Adam Phillips - Boeken

there's been a child therapist yeah for how long for 18 years and you stopped why for two reasons the main one was that I had my own children before I had my own children I could listen to anything and it was part of my own sort of hero myth I think of myself as a therapist but I could bear anything what was that true you could bear anything well I could bear everything that I heard and I heard some terrible things obviously as anybody would have did the join did you work I worked in Child Guidance clinics and children's homes and what were then called schools for maladjusted children and those are places where they just put all the children they didn't know what to do with the children weren't in prison or Hospital basically so there were a lot of rough kids and a lot of kids from very poor backgrounds so that I heard a lot of very disturbing things when I had my own children it was a bit like every child was my child I don't mean this in some grandiose sentimental way but basically it felt more like that and it was as though I could still listen to anything but I didn't want to I found myself much more disturbed by it that was one bit the other bit was that the National Health Service I worked for began to fall apart in the sense that when I started as a child psychotherapist I could see children for as long as it took and what I mean for an activity that could be literally two weeks or three years because that psychotherapy depends upon time it's about time by the time I left they I the government and various managers were saying well we'll pay for six sessions and it's got to work you know the criteria for cure were really business criteria and nothing to do with what I took to be a mental health criteria so we've managed by people who didn't understand what we were doing and we were given much less money so it became impossible yeah it became a business whereas wanted to become an idealist it was once an idealist the enterprise anybody could have child psychotherapy on the health service but what's the idea ten sessions it's that's like no idea at all what yes it's absolutely pointless but it's it's it over peace with a certain kind of model of medical economics which is you have to have outcomes that are that are recordable and then turned into statistics to prove that these forms of treatment work but actually it isn't like that it's the wrong story these days you work as a psychoanalyst how many people you see during the day I see between eight and ten for how long you talk with them between 45 minutes and an hour and a half it varies it's mostly 45 minutes four days a week I do it four days a week they don't all come for this not only okay they come once or twice a week what's different between children and adults well adults are much more defended I mean the great thing about seeing children is that it's more fun because they're funnier you can say anything to children why does it why is what why are they funnier because they I mean they very obviously but nevertheless more children are better at getting pleasure than adults does to say they want to have a good time they really want to and so they're amusing and I don't mean to laugh at but a laugh with they are genuinely loved ssin are genuinely funny given a chance to be because it's one of the currencies between them and adults also you can say anything to children because if they're not interested that it doesn't matter and if they are they're really engaged where's with adults adults are much more defensive and of course there's much more of a demand if I say something to you you've got to sort of engage with it where's children can be much more ruthless sometimes yeah you know what it's like you're talking to a child or reading a child a story and he'll go off and do something else now the children drop adults all the time now which is wonderful and freeing whereas adults are broadly speaking more polite and adults are more afraid I think I'm much more afraid yeah but they also know much more what there is to be afraid of question about your work you you what said that therapy is more about sentence then about theories can you explain that yes I think that the trouble with theories is they're often too grandiose in their reach they're an attempt to make two larger generalization whereas the thing about cycle in psychology none of the generalizations are true you have to start from that premise because people are very individual as well as very communal I think that a sentence is a better unit because it's shorter and because it's potentially more condensed it's a bit like the difference between a poem and a paragraph of prose and I think I'm I'm more interested in this is partly for aesthetic reasons probably and I'm more interested in well on the one hand I'm warranted in reading as reading sentences so I'm reading for the sentences not for the story and when I listen to people I seem to listen for the sentences laughs what a story not not as much for the story no although I also listen for the story but you always say that that the therapy is about storytelling it is but the risk is that stories can be very defensive you know if I can tell you a very coherent absorbing it's the example of death well I could tell you a story about my life which would be a coherent narrative let's say of me from the age of five to let's say 15 but in the very attempt to make it coherent I will live as excluded a lot of anomalous difficult tricky things so there's something about narrative coherence that is itself very self protective whereas if I just chaton I might say something that I'm and I might surprise myself yeah yes storytelling is about leaving out it's very much about leaving out and so in a way what the analyst does is make suggestions about what might be left out uh-huh okay okay that can you tell the story about the father of Tomas mum yeah what did he do the father of Tomas man took his children to a patisserie and said to them you can eat as many cakes as you want and all the children of course were very gleeful not great and what they discovered was that actually they didn't want to eat that many cakes because beyond a certain point they felt sick and this was Thomas Mann's father fathers rather devious manipulative and slightly fascistic way I think it is it why is it for she sings gistic because he already knows the answer it's not an experiment so it's a seduction yeah it's a bit like you promised the children hundred cakes and the chil discover they're only going to be two now as if to say there you are father knows best now that's a shame I think it would have been much more interesting if he'd said to his children let's say once a year we'll go to this cafe and you could eat as many cakes as you want yeah and that's free and then you can find out how many cakes you want but I think this was an attempt to prove to them that actually greed doesn't work and isn't good what is greed greed is wanting more than you can have now and greed is also react it's a self cure for a state of deprivation so that if I'm feeling deprived of something I'm very likely to want too much of it and that's the problem with greed it's also about I think not making two one choices yes it exactly it's it's also a bad narrowing chores or pre-empting choice so the instead of thinking okay what on this menu do I want you think I have ten steaks and that solves the problem and it's a bit like hypnotizing yourself and I think what that does is it takes the drama out of making choices how dangerous is an excess well it depends what kind because there are areas of in one's life where excess is valuable and interesting and there are errors in one's life which is very debilitating I think and in a way you could think growing up is the process of finding out for oneself where that which those areas are there are some things for people I want a lot of and some things in people I might need to have less of but it's about the quality of the experience not the amount when does it become dangerous it becomes dangerous when it becomes self-destructive if I love chocolate and I too much chocolate I will kill my pleasure in chocolate it seems to be the project is sustained anyone's pleasure and the risk is that unconsciously greed is the attempt to destroy one's pleasure a big question but you can handle it do we live in an age the 21st century of access yeah we do and I think we live in an age of disparate excesses in other words there are a huge number of people who are excessively poor and there is a small a large number of people who are excessively rich so I think that that's the most fundamentally obvious picture of this thing which is it's very very strange it seems to me that lots of middle-class people in the West really think a lot about what they're going to eat they go to restaurants whereas as everybody knows it's not a secret in the way that makes it more interesting there are lots of people for whom survival is literally the project in a very fundamental sense there's no excess it's just a question of whether you can have enough to survive and and a very limited amount also everybody knows who makes a profit they can only make a profit if somebody else's labor has been exploited it's not a mystery this it's absolutely clear what shocking is that those successes are entirely acceptable entirely well no one's really screaming and shouting no one is really saying I think here is a legitimate plausible alternative to capitalism no to auto profit uh-huh you know because one thing that communism did whether or not the Communists a communist said politics is not only a matter of economics whereas now the point is politics is entirely about economics and the only political agenda is how do you tax rich people less how come how if we come so far I don't know the answer to that like everybody else had but I do know yeah that everybody has underestimated the resilience and the power of capital and at the same time our behavior has become more excessive - it has but also one thing the capitalism I think does very successfully is exploit something about appetite and I think that capitalism is for children because it engages with appetite at the child's level for children come listen for surely in the sense that children always want the next best thing because they are they're just beginning to deal with the conflicts about appetite so good with supermarket have more yeah it's like thing you were saying earlier about choices and having a sense of what is enough now in the book I quote what I think is a brilliant comment by Neil Diamond someone says Neil Diamond what do you think about being rich he says you can't have two lunches that's it that's a great point you can't have two lunches yeah but what if you want to start trying to have two lunches or you have one very very very long lunch now why are you doing that let's talk about stimuli yah you're not on the internet no you don't have email no no you google why not because I want less communication not more I want to communicate as much as possible with people I know I don't want to find out things about people that they don't know I'm finding out but it does rely no I don't mean people are dead so that I want in a way insofar as I can to exempt myself from all those forms of information and access thirty years ago and didn't have a cell phone there was no internet I had a landline and I didn't have the idea that I was missing something I have these days why is that because if you have access to somebody or something you can feel excluded by them it's as simple as that well it's not no it's not as simple because because that has very powerful consequences because it means that if the internet goes down you feel radically deprived of something you begin to feel that you need because it's though suddenly you don't know what's going on and it's very like you know the experience of any form of familiarization you know if you have a relationship with your mother or father and they go where you feel it and you wonder what they do under what's going on yeah when you don't have access and it has powerful echoes I think in one's history it's like being cut off or abandoned or unmissable we're there to think I think it's linked to that yeah because I think the the internet gives people the illusion of continual contact yeah so that when it's gone when it's down it's as though there's a reminder of what it's like to be abandoned or separate from all these people that one was in instant communication uh-huh and what can I do about it feeling I don't you just live with it yeah I live with it but how well you see I think in a way you should have this both ways which is there's the pleasure of the Internet and the access it brings but there's a different kind of pleasure when it goes down because instead of thinking oh my god it's gone you could be thinking what shall I do now in its absence yeah you know that's an that's an opportunity the risk is it becomes an addiction so you're not thinking great I can read a book now I'm thinking how can I get the internet back yeah so it becomes like an addiction everything is organized around sustaining it and locating it and keep you in touch with it are we talking about excessive behavior here we could be why do you say we could do well because it may be essential to how you work you know it would be it would be absurd to generalize here but if you're beginning to feel why am I so obsessed by the Internet I would want to say to you well it's a good question because actually it could be quite freeing to lose the Internet occasionally yeah you could actually it could could create the space to do something else

Channel: Jorn Wemmenhove

Views: 23,728

Rating: 4.9253731 out of 5

Keywords: Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst, boeken, wim brands, greed, excess

Id: gEAQFpqCE6Y

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 12 2011