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On March 15, 2014, Richmond Area Multi-Services (RAMS)1 invited Adam Phillips to spend the day and speak about his recent book, One Way and Another: New and Selected Essays and Selected Essays (2013, Hamish Hamilton). Dr. Phillips is a British psychoanalyst, renowned for both his literary essays and theoretical contributions. At this all-day event, Dr. Phillips shared an unpublished essay on unforbidden pleasures, and participated in three interviews about his work and his thoughts about psychoanalysis, community work, and culture.
The first half of Dr. Kwok's interview was published in the Fall 2015 issue of fort da. The following is the remainder of the interview.
Loong Kwok: Do you ever supervise?
Adam Phillips: I do.
LK: What is that like for you? How do you approach it?
AP: I really like doing it with people I really like. I don't want to sound cut about this; I gather there's a lot of stuff about supervision now. When I trained, there weren't courses on supervision. You just went to people. It was like a guild thing, it was an apprenticeship. You
Founded in 1974, RAMS is a non-profit agency providing comprehensive, culturally competent services that aim to meet the behavioral health, social, vocational, and educational needs of the diverse community of the San Francisco Area with special focus on the Asian and Pacific Islander American and Russian speaking populations. For more information, visit ramsinc.org.
went to see people practice. No one had a course on supervision; they learned it from their supervisors. And that's sort of how I do it.
It seems to me that the most ordinary, potentially pleasurable thing in the world [is] to talk about how people work. Just that. But I'm not interested in telling people what to do. I am interested in how people listen — what they make of it, how people learn, what their appetite for it is. All that stuff. It's very, very interesting.
LK: You also teach at the University of York and I imagine there you're teaching to a non-clin