Adam Phillips’s new essay collection, “On Giving Up,” presses at this same theme. What, other than the obvious, is aliveness? Phillips’s background is in psychoanalysis, both as a practitioner and an explicator. He is a prolific essayist whose other collections include “On Balance” (2010) and “On Wanting to Change” (2021), and since 2003, he has served as the general editor for Penguin’s retranslations of Freud. Naturally then, it is through the lens of psychoanalysis that Phillips views the question of aliveness.
In “The Interpretation of Dreams,” published the year before Joyce’s youthful lecture, Freud had announced similar conclusions about the universality of the great drama: “By … showing us the guilt of Oedipus, [Sophocles] urges us to recognize our own inner self, in which these impulses, even if suppressed, are still present.” Everyone, even the deadest among the living, plays the lead role in their own Sophoclean tragedy.
Like Freud, Phillips is an analyst steeped in literature. The touchstones on show here are the European writers of the early 20th century, the generation working in the era when psychoanalysis was making its first, greatest impact on European thought: Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Viktor Shklovsky and, most prominently, Franz Kafka. Phillips takes Kafka’s aphorisms and pulls at them until their immediate wit or strangeness unravels to reveal something else behind. When Kafka writes in his diary that the advantage of lying on the floor is that there is nowhere left to fall, Phillips points to the difference between freedom from — which is what Kafka offers us with the pretend-solution of lying on the floor — and freedom to. What is aliveness without the potential to participate in life? “If Kafka has a subject,” Phillips notes, “it is exclusion — the feeling of being left out.”
Most of the essays have been published as individual pieces elsewhere, in the London Review of Books, the Raritan, Salmagundi. The variety of sources means sometimes ideas we have encountered in earlier chapters are reintroduced later, a glimmer of almost-repetition as Phillips reminds us of Kafka’s failure to marry or of Freud’s attempt to control the boundaries of the discipline he had founded. There is a sense — quite a satisfying one, in fact — of circling around ideas, of each essay being ostensibly on a different theme from the others, but really treating the same concerns from a slightly different starting point.
Along with Kafka, another recurrent voice is that of the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, whose essay “The Fascist State of Mind” was first published in the early 1990s but feels more relevant now than ever. For Bollas, the fascist state of mind is not a politically partisan concept, but rather the narcissistic narrowing of one’s perspective, “a simplifying violence” that shuts out doubt or conflict — or, in Phillips’s terms, “an anxious and determined refusal of the complexity of one’s own mind and the minds of others.” When Hamlet vows to “wipe away all trivial fond records” — to erase all the clutter and whimsy of a real personality — and to become solely the instrument of his father’s vengeance (“thy commandment alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain”), he is in thrall to the fascist state of mind. Not indecisiveness but over-decisiveness.
Though Phillips doesn’t quote it here, Bollas has another useful example from the “Revolutionary Catechism” of 1869: “All the tender feelings of family life, of friendship, love, gratitude, even honor must be stifled by a single cold passion for the revolutionary cause.” What do we feel when we read this? Disgust? I hope so. But also perhaps a seduction, an envy? It must be nice to be so sure of oneself. We have seen it before, not only in Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, but also in the self-congratulatory stridence of some of our modern political discourse.
One form of aliveness, then, is to resist the foreclosure of our overbearing convictions, to hold at bay our impulse to simplify the world. As William Blake noted: “To generalize is to be an idiot.” Put another way, one way to stave off the deadness of the commonplace is by countering the urge to assimilate people, opinions, experiences into commonplaces in the first place — to be attuned to detail, alert to specificity, curious about difference. In one of these essays, “On Not Believing in Anything,” Phillips reminds us that belief, in one sense, represents the “the fear of curiosity” and that the word curiosity has its root in the Latin cura, meaning care.
This is a wise, generous book. Phillips has a mild, expansive way of explaining the insights that psychoanalysis offers into our everyday drama, its glimpses of differently shaped problems behind the ones we thought we had. Why does being a grown-up not feel like what we thought being a grown-up would feel like? Why does getting what we want produce anxiety rather than satisfaction? But a book about psychoanalysis is not an analysis. There is no program here, no self-help regimen. These essays won’t cure us, but they may make us curious.
Dennis Duncan is a lecturer in English at University College London and author of “Index, A History of the.”
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 160 pp. $26
