Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis
Adam Phillips
Faber £10, pp240

It seems only five minutes since Adam Phillips published his last book: there's no stopping him. Promises, Promises is a collection of reviews, essays and lectures, but if it looks more mixed and patched than some earlier books, then that's part of the point.

Promises, Promises relishes the miscellaneous; characteristically, and appealingly, it avoids dogma, certitudes and authority. But it does have a strong and absorbing theme, which is the relation of psychoanalysis and literature. Which is better? Or, which is better for you? What are their languages good for? And, what good might they do you? 'Words alone are certain good,' Phillips quotes Yeats. But whose words and what is 'certain good'? The words good, better, best run through this book like a plot, or an obsession.

Psychoanalysis, though it is a science, often uses or invokes literature, especially poetry. Why? Because psychoanalysis has to work in and with language, and the language of poetry demonstrates the 'best' possibilities of language, and thereby sustains confidence in the value of words. But there may also be unease and ambiguity in this relationship, and Phillips explores this with interest, care, and considerable scepticism.

(He spends his own writing life in a balancing act between the two. Some of his heroes - Jonathan Lear, Leslie Farber, Lacan, Winnicott - are analysts, but you often feel he would rather be reading T.S. Eliot, John Clare or Hart Crane. As he says at the end of this book: 'Why have an analysis when you can read?')

As if putting his dual allegiance to the test, he asks, are psychoanalysis and literature in competition, or collaboration? You could describe the analyst as a kind of poet. When he (though Phillips often uses 'she') makes a 'good interpretation' of the patient's material, he changes the punctuation and the form: 'The patient's sonnets are turned into free verse, his limericks are turned into elegies.'

Or you could say that the analyst turns the patient into a better writer, the 'good-enough poet of his own life'. (But then, how does the analyst arrive at his sense of 'what a good life for a person is'? 'How do we know what is good for ourselves and someone else?')

Or you could see psychoanalysis in rivalry with the poets. For Freud, creative writers are, enviably, the ones who get away with it, who can make their shameful desires acceptable in public. 'Poetry is the smuggler's art, repackaging contraband so that it can be available on the open market.'

What makes Phillips sceptical is the use of poetry as a means to a 'cure' or as a form of self-knowledge. 'Poets, after all,' he remarks with typical wryness, 'are not famous for their mental health.' Literature should be useful to analysts not as an information kit about human nature, but as an example of words that are good, better or best because they are not propaganda - they are 'hospitable to interpretation'.

What psychoanalysis needs is 'more good sentences'. In its quizzical, intellectual, self-conscious way, this is a moral book with a serious message (though it might hate to be described so portentously).

Phillips wants analysts not to be cult figures or teachers or propagandists, but to be more popularising and democratic. They should value truthfulness but not Truth; the contingent, the small, and the messy, rather than the visionary or the schematic. (One of his best pieces here is on 'clutter', and he does believe there is such a thing as a 'good mess'.) They should want to be 'interesting', rather than 'right'.

Not surprisingly, what he most dislikes in clinical practice is 'diagnostic categories', and what he dislikes in literature is 'speaking with too much conviction, on behalf of too many people'. He likes writers who allow in terror, chaos, irony and melancholy: Pessoa, Housman, Hart, Crane, Trilling, Melville (a brilliant essay on Bartleby and anorexia), Patrick McGrath, Frederick Seidel. He distrusts biography because it creates a tension between 'what the subject wanted to be... and what the biographer wants the subject to be'. 'Biographies give shape to a life, but a life doesn't.'

Couldn't biography, I would ask here, be a way of suggesting the inconclusiveness and messiness of a life? This will have to join the army of unanswered questions raised in, and by, Promises, Promises. Phillips loves questions and quibbles, and he defends the analyst's maddening habit of not answering questions by suggesting that this could encourage the patient in a game of asking without expecting an answer - or without expecting 'that there will be answers at all'.

This hopeful uncertainty is also applied to 'the culture of complaint', in which we are 'forever aggrieved about being misunderstood'. Might it be more interesting not to take offence, but to listen to the ways other people describe us, and work out why we think this might be a mistranslation? Thus we could be 'endlessly fascinated by what people make of us'. Phillips does go on to say that the history of oppression has been a history of people 'having translations imposed upon them by a dominant class or group'. Even so, there seems something theoretical and unreal in suggesting that, say, a black boy set upon by white hoodlums might pause to consider, with endless fascination, how he is being mistranslated.

In his valuing of what is undefinitive, Phillips has some attractively rueful illustrations of himself as a practising therapist, brought up short by what his patients say. 'There was a pause then, and I had so much to say that I couldn't think of anything to say.'

In a book so wedded to the best use of language, it is rather a relief to find him occasionally lost for words, particularly since he does have a tendency towards knowingness: 'It seems dull to begin at what one might pretend is a beginning. Everybody already knows something, even if what they know is that it is part of our intelligibility to ourselves - perhaps the essential part - to notice that we are unintelligible to ourselves.'

Paradox can be an irritant. But then, Phillips is irritated himself by the analyst as 'the knowing knower', always with his mind made up. The 'best' kind of writers - like the best kind of analysts? - are open and leave us with something more to do, 'with unfinished business'. 'As though these writers [and Phillips is one of the best of them] offer us irresistible invitations - to think, to write, to talk - and this is what keeps the story going.'