Adam Phillips: ‘Against Self-Criticism’ (with Q&A)
Adam Phillips, psychotherapist and writer, reflects on self-hatred. The lecture was part of the London Review of Books Winter Lectures series 2015, held at the British Museum.
fusions of trauma and nourishment
Fusions of trauma and nourishment mark all lives. Sometimes the balance tips very much to one or the other side. Trauma may be so severe that nourishment becomes less and less possible. Personality becomes so occupied with dealing with wounds that little is left over. Difficulties are even greater when trauma becomes nourishment. Still, there are cases in which deep lines cut by trauma provide access to depths that are otherwise unreachable. In such instances, nourishment follows trauma to new places. We wish things could be otherwise…easier. But we have little choice when illumination shines through injury.
Nevertheless, we do nourish each other and continue nourishing each other. Something comes through. We procreate and create, build cities and cultures, and nourish affections and creative efforts. That our nourishing efforts contain social and psychic poisons, that, to varying degrees, we ourselves are toxic, is part of the challenge we find ourselves forced to face. Our faith – ever tested – is that facing this challenge well brings us to places we could not have found otherwise, and that some of these places are very worth the trip.
Michael Eigen, (1999) Toxic Nourishment, p. 225. Karnac Books.
death belongs to the realm of faith
the misplaced absolute
I am in analysis. My formal analysis finished twenty-five years ago but I am still in analysis; the process goes on. Psycho-analysis is a living reality that cannot essentially be defined in terms of any ritual procedure. Emotional development and self-knowledge are two of its manifestations but the essential reality of which these are two of its manifestations is an absolute but an absolute that can grasped through symbols but is immediately perverted the moment it is conceptualized as existing in the symbols themselves. As soon as psycho-analysis is seen to be a procedure where someone attends at the consulting-room of a professional calling himself a psycho-analyst five times a week, on the couch, for fifty minute sessions. As soon as this is thought to be psycho-analysis we have fallen into the error of the misplaced absolute.
Neville Symington, Excerpt from the lecture The difference between Psychotherapy and Psycho-analysis
Winnicott & unconscious boundless support
Winnicott’s picture of healing involves creating conditions for a valued sense of continuity of being to grow. The therapist triggers a taste of unconscious boundless support, a generative boundless unknown accessed through the medium of a somewhat known personality. A continuity that survives discontinuity, perhaps not immediately , but in time, replenishing, returning. For Winnicott continuity-not discontinuity-is primary. He does not, as is fashionable, idealize discontinuity. If anything, he might idealize continuity, but it is within an overarching experience of the continuity of being, as core and background support, embracing disruption, that aloneness seeks the riches of life.
Eigen, Michael (2009-05-14). Flames from the Unconscious: Trauma, Madness, and Faith (p. 27). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
explo-ration of a psychosphere
The therapy situation provides a special, limited milieu for birthing or exercising contact with feelings and patterns of feelings in a more sustained, concentrated way than usual. It supports explo-ration of a psychosphere, cousin of the noosphere (de Chardin, 1959; Bion, 1994), finely nuanced psycho-spiritual domains. Here, without apology, one can pay attention to elusive processes one might not be able to access without dedicated support.
One of the side benefits of becoming a therapist is—if one has the need, bent, sensibility—the chance to open psychic reality by system- atic exercise of capacities often downplayed by the dominant culture and common sense—dimensions of uncommon sensing crucial for the feel and taste of life. A life that includes working with problematic, invisible emotional currents that add to the richness of being. I once heard Hanna Arendt (Eigen, 2001a) speak of the secret ecstasy of thinking. I feel, too, deep satisfaction and joy in the profound beauty of analysis, while all too cognisant of its pitfalls. The beauty, awe, and wonder of working with the forever unknown.
Eigen, Michael. The Birth of Experience. (2014) Karnac Books.
the defined value of ambiguity
I then go on to look again at the subject of Bion’s ‘method’ from another angle of vision. Meltzer (1978) discerns in Bion’s style of writing a genuine search for ambiguity. His readers are certainly very familiar with this ambiguity, which they experience as a source of both delight and torment. Also the colleagues who attended his seminars had direct experience of it. But for Bion ambiguity has a defined value. It activates the psychoanalytic function of the mind. In his view, in fact, psychoanalysis can be seen as a special probe that explores the unknown of the psyche in an act of reconnaissance that continuously expands the field. Thus, Bion’s darkness, the black light of dream projects on to things, is nothing other than the desire to be ‘precisely obscure’ (Bion, 19975, p. 191), to achieve the ideal state of mind which he calls negative capability, and to free oneself as far as possible of preconceived ideas. To focus on knowledge you need to be able to tolerate the frustration that comes from not understanding, from paradox, from the aporias of reason, and what Freud called overdetermination, in other words, the plurality of possible meanings.
Civitarese, Giuseppe. (2012). The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis. Routledge.
approaching the unconscious
BION: In psychoanalysis, when approaching the unconscious— that is, what we do not know— we, patient and analyst alike, are certain to be disturbed. In every consulting-room, there ought to be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psychoanalyst. If they are not both frightened, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what everyone knows.
Bion, Wilfred R. (2005-06-09). The Tavistock Seminars (Kindle Locations 1706-1708). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
appreciating the reality of analysis
It is truly dreadful the way in which psychoanalytic theory can become so learned, so prestigious, that I would certainly hate to try to understand it myself; in fact, I don’t waste my time trying to. I do occasionally get bombarded with it: while trying to say something to me, the patient is constantly interrupted by his own high-powered psychoanalytic knowledge. There is the same difficulty at the other pole, where there appears to be an inability to understand or to appreciate the reality of analysis.
Bion, Wilfred R. (2005-06-09). The Tavistock Seminars (Kindle Locations 1497-1501). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
psychoanalysis and truth
But the truth is independent of us. Psychoanalysis is an attempt to know what it is that interrupts us, or makes it impossible to think clearly or to have any respect for the facts that are available to us ; it is an attempt to investigate what it is in ourselves that causes so much trouble, not because we cause the trouble but because it is the only thing about which we can say anything at all.
Bion, Wilfred R. (2005-06-09). The Tavistock Seminars (Kindle Locations 1481-1483). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
authentic analysis 