The world according to Adam,,,,your desire to be understood is a mistake

Adam Philips is a psychoanalyst practising in London


We should live our lives as gratifyingly as possible, the life we have. Otherwise, we are setting ourselves up for bitterness

Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless trauma about, the lives we were unable to live.

On Frustration,” in praise of that emotion. Frustration makes people real to us, he says, because, in our lives, they are usually the sources of it. Indeed, frustration makes reality itself real to us. 

Consider love:

There is a world of difference between erotic and romantic daydream and actually getting together with someone; getting together is a lot more work, and is never exactly what one was hoping for. So there are three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized satisfaction. . . . And this is when it works.

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: “On Not Getting It.” Here he claims that we’re better off not understanding ourselves, or others. “Perhaps understanding is one thing we can do with each other—something peculiarly bewitching and entrancing—but also something that can be limiting, regressive.” Indeed, it may be risky. “The illusion of knowing another person creates the possibility, the freedom, of not knowing them; to be free, by not knowing them, to do something else with them”—that is, mistreat them, on the basis of our presumed understanding.

But the error Phillips addresses most feelingly is our wish to be understood. This, he says, can be “our most violent form of nostalgia,” a revival of our wish, as infants, to have our mother arrive the instant we cry out from pain or hunger.  Winnicott’s good-enough mother as not just good enough but the best,ign up for our daily newsletter and get the best of The New Yorker in your in-box.

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In Phillips’s view, the quest for understanding is not just an insult to emotional health; it is an intellectual error. “We think we know more about the experiences we don’t have”—the unlived life—“than about the experiences that we do have.” In the candyland of our imagining, there is no check on “the authority of inexperience,

There is nothing we could know about ourselves or another that can solve the problem that other people actually exist, and we are utterly dependent on them. . . . There is nothing to know apart from this, and everything else we know, or claim to know, or are supposed to know, or not know, follows on from this.

. People, he writes, have no discernible connection to one another. But we can give solace to those we care about by allowing them just to be, without having to explain themselves. Rilke, in a letter, made the same point: “I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.”

On the contrary, the therapy he invented “weans people from their compulsion to understand and be understood; it is an ‘after-education’ in not getting it. 

 psychoanalysis must always be conjectural:

 “Psychoanalysis is only just beginning to get the kind of public scrutiny, the intelligent hostility, it needs.” 

airy pensées, : “Most infidelities aren’t ugly, they just look as though they are.”

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His  lockstep logic, can daze you and make you stop worrying about the truth. “The only phobia is the phobia of self-knowledge”; “Religion is about the struggle not to be God”; “The mother is as vulnerable to her need for her baby as the baby is to his need for her”—

. He is a visiting professor in the English department of the University of York.

His love of paradox is clearly the product of a hatred of cant let alone from common sense.  such as his claim that we should stop trying to change our lives. I have never known a person who, having quit a job or initiated a divorce, felt, afterward, that he had made a mistake. But Phillips is attacking an idée réçue, and you have to thank him for it. Likewise his notion that we should give up trying to understand ourselves. It sounds crazy, but don’t we all admire people who, instead of constantly asking themselves why they’re doing such-and-such, just get on with it?

”: the beady eye, the knowing better than you do what your thoughts are, the readiness, if you object, to say that this is just your defenses speaking. I. He sees certainty, and the questioning that leads to it, as a wall separating us . 

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