“On Getting Better” by Adam Phillips

This collection of essays by Phillips is a companion to his collection “On Wanting to Change.” In these writings, Phillips focuses on what it would mean to be cured. He begins provocatively, “Clearly any politics not bent on improving society would not be politics, but would a personal life not bent on self-improvement not be a life, or at least not a life worth taking seriously?” Phillips suggests a psychoanalytic answer, “The cure here, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is the cure of an inhibition…. To be cured, then, is to be leading one’s preferred life.” However, satisfaction, as opposed to pleasure, is a culturally mediated phenomenon. “What is acculturation if not the formulation, tacitly or otherwise, of the individual’s aims and objectives?” The real problem for the analysand might be her own self-cure. “If the patient is suffering from their self-cure then it might be the wish for the cure that they are suffering from. Not that they have, as it were, found the wrong cure, but that the idea of cure has waylaid them. They have sought solutions as a way of taking insufficient interest in their problems.” Roger Money-Kyrle makes the claim, “The primary aim of psychoanalysis, in opposition to the avowed aim of all other therapeutic methods, is not to cure but to make conscious.” Following in the vein of William James and the American pragmatists, Phillips suggests, “The truth of our desire — if that is a useful way of talking — can only ever be an experiment and a risk. Psychoanalysis suggests that knowing and wanting don’t necessarily go together.” He continues, “Here in brief is James’s credo: replace the divine with the human wherever necessary and useful; believe and consider true whatever you need to believe, even God, in order to be the person you want to be; and be mindful, and admiring where you can, of the preceding generations that give you a language — the only language you have — to make a new language out of…. The pragmatically open-minded would never close their minds.” In the end, however, “without objects of desire, we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.”