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A glance at the cover of The Cure for Psychoanalysis names its author as ‘Adam Phillips’. The ascription is misleading in the obvious sense that the book is a transcript of a day of presentations and discussion at New York's Institute for Psychoanalysis in March 2018 and consists in large part of the words of multiple interlocutors and commentators alongside Phillips himself. And it's misleading in the deeper sense that every authorial ascription is misleading; few authors have reminded us more insistently than Phillips that every book is a collaboration with an array of named and unnamed conversational partners. Writing and thinking are born and sustained only in and through conversation.
Psychoanalytic practice is a model for this kind of authorship. Winnicott, the subject of Phillips' first book (a still unsurpassed introduction) in 1988, has remained at the centre of his work in the more than three decades since. Phillips' project involves, among many other things, an unending refinding and transformation of Winnicott's thought, to grapple with it not to fix him in the past but to keep discovering him for the future.
It is the same principle that animates the ‘cure’ Phillips alludes to in his title, which he adumbrates in one of the day's Q and A sessions as ‘a non-epistemic project’: ‘That is, it's not about knowledge, it's about experience’ (p. 45). The project of a clinical psychoanalysis is not to amass some quantitively expanding body of truths about oneself, but to enter into an ever more lively and curious relationship with oneself. One might even push the point further and call the project ‘anti-epistemic’ in the sense that an analysis might be a way of ceasing to know too clearly and fixedly who and what we are.
This offers one way to read the ambiguity of the title; that ‘for’ might signify something like ‘from the perspective of’, but more immediately identifies psychoanalysis itself as the malaise in need of a cure. Perhaps, as the second of the two ess