiser of one’s life…. And the problem with this part of oneself is that it is omniscient. It really believes that it knows who we are, and it keeps telling us who we really are.” On suicide, Phillips ponders, “What always amazes me is how few people kill themselves, and how much people can put up with, and why they are willing to put up with what they put up with…. Masochism is our greatest device for survival. If you can turn pain into pleasure, you’re ahead…. I’m always wondering what keeps people going. Why they keep at it. Because I mean, I know I want to keep at it, as far as I know, but it’s still, it seems to me an interesting mystery.”
Finally, in the eponymous essay, “The Cure for Psychoanalysis”, Phillips discusses psychoanalysis’ ambivalent relationship with the notion of a cure. “A culture that believes in cure is living in the fallout, in the aftermath, of religious cultures of redemption.” What does psychoanalysis have to offer? “Psychoanalytic treatment is an antidote to indoctrination; it is an enquiry into how people influence each other, into the individual’s history of living in other people’s regimes…. When we become aware of what we are not, as yet, aware of, we do not know what will happen, we cannot know what we might do or become. This is the essential, the defining risk of psychoanalysis that concepts of cure attempt to allay or appease: making conscious has unpredictable effects…. Freud’s fiction of the unconscious left him and some of his followers with an abiding and unsettling question: what could the unconscious have to do with the concept of cure?”
No comments:
Post a Comment