If humans are, in the words of psychotherapist Adam Phillips, “problem-solving animals,” then this comes with its own problems—not least of which is gettingthe wrong end of the stick. One might think of the New Yorker cartoon where a drowning man calls out to his dog to “get help.” Cue the next frame: his faithful friend on an analyst’s couch. The joke, here, is on our species at large—a species which has, to date, demonstrated spectacular levels of unhelpfulness. And given humanity’s recent record who could blame anyone’s Fido for going awol? But the cartoon has a more specific target: the pay-per-hour shrink—and, by association, the self-help author. For when “help” is seen as a bookable commodity, it’s clear that somethingvital has got lost at sea.
My first encounterwith Phillips’s work came when I was a book-browsing teenager. Titles like On Flirtation and On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored seemed magically alluring, promising a mixture of self-help, intellectual sophistication and sex. Ithought, in short, that he would help me “get better” at something. Finding the kissing and tickling to be densely punctuated by Winnicott and Freud, I shelved him. It wasn’t until some years later that I read Phillips’s early essay“On Success,” a compelling narrative that spoke vividly to me of the dangers of living life according to one kind of story, of the obsession with “getting better,” ofthe virtues of finding things difficult. “It is particularly difficult,” Phillips writes:
to entertain alternatives in a culture so bewitched both by the idea of success and by such a limited definition of what it entails. Because the idea of the enviable life has now replaced that of the good life, it may be difficult to hear, or listen to, the parts of our patients… that are not interested in success… We police ourselves with purposes. Our ambitions—our ideals and success stories that lure us into the future—can too easily become ways of not living in the present, or of not being present at the event… of disowning, or demeaning, the actual disorder of experience. Believing in the future can be a great deadener. Perhaps we have been too successful at success and failure, and should now start doing something else.
Known as “Britain’s foremost psychoanalytic writer,” Phillips has written over 20 books—and in admitting that I have found much of his writing personally transformative, I risk sounding like one of those Insta-influencers promoting soap-free shampoo or facial yoga. To note that Phillips’s way of looking at the world has changed mine for the better feels risky, too. For this very belief—namely, the desire to believe in a writer or thinker as offering a kind of charismatic “conversion narrative” (think Jordan Peterson)—is precisely what Phillips warns against.
Then again, Phillips newbies would be unlikely to become devotees after reading On Getting Better. And this is the point. Together with its companion volume published last year, On Wanting to Change, this terse book collates a number of Phillips’s more recent psychoanalytical-philosophical lectures and journal articles. The first—“On Cure”—tackles the shifting ambitions and views of psychoanalysis, from remedy to something nearer to “adventure.” Other pieces reflect on the questions of “Pleasure,” “Truth” and the idea of what it means to be ourselves, rather than other people.
On Getting Better and On Wanting to Change feel harder than many of his previous works. They contain notably less in the way of what one might call “human interest”—fewer first-person anecdotes about his own life or his psychoanalytic clients, fewer aphoristic nuggets. Nothing in this book feels as if it has been written with the idea of a “market” in mind.
But if the pair of books give us Adam Phillips unplugged, this is deliberate. Over the years, Phillips’s thinking has knowingly skated around stylised formats. It’s not so much the matter of his titles, which from early works such as “On Composure,” and “On Risk and Solitude,” to more recent offerings such as “On Frustration,” overwhelmingly adopt the ice-cool prepositional form. The writer, who entices his readers with vignettes about clients before taking us into more complex thinking, is switched “on” like a whip-smart acquaintance.
In dialling down the shine and ramping up the professionalised discourse, these latest books make one ask what it means for an essay to be “on” something. After all, the titular “On,” so conventional to the essay genre, doesn’t often get much press. We may usually just take it to signal the fact that the work to follow is in its own way a kind of prepositional resting point, an opportunity to brood “upon” an often overlooked subject. But that small word also hints at something more mobile. It gestures towards the idea that any work (particularly one with such a teasingly peppy title as On Getting Better) aims to move us “on.” We might hope, then, that such a book of essays might aid self-development and enlightenment—that it can act as a portal to revisit the topic under review, be it walking, or kissing, or cannibalism, freshly informed by the reflection that one has consumed.
It is specifically this kind of onward progress, this on-ness, that On Getting Better frustrates. For the chewiness of its form is partneredby the confrontational tenor of its content—namely an unravelling of the individualism to which the essay, and the psychoanalytical endeavour, is most often seen to cater. Written through the first Covidwave, the pair of books offer Phillips’s immediate reflections on the virus which has, in his words, exposed: “the brutal chaos of capitalist culture.” As he writes in On Wanting to Change:
Whether or not the Covid virus is a plague, or like one, we are in the gradual process of discovering both what kind of decisive change it has brought to our lives, and what kind of decisions we want to make about our lives in the light of it… It has been a salutary and horrifying example, if we needed one, of how much significant change in our lives is imposed upon us by both the natural world and political ideologies.
It’s no surprise, then, that On Getting Better is concerned not so much with, but with the deconstruction of the desire for, individual betterment. We see Phillips writing and thinking about how—and if—we might write a different kind of story—of whether, as he puts it, “an age of hedonistic individualism could issue in collective political action.”
One of Phillips’s concerns here is an attempt to correct a historic oversimplification of his own vocation as a neoliberal luxury—as well as his critique of those who have framed the psychoanalytic project as one which can indeed help anyone to “get better,” or ahead. For in “presenting the aims of psychoanalysis, their concepts of cure,” he asks, “are analysts doing anything more than adding to the culture’s image-repertoire of the good life… stocking the supermarket shelves with new products, new ideals for ourselves?”
Giving the side-eye, then, to the self-help shelf, On Getting Better works more like a pamphlet for unselving—attempting an emphatic collective politics. Phillips’s writing has always been political. In 1996 he wrote, taking his lead from Eric Fromm, that to see “psychoanalysis as a refuge from politics” is “a contradiction in terms.” But if the political tenor of On Getting Better feels darker and less hopeful than previous writings, this is clearly a response to the times that we live in.
What hope there is, one feels, lies in Phillips’s urgent invitation for a different kind of conversation. For if things—to borrow a phrase from the Beatles—aren’t “getting better all the time,” they still have the potential to get a good deal worse. “How can we talk differently about how we might want to change,” Phillips writes, “knowing that all life is group life?” Such a dialogue, he indicates, will be testing. In a striking section of On Getting Better, he draws tacit parallels between the contemporary political climate and the “corruption and avarice in the aftermath of the English Civil War.” The texts he refers to in this essay—Algernon Sidney’s 17th-century Discourses, Calvin, Paradise Lost, set against Freud and Lacan—are complex as well as unforgiving. In this sense, the piece—“Unsatisfying Pleasures”—lives up to its title.
What hope there is, one feels, lies in Phillips’s urgent invitation for a different kind of conversation
Phillips’s politics have been marked by an abiding commitment to complexity. We must, he writes elsewhere, retain “a genuinely political and psychic vigilance in the face of the insidious violence of over-simplification.” Reading this latest work requires, and elicits, that vigilance. The essays proceed, in the words of one of their epigraphs from Denise Levertov, “much as that dog goes,/intently haphazard,” but their waywardness reflects back on to the reader’s desire for an easier path. After all, “psychoanalysis,” Phillips writes elsewhere, “is not about getting anybody ‘back on track.’” Its aim is “to restore the loose ends” of our narratives, to remind us that there may not be a fixed track at all. (On my second reading of On Getting Better, I found myself reading these essays backwards, from the final paragraph, and found a different kind of sense that way.)
Such looseness chimes with the volume’s send off—a reflection on the importance of resisting “dogmatic” conclusions, via the work of William James and Diogenes. This final essay’s title—“Loose Change”—speaks to the need to retain a pragmatic open-mindedness in the face of all change. But it also acts as an envoi, punning on the reader’s own invested assumptions. As we end the book, it is hard to put aside our belief in some kind of economics of reading—that time merely spent will yield some sort of capital gain for the self. In keeping with this awkward, important, admonishing book, that exchange is held at bay. On Getting Better leaves you, instead, with a feeling of something half grasped—a rediscovered coin in one’s pocket lining, just irritatingly out of reach. Getting the better of our instincts, Phillips teasingly elicits—and frustrates—that human desire for a hack or a tip, for things to pay off, for something to go on.
