In Writing, by Adam Phillips

In writing, by Adam Phillips, a psychotherapist and psychoanalytic writer, is a collection of essays many of which were originally delivered as individual lectures at a number of universities. As is typical of Adam Phillips’ approach to the reader, the book is an invitation to have a conversation and see where it takes you. In a series of interviews with Paul Holdengräber (The Paris Review) over a number of years, Phillips comments that he either has reviewers describing him (Holdengräber 2014) as narcissistic and empty, or his books are found to be interesting (p. 259). He sets himself up as a writer of books that will evoke an extreme response or divide opinion. It is a challenge aimed at anyone reviewing his work that might dismiss him as shallow, but also offers up his books for the reader to find something that resonates.

Adam Philips makes the case that the relationship between psychoanalysis and poetry is one way. Freud may have been open about the inspiration for his method coming from Goethe, and from the philosopher-poet Schiller who observed that hunger and love held the mechanism of the world together, but creative patients come into therapy with great fear. Will analysis kill the creative impulse, or will understanding dry out the creative juices? The phrase: “If they lose their devils they will lose their angels” (p. 8) suggests psychoanalysis is a contagion, a language that gets into creative work and ruins it. He talks about a psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality versus an understanding of economic pressures and anxiety.

For Pound, Freud makes people write about sex when they should be writing about economics; for Eliot, Freud makes us write too definitively about unknown terrors and mysteries (‘the material is so clearly defined’). Psychoanalysis is the wrong language in the wrong place; too prescriptive, too knowing. (p. 3)

Phillips’ focus is on the language that stifles expression. But then he turns on his heel, which he does many times in the