Equals
by Adam Phillips
Faber and Faber £12.99, pp246

Adam Phillips's groundbreaking collection of psychoanalytical essays was memorably titled On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored. Nine years, and eight books later, his titles may have become less tantalising but his writing has continued to be both playful and rigorous, often, like the best fiction or poetry, startling the reader into a new way of seeing.

For someone whose subject matter is the slippery terrain of the unconscious self, his prose is spare and direct, loaded with insights that often seem rooted in his suspicion of the obvious. Phillips, moreover, has been immersed for the past several years in editing the new Penguin Freud, a celebration of Freud the writer as much as the analyst. As many critics have pointed out, Phillips's interests are literary as well as psychoanalytical.

Here is a typical, and typically mischievous, Phillips sentence: '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.' It is, in fact, the opening sentence of Equals, a book that for two thirds of its course - the last third is made up of repackaged, but still trenchant, book reviews - sees Phillips revisit in depth a question that resounds throughout his previous work: how can anyone else know what is good for us?

This question underlies not just the complex, unspoken contract between the analyst and the patient, but all the bigger contracts concerning ethics, morality and behaviour that define a so-called democratic society. It can be asked not just of Freud or Lacan, two of Phillips's guiding presences, but of one's own GP, or David Blunkett. And, of course, of Adam Phillips.

On one level, Phillips's entire oeuvre can be read as an intellectual and moral discourse with himself: a continuing self-interrogation, and, by extension, an interrogation of psychoanalysis itself. In his last book, Houdini's Box, he circled around the notion of escape, contrasting two psychoanalytical case studies with the life of an actual escape artist, Harry Houdini, and the work of that most elusive poet, Emily Dickinson. Given that Phillips's former job was as a child psychotherapist, you could say that he, too, is an escape artist, having escaped into writing. And that, in writing, he has found the ultimate expression of his love for, and suspicions of, his other career.

How else can you explain a statement as challenging, and mischievous, as: 'Psychoanalysis reveals what two people [at least] can feel and say and think in each other's presence if they don't have sex with each other.' It is a near perfect illustration of the unique intimacy that characterises the analyst-patient contract, and it also hints at the strange, secretive, semi-erotic eddies that swirl around, and underneath, that same intimacy. For the contract to succeed, of course, the analyst and the patient must, despite all this unspoken commitment to intimacy, trust and self-revelation, remain distant, remain strangers.

Equals explores, and often revels in, these kinds of seeming paradoxes. Like Darwin's Worms, Phillips's intriguing elucidation of Freud's and Darwin's overlapping views of how to live defiantly in a world driven by impossible ideals - of transcendence, redemption, progress - it also attempts a redefinition of some cherished belief systems.

'Whether or not Freud or Lacan thought of themselves as democrats,' Phillips writes, 'or believed in equality as one of the rights of man, there is nothing in their psychoanalytical accounts of what people are really like that is conducive to the kind of social hope invested in ideas of equality.' And yet both Lacan and Freud persevered, against all their collated evidence to the contrary, in their pursuit of a kind of equality between themselves and their subjects, in the search for, as Phillips puts it, 'what might be called alternatives to leadership'. Which, among other things, is what this book is all about.

Throughout this characteristically unified but wide-ranging collection - there are nods to, among others, Kafka, Nietzsche, Eliot, Mailer and Winnicott - Phillips continually returns to the notion of informed listening. 'Listening,' he reminds us, 'is privileged in democratic societies.' Likewise in therapy: 'Calling psychoanalysis a talking cure has obscured the sense in which it is a listening cure [and the senses in which it is not a cure at all]. Being listened to can enable one to bear - and even to enjoy - listening to oneself and others; which democracy itself depends on.'