Going Sane
by Adam Phillips
256pp, Hamish Hamilton, £14.99
Not so very long ago that most sagacious of literary critics, Frank Kermode, said that we were ready for the adjective "Phillipsian" - derived, of course, from Adam Phillips's growing body of work, mostly collections of essays so agile and exuberant in their performance of thought that jumping in is irresistible. "Phillipsian" would evoke a vivid, paradoxical style that led you to think that you had picked up an idea by the head, only to find that you were holding it by the tail.
True to form, Going Sane is also about going mad, a subject that has attracted many writers and poets and has a whole "science" devoted to it. Phillips's concern is to give us a genealogy of sanity. But, as he shows, sanity is at best an elusive concept. At worst, sanity spends so much time barricading itself against the force of its opposite number, that it tumbles over into it. Phillips begins his study with a report from a US court of appeal that ruled a death row prisoner would have to be treated for psychosis so that he could become "sane enough to be executed".
Sanity doesn't, on the whole, have a good press. Ringfenced by the narrowest, most disciplinarian of the mind doctors, it's better known for what it keeps out than what it allows in. The anti-psychiatrists of the 60s saw it as a stranglehold on human imagination, forcing complexity into a bland norm of conformity. It's the Stepford Wife of mental states, smiling, simple, optimistic, a robotic beauty mask covering the reality of existence. Even that herald of pompous normality, Polonius - the only Shakespearian character to use the word "sanity", whereas the word "mad" appears more than 200 times - finds Hamlet's utterances "pregnant" with "a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of".
Sanity just doesn't do it for us. No rebellious writer has sung its praises or pregnantly filled out its possible meanings. Indeed, after some 200 years of psychiatry, alongside work such as Michel Foucault's which showed us how we "incarcerated disturbing people in diagnoses and institutions", we know a great deal more about madness than we do about what sanity might look like. Even if as a culture we may be afraid of madness, may want to lock or drug it up, we don't seem to know what we want to put in its place.
Freud talked loosely of the ability to love and to work. Interestingly, though Phillips doesn't note this, the word "sanity" doesn't occur in the standard edition of Freud's works. The Germans have a notion of "sound understanding", the French of "reason" as the flipside of madness, neither of which are altogether states in the way that sanity might be.
Given his work as a psychoanalyst, what to put in the place of madness has to be a crucial question for Phillips - and for the rest of us, too. What is there on the other side of those symptoms and feelings that drive us mad - those depressions, attempted suicides, battles with anorexia and other disturbances that are so prevalent? What is there after infancy and adolescence, those periods of life some theoreticians describe as themselves fraught with madness? "We need the idea of sanity to help us to believe that upbringing and education are worthwhile, that culture works, that whatever is sane about us can be placated. Sanity is part of that peculiarly modern vocabulary of hope that depends on progress; on the belief that what makes our lives worth living is that they can be improved."
But if we need to think we might be going somewhere better, Phillips makes us wait until the end to tell us where that better place might be and the meanings it might hold. The deferral and the slight irritation it causes seem to be part of the plot. Phillips's prose often makes you do mental battle and, perhaps like being in analysis, offer up resistance. Before you get to that better place, you have to be fully aware of all the pitfalls and difficulties of a life with others and how soaked through it is with disturbance. No one said sanity was going to be easy.
Mind doctors, it should be noted, usually approach all this the other way round: the mad are mad because their behaviour isn't like a sane person's. The mad don't communicate properly or comprehensibly; they show no warmth or interest in others; they are self-absorbed, like autistic children. But Phillips's brief has never been professional in the narrow sense. He's interested in the bigger picture.
So he guides us across the hurdles and traps of ordinary life, the points where the ills can set in. Sexuality is one: "now openly spoken of but everywhere repressed", the mad contemporary labour of it, "the amount of work that goes into making desire desirable". Money and its accumulation is another. With both, we always want more than we want. Then there's the mixed blessing of the pursuit of self-knowledge: even if what you find fails to drive you mad, it's calculated to transform sanity into a form of self-deception.
It is with relief that you reach the place that is Phillipsian sanity, and the pleasurable paradoxes it offers up. "Sanity ... is an antithetical word; it keeps opposites in play, it keeps alive our more haunt ing conflicts and confusions ... For the more deeply sane, whatever else sanity might be, it is a container of madness, not a denier of it ... The sane have a sense that anything they want is either going to frustrate them because it isn't quite what they really want; or it is going to horrify them because it is more nearly what they want and so they will be unable to enjoy it. The sane, in other words, are ironic rather than fanatical in their pleasure seeking. They see their relationships as coincidences rather than destinies; their talents as unearned gifts ..."
Phillips's sanity has all the complexity of wisdom. It prickles with a Jamesian moral muddling-through and a Proustian clarity about the self. What it tells us is how we might arrive at a better life, a project which is more usually treated by political philosophers than, as one might expect, by psychologists. For that alone, Phillips's treatment is worth attending to. But there's much more. Going Sane is a place worth going.
· Lisa Appignanesi's latest novel is The Memory Man (Arcadia). Freud's Women (with John Forrester) will be available in a new edition this spring.
