24/07/2025
Another terrific talk from Adam Phillips. The basic theme of the discussion is kindness, and the difference between the kind of world we want, or say we want, or think we want, and the kind of world we actually manifest and live in. But that quickly leads into many other related and fascinating areas - class and psychoanalysis, the nature of greed and appetite, and - especially galvanising I thought - an initial exploration of how our current state of misery and loneliness might be related to capitalism itself, as a project.
It starts off by Phillips being asked a question about modern America: of how 'there's much talk in America of dual crises - of loneliness and mental health and anxiety. In addition to being more kind to each other in general, I’m wondering what you think are kind of accelerating that in our current time, because it seems to be an accelerating process, and also if you think that it might be somewhat of a uniquely American phenomena, particularly because we have the American Myth of anyone can make it here - the American dream so to speak - and if that creates an increased sense of failure if you haven't made it vocationally.' This is Adam Phillips' reply:
'I don’t, for an obvious reason, feel I can talk about America. I do think, even though this sounds rather adolescent, that this is to do with capitalism - that any culture that cultivates competition rather than collaboration is fu**ed. It can't possibly - it just can't create enough fellow feeling, and it seems to me this is what we are seeing - I mean who knows what we're seeing - but it's one of the things we are seeing. Because it is terrible to live in a world for example where there is homelessness. It seems to me astonishing. And how also easily we accommodate to it.
Well all these things that we have to inure ourselves to are all really bad symptoms of an absolute failure of fellow feeling. And you know for me again psychoanalysis is about fellow feeling. And it’s about the fact that we're all in the same boat - these homeless people out in the street - they were babies once, they were somebody's children. It’s terrible - it’s really terrible. And it would seem to me you know we therefore have to do what we can about that - because defeatedness is obviously part of the problem.'
He's also greta on the issue of appetite - as the form our sociability takes- and GREED as a sort of perversion of actual appetite - appetite born out of despair, at the thought you can not get what you want, so get what you can:
AP: 'Well, greed would seem to me to be appetite derailed - that in greed there's a despair about satisfaction, so instead of getting what you want, you believe that you need to get as much as you can of what there is. And it's a terrible false solution. I think greed, in this story, greed would be appetite in a way that's been sabotaged or that is born of despair - that you're greedy because somehow you don't believe that what you want or need is actually there, so you fob yourself off by filling yourself up, rather than being able to think what it is you want.'
And from there he moves on to the important an often neglected, issue of class and psychoanalysis, in response to a question ' about the material conditions that affect whether people can be kind'. This is his reply:
AP: 'Yeah, I mean clearly this is an economic problem as well, because psychoanalysis takes an awful lot for granted in terms of people's affluence - because clearly a very vivid blind spot in psychoanalysis is class. Because class is very rarely referred to as a significant thing, and that's the way in which psychoanalysis can feel like sort of armchair philosophy in a way - because it's as though - and of course this was Marx's view - that if you don't address the economic infrastructure or preconditions, you can't really get a grip on anything else.
And so that's why I think in a way psychoanalysis needs to be, as it were, influenced by good useful political theory. Because psychoanalysis is political all the way down actually - how could it not be.'
A woman in the audience then asks him: 'you started out working in the public sector and you've now gone into private practice. How do you find that different just in the work you do?'
AP: 'Well, it was a defeat. I mean the great thing about the National Health Service was that anybody could have psychotherapy free and indeed we had walk-in clinics, where people walked in off the street. When we began, the people who managed us would say ‘you can see children for as long as it takes’.
By the time I left - and this is why I and my some of my friends left - they would say ‘we'll pay for two sessions and we want an outcome study’. Well in other words once neoliberalism kicked in we were being managed by people who had no interest in what we did.
And then in a sense it was incommensurate - there was no way you could practice what I took, and several of us took, to be psychotherapy in that context. So we left. But it was really a defeat.
Because I didn't want to do private practice, if you see what I mean. And lots of child psychotherapists were very politically idealistic because it was available on the Health Service. And we lost that in sort of you know six months, more or less.
And all those sort of fantasies of sort of Robin Hood clinics and so on - you know, where we charge rich people a lot of money and make it available to poor people so poor people - it didn't work like that. Nobody could make it workable, because once you're in private practice you see middle class people, in the kind of private practice that I'm familiar with. And it's very very difficult to extend your range of people. Whereas what for me was wonderful about working in the Health Service was you saw all sorts of people.'
You can watch the full discussion here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0R2MEccDIQ&t=1618s
