04/07/2025
"Any psychoanalytic theory that is of interest only to members of the profession is unlikely to be worth reading," Adam Phillips once observed. This is a great interview, between Phillips and Alain de Botton - exploring both what makes psychoanalysis valuable, and why so little of it is worth reading:
"Phillips is the only psychoanalyst that anyone in Britain outside the profession is likely to have heard of. This is no coincidence, for, since the publication of his first collection of essays, Phillips has gone out of his way to speak in plain language to ordinary people. I've described him as our finest living essayist.
Alain de Botton: A quote by the critic Adam Mars-Jones on the front of many of your books describes you as 'The closest thing we have to a philosopher of happiness.' What does it mean to you to be a philosopher of happiness?
Adam Phillips: Apart from the philosopher bit, I'm very pleased by the quote, because I think that Mars-Jones has picked up on something that should be important in psychoanalysis, and that is happiness. The psychoanalysis I was trained in was a kind of secular religion of misery. There was an assumption that it was deeper or more truthful to suffer, and that people's character should be measured by their capacity for suffering. Whereas I think learning to have pleasure is the real challenge.
AdB: But a philosopher of happiness should know what happiness is and how you might get it. And yet your work is far from prescriptive.
AP: I don't know what will make you happy. The aim of psychoanalysis at its best is to help people find possibilities for happiness. So I'm not selling happiness, I am selling the possibility of happiness. For me (and the people who disagree with this needn't bother to read my books) an awful lot of misery is meaningless: it doesn't do anybody any good. But the capacity to transform unhappiness into pleasure seems to me to be a great art.
AdB: What fantasies do people have when they meet psychoanalysts?
AP: A range of things - from assuming that the psychoanalyst can read their minds or see through them (as though they were frauds), to the inverse assumption that the psychoanalyst is likely to be a fraud, posing as a deep, intelligent, thoughtful person, while actually suffering from some terrible personal problem which makes them need to be an analyst.
AdB: I feel when reading your work that it's particularly 'British' - in a good way. What do you think has been the particularly British contribution to psychoanalysis, in writing and practice?
AP: I think really imaginative common-sense. One of the things I like about British psychoanalysis is that it isn't portentous, it doesn't talk endlessly about the depths of being or the meaning of life. It localises things. It tells you important things without telling you they're important.
Someone once said to Oscar Wilde 'Don't you think morality is important?' And he said, 'Yes, but I don't think importance is.' So that's what's nice about British psychoanalysis. The implication is just: 'This has caught my attention, and here are my thoughts'.
AdB: In your book On Flirtation, you say that "Ambivalence may be central to psychoanalytic theory, but psychoanalysts - psycho analysts who love psycho analysis - never write about what they hate about psychoanalysis." What do you hate?
AP: I hate two things about psychoanalysis. Firstly, its intrusiveness, I feel that most people are essentially private and the demand to articulate oneself is quite often a real strain - sometimes necessary, but a great strain - and in the process, it can be a diminishment.
And a second problem lies with the power of the rhetoric of psychoanalysis. In so far as psychoanalysts talk to each other, they can start to think that they are telling each other the truth. Whereas, for me, psychoanalysis is only one among many things that you might do if you're feeling unwell - you might also try aromatherapy, knitting, hang-gliding. There are lots of things you can do with your distress. I don't believe that psychoanalysis is the best thing you can do, even if I value it a great deal.”
Read the full article here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4722744/A-meeting-of-minds.html