Buy this book

Rob Weatherill
posted 26 January 2006

Here is a snippet from an Adam Phillips interview in The Irish Times (20 December 2005) by Shane Hegarty:

In Going Sane he writes of how relationships are 'not the kind of thing that one can be good or bad at, that one can succeed or fail at, any more than you can be good or bad at having red hair, or succeed and fail at being lucky.' He has not changed his mind. 'From my point of view, the way modern life is constructed and lived, you can't make a relationship work by an act of effort or will,' he says, 'The will can't do that work of imagination in a relationship, and when that happens people grow to hate each other even more,' he says. When a relationship feels like it's over, he believes, it is. We should accept that the man or woman of our dreams isn't someone we could actually have a relationship with, and learn to bear our frustrations. Although, given the implications revealed by Freud, actual sexual satisfaction would be catastrophic. 'The point about sex is that it isn't satisfying,' says Phillips, 'because that's what sustains desire.'

It will be clear why Phillips has been called the psychotherapist of the floating world. Trendy and floating, lightweight, ephemeral like the relationships he is describing. What does sustain a relationship if not, in the final analysis, effort and hard work and much imagination. With whom should we have a relationship if it is not the man or woman of our dreams, providing these dreams have some base in reality? We all know young lovers who have grown old together, who will stand by each other, in spite of difference and even hatred at times. All relationships are ambivalent. No but now nothing can be taken seriously; everything must be ironic. Should psychoanalysts just be ironic?

Well, I then went out and bought the book and read it over Christmas. Is this the same person who wrote one of the best accounts of Winnicott's work which very carefully elucidates the work of this well known child psychoanalytic pioneer? He has come a long way, so many books later. Now he is too clever by far. He is saying throughout Going Sane that there are many interesting stories about madness, but very few about sanity. So far so good. Madness has all the best lines, etc. But this is really a great platitude. Likewise: crime is interesting; what goes wrong is what makes the news; you go for medical tests and only the pathological results are 'positive'. The bad makes the news, not the good. The prodigal son is praised and celebrated, not the other son who stays at home.

Phillips rejects the political radicalism of Laing and anti-psychiatry, stopping short of saying, in effect, that madness is the new sanity. He says, 'Laing is remarkable despite the messianic hyperbole and the conceptual confusion, for wanting to make the case for a desirable sanity' (p32). But he is a softer version of Laing, altogether lacking Laing's courage, engagement and humour. Instead, he posits all too cleverly and serenely a kind of mad sanity, a sane version of madness - a sanity that is 'a container of madness' (p223). A Guardian reviewer says: 'Anyone writing about the mind is drawn to paradoxical formulations, since they echo the complexity and compression of mental processes, but in bulk they are exhausting to read. Sometimes, a love of epigrammatic conjuring can seem simply smug. For example: "As if we aren't what we should be, but what we think we should be has all too little to do with who we actually are"'.

Phillips is talking about ordinary forms of madness, which are really no big deal - idiosyncrasies, singularities, quirkiness, funkiness, ironic developments, forbidden excitements, extremes, wildness, particularly of the young - while staying away from florid insanity as such, rather like Foucault said psychiatry would always be bound to do. Unkindly, one suspects that real madness would freak Phillips, with his measured tones and carefully constructed paradoxes and reversals: always with the first person plural on every page! The stories we tell ourselves: we this and our that! Sanity is boring, madness is exciting. Sanity as trustworthiness, reliability, soundness is too often conflated in Phillips' mind with bourgeois fundamentalism, even fascism. He definitely places himself on the soft left, against any over-aching system of values. He deliciously inhabits the in-between world, where 'common sense is increasingly something we can no longer agree about' (p84). Sanity is like a 'phantom limb' or a 'prosthetic device.'

However, this does not stop Phillips giving guarded praise for Orwell, Lamb and Shakespeare, all of whom have encountered madness. No examples of women that I can find. No George Elliot, Vera Britton, Billie Holiday. These people are pretty sane, because they have an inner strength of character and values, not something that Phillips would stress, as this would align him with a conservative view to do with courage and virtue.

Instead, we have a new 'fall' now, after Blake, Rousseau, Wordsworth and Winnicott - the fall into adulthood. Here, Phillips, unlike what he calls the anxious/repressive adult world, empathises with and idealises childhood as well as understanding Symington's view that having a baby is like 'the dropping of a bomb into the family' (p105). God! On the one hand, he seeks to protect childhood from the terribly, profane, fallen, boringly sane adult world, then, on the other, being terrified of the real child! It's all so knowingly precious. The Kleinian 'bad fit' theory of child development ('We are born mad, develop a conscience and become unhappy; then we die' [p108]), does not suit Phillips' guarded optimism, although he does concede there might be some truth in this version, where we have to really struggle for sanity against all the odds. However, he suspects this 'medicalising' of madness, pathologising desire, as 'moral blackmail' (p113), like the former Christian - being sane in order to be saved.

Contemporary and relativistic: 'The sane adolescent would have something wrong with her' (p127). Phillips can even see the suicidal impulse as noble. Suicide asks the real urgent question of adolescence - is life worth living? Of course, of course, since Camus, this is hardly new. He goes on, 'for this [suicide] to be treated as a form of madness; for this to be experienced by adults as deranging, tells us something about the precariousness, about the anxious complacency, of the forms of adulthood we have evolved' (p138). He is perhaps not aware that in Ireland more young people kill themselves now than die on our roads. None of that is very noble.

Phillips does acknowledge that there are serious psychiatric conditions (autism, schizophrenia and depression) that do challenge, 'our [his?] always measured wish to know the extremes of human unhappiness' (p160). Even here he is condescending and sickeningly empathic: 'One of the most poignant and disarming things about spending any time with an autistic child is that it's like being in a room with someone who only appears to be a person' (p161). And although he concedes that 'It is always callous to use anyone as an example of anything' (p170), he goes on to ponder what an autistic child is fleeing from: 'what it [autism] is a cure for…why has their desire had to take this form?' (p171). There has to be a reason again, even for these radical pathologies. We are lead to suspect the adult world at fault again. And here, instead of the 'he/she' of political correctness, he sticks with the 'he' as it is mostly boys who are diagnosed with autism. Quoting only analysts from two decades ago (as if there has been no recent work), he suggests that autism is a radical flight from what he calls 'the beneficence of human exchange' (p176). From Phillips' vantage point and expanded conscious the strangeness of autism and schizophrenia can become a kind of sanity (the container of madness again). Is there no limit to what this wise man can accept! Madness is entirely reasonable if only we can be tolerant, understanding and free enough to see it and hang out with it.

Rather predictably, money equals greed equals madness - the wrong sort of madness, needless to say. Acquiring money is bad madness and cannot possibly bring us happiness. Here Phillips reveals his latent high morality. Power, prestige, security, independence… 'We must ask how and why we have come to think of them as worth wanting' and what must we be like 'if such things give us pleasure' (p189). 'It is not merely that it is mad to be rich; but that it may also be a form of madness to have consented to the language of money' (p211). Easy, as one commentator has noted, for some. The Guardian reviewer again: 'he sounds like someone with a good pension plan!'

It is in the last part of the book, 'Sane now', that Phillips' pseudo-religiosity comes to the fore. Here he sounds more like Kahlil Gibran. Deep sanity is what he's for - keeping opposites in play, listening endlessly and never judging. But caught in his own logic he asks: 'what would happen if everyone started listening at once?' (p229) The deeply sane do not need a number of things: they don't need to be understood; they don't need recognition; they don't need relationships subject to contract (because they don't expect relationships to last!); they see their talents as gifts (perhaps not something worked hard for); they know that wanting is frustrating and getting can be even worse; so they are ironic in their pleasure-seeking, and real pleasure seeking is known by the deeply sane to be risky, but that doesn't stop them! Here is a classic: 'It would be part of the sane person's sanity to want new forms of pleasure in which neither one's kindness nor one's excitement are overly compromised (one emblem of this might be those gay men who experiment in coming without getting an erection). The sane person knows that being able to only be a nice person is the death of sexual excitement; and that being able to only be nasty is too isolating' (p235). This is not joking; this is serious deep sanity - coming without an erection? Similarly, in a Blakean moment: 'the sacrifice of excitement is the royal road to envy' (p236). He has every option in human desiring covered, understood by now: nothing is left to chance, which, of course the sane, the deeply sane, always playfully chances with.

Sanity means, 'harmony and the supreme bearing of conflict' (p240. that's Phillips' narcissistic fantasy about himself). His next book is going to be on kindness (you have been warned). Sane kindness suggests that 'all forms of sacrifice would be avoided, if at all possible' (p241. especially looking after, rather than merely 'spending time with', an autistic child, perhaps). Secondly, sane kindness means no adult can know what's best for another adult or group or society. Nobody must impose anything. This rules out education, unless you want to be educated, parenting unless you want to be parented. It is rather like the joke about the psychotherapists and the light-bulb, nothing will happen unless the light-bulb wants to be changed.

Rob Weatherill is a psychoanalytic and supervisory therapist in Dublin. His most recent book, Our Last Great Illusion. A Radical Psychoanalytic Critique of Therapy Culture, was published by Imprint Academic in 2004. See also: www.criticalpsychoanalysis.com.