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With Mozartean economy, Adam Phillips speaks to the questions that have held our attention for what seems forever. But then, challenging the premises upon which these longstanding questions rely, he prods psychoanalysis to rouse from the torpor imposed by its own historical insistence on scientificity and on its defensive proclamations of rightness, positions to which many of us have subscribed at least partially.
Psychoanalysis is now for Phillips as for more and more of its practitioners (including this reviewer) somewhere between science and literature. Perhaps psychoanalysis even may be said to comprise a collection of theories of literary criticism. Psychoanalysis is, after all, a kind of narrative. Important to Phillips is that this narrative includes implicitly those who set forth the various manners by which the narrative might unfold as entitled to credential themselves as experts. Mostly, psychoanalysis holds that we are terrorized by the vastness of desire, instinct, mystery, anxiety, or what-have-you. Having bought that our terror is thus adequately described and explained, one is driven into the arms of the experts, the psychoanalysts who were responsible for authorizing the terror initially. Hence, the title of the book. This is what makes Phillips' question so central. He asks, What kind of expert is the psychoanalyst? His answer is surprising: “The analyst is an expert in the forms of ignorance—in the forms ignorance can take in the service of self-protection. Or is he, rather, an expert on the inevitability of ignorance, or how we can't escape it?”
Still, psychoanalysis offers a narrative scaffold for the disease of our patients. It makes their lives bearable by making it interesting. It does so, very simply, through conversation with another person.
Citing Lacan (who, with Winnicott, Klein, and Ferenczi, appears with pleasing frequency), the psychoanalyst is supposed to know that the patient, in the transference, regards the psychoanalyst as the one w