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IN ADAM PHILLIP’S MOST RECENT collection of essays, Terrors and Experts, he once again wields his formidable literary gifts to fashion a psychoanalytic sensibility well worth pondering. This sensibility is less interested in whether psychoanalysis is true than in what it can do for us. And what psychoanalysis can do for us, according to Phillips, is to make life a great deal more interesting and worth living. It is, in his words, an “interesting hedonism.”
Phillips’s point of departure is his reading of Freud as a master of irony. Open the toolkit of psychoanalysis and one finds juxtaposed two distinct “Freuds.” First, there is the well-known “Enlightenment Freud.” The Enlightenment Freud “ascribes needs—which he calls instincts—to people and then shows us how and why we try to disown them” (p. 6). He defines a set of essential terrors which, he assumes, we cannot bear to remember or know. He catalogues a variety of psychic mechanisms by which we remain unaware. He cures us by disabusing us of our self-motivated ignorance. Enlightenment Freud, in other words, fashions a grand new science of self-knowing.
But side-by-side with this Enlightenment Freud is a post-Freudian version of himself. This “post-Freudian Freud” dismantles his own Enlightenment project of efficient knowledge. He is an expert on the limits of expertise and the impossibility of self-knowledge. He is the master of suspicion, wondering what we can ever really know about the self, or whether there is ever really a self to know. “The inevitability of infancy,” writes Phillips, “the unruliness of instinctual life, the puzzling acquisition of language and its link with sexuality, the unconscious dream-work; all