Equals - Hardcover

Phillips, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465056792 ISBN 13: 9780465056798

Publisher: Basic Bks., 2002

Synopsis

If the best thing we do is look after each other, then the worst thing we do is pretend to look after each other when in fact we are doing something else. Psychoanalysis teaches us the dangers of this paradox--and, in doing so, gives us fair warning about the perils of all social endeavors. In one way, the talking cure can be seen as a kind of listening cure. And learning to listen and be listened to is a skill upon which democracy itself depends.Written in his beloved epigrammatic and aphoristic style, Equals extends Phillips's essayistic probings into the psychological and the political, bringing his trenchant wit to such subjects as the usefulness of inhibitions and the paradox of permissive authority. He explores why citizens in a democracy are so eager to establish levels of hierarchy when the system is based on the assumption that every man is created equal. And he ponders the importance of mockery in group behavior and the psyche's struggle as a metaphor for political conflict.

About this title

Review

Adam Phillips's Equals attempts to relocate psychoanalysis as a natural part--and even a necessary part--of an engaged and unregimented life. Phillips is a politically aware writer. He is not a "party man" in any sense. But he has notions about democracy that inform, not just his view of psychoanalytic practice, but also his ideas about human freedom and happiness. Phillips reminds us that people suffer, not because they are in conflict with themselves, but because they have suppressed a conflict by imposing an unconscious authoritarian order over their thoughts and feelings.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to recreate emotional fluency. (One assumes the job of politics is to deal with the fallout.) Like democracy, psychoanalysis should recognise and legitimate conflict which an authoritarian (superegoistic) order would suppress. Drawing parallels between the idea of free association in democracy, and the practice of free association in psychoanalysis, Phillips writes: "hearing all those voices... may itself be a kind of happiness". Phillips's arguments are meticulous, and sometimes fussy. The general reader will find some passages obscure, but there is never the sense that Phillips is being deliberately obscurantist. His compassion--as a writer, as an analyst, and as a literary critic--is admirable. A child psychotherapist by training, his essay "Childhood Again" brings his strongest qualities together--ideological nous, close argument and compassion--in an entirely successful and memorable synthesis. --Simon Ings

Review

"Brilliantly lucid; reading him on top form is like having bubbles of insight exploding inside one's head."

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Bks.
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465056792
• ISBN 13: 9780465056798
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224