The more you bring to this psychoanalytical book on desire in life, the more you'll get out of it
The Life You Want (Hamish Hamilton) by Adam Phillips
Imagine you are at the airport, picking out a new book for the trip, and you are attracted to this slim volume with its beautiful cover and inviting title, The Life You Want. You would soon learn, once in flight, that this is not light entertainment. Phillips has rightly been described as Britain’s foremost psychoanalytic writer, and this stimulating collection of essays is most fruitfully read with your full attention. Perhaps it’s always true that the more you bring to a book, the more you are going to get out of it, but this is especially true of Phillips’s work.
Each chapter circles around the question of desire in life but rarely offers direct advice. Rather than tell us what to want or how to get it, Phillips has the therapist’s gift for asking productive questions: Who do we want to be judged by? What am I unwilling or unable to talk about? How can I make the life I want out of what I happen to have been given? It’s a style of writing that tacitly encourages the reader to stop, put the text down for a moment and sit in reflection. On top of this, Phillips has a knack for finding phrases that can reinvigorate one’s experience of the world. He observes how we can fail to wake to what’s new in life, for example, “by living as if … the present was the reincarnated past”.
The book draws on Freud to illustrate the ways in which humans are such strange creatures. How peculiar it is, as Phillips points out, that “among the things we most want to escape from are the things we most want and enjoy”. Why do we use routine, for instance, to “keep real enjoyment at bay”? Or why do we resist what makes us happy? The Freudian portrait of the self-punishing human animal, for Phillips, stands in useful opposition to overly positive forms of psychology and lifestyle advice. Yet he also has reservations about some of the gloomy beliefs at the core of classical psychoanalysis. Must life be conceived of quite so negatively? Do we have to be “the sworn enemies of our own nature”?
Phillips is influenced by the American pragmatist school of thought, notably the work of postmodernist philosopher Richard Rorty. The basic pragmatist message is: don’t get caught up in whether a belief matches reality; focus on whether it contributes to a better life. If psycho-analysis represents European pessimism, then pragmatism embodies American optimism. Rorty and Freud are intellectual chalk and cheese, as the author notes in the opening essay, and the challenge of combining their outlooks runs throughout. Phillips’s aim is to use the friction between his inspirations creatively: “Pragmatism and psychoanalysis, in the best sense, can expose and renew each other.”
Consider Freud’s famous image of a rider (the conscious mind) on a horse (the unconscious). All too often, as Freud remarks, you might think that you are steering your life when the horse is just going in the direction that it wants to go in. However, as Phillips indicates, one of the things a pragmatist might do is query whether this is a helpful analogy: “Is riding a horse the best description of what our life is like, or of what we want it to be like? Why is it one horse and not a group of riders?” The vocabulary we use, as Rorty might put it, creates the world that we live in. And, for Phillips, as suggested by the idea of a group of riders, pragmatism offers a way of integrating Freud’s insight into our unconscious motivation with a more social vision of our human situation.
It’s no surprise, in a culture shaped by consumerism, that life has become focused on individual wants. Perhaps desire is viewed as the only guide to life left in a world that’s abandoned larger visions of how to live.
What about alternative visions of fulfilment? Phillips interrogates simple and selfish assumptions as to what to strive for, but he’s also radically anti-authoritarian and sceptical regarding grand prescriptions. In fact, the lack of concrete guidance might leave some readers frustrated, especially given the title of the book. What’s celebrated is not a destination for desire – personal or collective – but ways of investigating what we want through questioning, experimentation via trial and error, and conversation.
If we trust in these processes, Phillips says, we can find our own answers.