Promises, Promises

Adam Phillips

376pp, Faber, £10
Buy it at BOL

Psychoanalysis and the disciplines of psychology in general began as a new, revelatory development of medical science. There is a distinct possibility that they will end as a discredited but historically significant branch of mysticism. That, at least, is the spectre of scepticism, the nagging emotional qualification that haunts Adam Phillips's continually absorbing and intellectually wide-ranging collection of lectures, essays and journalism, Promises, Promises.

Phillips was a student of literature before he trained as a child psychotherapist, and his writing has always been torn by the decencies of doubt and by a sense of the independence of language: the way it can take over from, as well as accurately depict, empirical truth. He knows what Freud felt and sometimes openly admitted, that the world's age-old gathering of insight into human nature is stored in its literature, that poets are and always have been what Shelley once called them, "the unacknowledged legislators of the world" - priest-like expounders of sacred mysteries, "unapprehended inspiration". Accordingly, he writes and speaks with wary, foot-in-both-camps precision and care, acutely aware of the paradox of language: that it lies, falsifies and invents in order to reveal.

All our lives contain an innate tension between what we want to be and what events, contingency and the world seem to wish us to become. We are "translated" - to use the term of Phillips's astute Gwyn Jones Memorial lecture "On Translating A Person" - from our original selves by external circumstances, inner trauma. This sense that the lives we live are often damagingly and diminishingly different from the ones we are capable of living lies at the heart of psychoanalysis, which promises what (in different and often zealously competing ways) both Christianity and Marxism also promise: redemption through self-education, wholeness through self-knowledge. To psychoanalysis, the inner life is always, also, a potential life - an ample but unlived-out existence which the analyst can help the patient first to uncover and then, if circumstances are propitious, to recover and make real.

The difficulty with this, as Phillips sees in a long, coolly penetrating essay on "Poetry and Psychoanalysis", is its fundamental generic resemblance to the processes of fiction, and fiction's dependence on the security and concreteness of language. What we know, in any field, is largely what we are able formally to express, and the telling of stories is history's most articulately evolved medium for the expression of human psychology and behaviour. Freud, imaginatively abasing himself before the works of Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe, understood this humiliatingly well and perhaps always yearned for some of literature's flawless linguistic and philosophical coherence. On the page, the best of his work astonishes us by the miraculous lucidity of its understanding. We read it as Shelley thought we should read poetry, apprehending beneath the literal, apparent meaning a profound, universalising genius, able to mirror, in some uncanny and shamanistic way, "the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present". Perhaps what Freud really did was to write the explicit and single-minded parables of hunger and erotomania that literature had not yet written, or had balked at writing during long centuries of Pauline Christian conditioning. Although he ranked himself with Copernicus and Darwin, perhaps we should put him alongside Ibsen, Strindberg, Joyce and Lawrence.

Behind Phillips's fine, discursive book lies a fundamental, informing uneasiness that psychoanalysis may be pretending to an authority that it cannot ultimately possess. When Phillips describes Freud as writing "science which sounded like literature", it is possible to go further and argue that psychoanalytic theory is actually literature dressed up as scientific investigation. Art's strength is metaphorical: it works by analogy, by reorganisation and rearrangement, and has the freedom and irresponsibility of thought itself. Psychoanalysis claims to be essentially a science: to proceed, like physics, by broadly verifiable laws and to embody some sort of literal truth. The drawbacks of this for clinical medicine seem obvious. Freud's doctrine of the powerful unconscious has taught us increasingly to interpret illness in metaphorical terms, yet to resist the idea that diagnostic emotional suppositions may not be hard fact. As Lewis Wolpert, in his recent superb study of depression, Malignant Sadness, observes: "It is curious that conversion disorders, made so famous by Freud, in which emotional conflict was converted into, for example, blindness, deafness or paralysis, seem nowadays to be very rare. One possibility is that many of the cases were indeed due to a physical disorder."

Conversion is the essence of psychoanalysis, as well as of language itself. Both try to resolve the contradictions of being alive through alchemical transformations, wresting new securities from the chaos of old and rooted griefs, calming the mind's ever-threatening anarchy through narratives that channel our experience and hold it in a kind of tense but apparent orderliness. Sophocles's Heracles, in Ezra Pound's far-sighted translation, cries out, at the supreme moment of his life, in a half-mad ecstasy of emotional recognition: "It all coheres."

Freud believed this too. It's not surprising that he saw dreams as a kind of art, a "royal road to the unconscious" that could be read, picked apart and diligently expounded as though the analyst were a supremely authoritative literary critic. It was his most seductive experiment, and easily the most fallacious. Art can be experienced by anyone able to receive it; dreams can be experienced by no one but the dreamer. Even our memory of them is a reorganisation of the material by a meaning-obsessed waking consciousness. Freud knew this, of course - he calls the process "secondary elaboration" - but, in his driven, Messianic, Sherlock Holmes-ish way, couldn't bring himself to abandon the formal beauty of the system he had created. In truth, the magico-religious cultures of the ancient world probably got closer to decoding the mysterious dialect of dreams than he did.

The continually impressive thing about Phillips's work is its refusal to disregard the human costs of systems, theories and dogmatic verbal structures. He always earths argument in lived experience. Occasionally this caution lends to his precisely articulated prose a distant or monochromatic note, but it proceeds from an admirable distaste for the vibrato of fake wisdom to which linguistic stylishness is notoriously prone. In a review of Martin Amis's novel, Night Train, he writes: "The effect of his often brilliant verbal delirium is to make things wordy and unreal, language warding off the experience it describes, whisking it away." It's a mistake Phillips takes pains not to make himself.

For him, the work of Freud and the other great psychological thinkers is more imaginatively enabling than it is empirically accurate or "true". Consequently he argues for a version of analysis "more committed to happiness and inspiration (and the miscellaneous) than to self-knowledge, rigorous thinking, or the Depths of Being". To Phillips, the real promise of psychoanalysis is to widen our language rather than to extend our science. Freud's ground-breaking gift - despite its denial of the historical or collective in favour of the internal - was to make it possible for us to say things about our minds, our consciousness, that had never been said before, or never said in such specific, unhysterical, anatomising detail. He gave us secular classifications for areas of our being that had been assumed to lie beyond the scope of secular classification. Or, in Phillips's liberating terms, he freed us to translate ourselves and be translated. "On Translating A Person" might have been a better and more accurate title for this richly thought-provoking book.