Adam Phillips on 'Attention Seeking'

[Applause] so the moment if I know how many people here were regular readers of Adam Phillips I'm assuming a lot of you are so if you are then the moment you hear that Adam Phillips has written a book called attention-seeking immediately your mind is awakened to all the possibilities that you haven't noticed in though just in the title alone immediately you begin to think why have I never paid attention to that term why is that term always been judged by mood harshly why is that term not obviously a good thing and and so on so just the moment you even read a title by Aaron Phillips something a kind of electricity sort of happens however as it turns out that doesn't mean you can predict what's in the book the book remains completely unpredictable and I think one of the reasons this book is unpredictable is in some ways this is the conversation we're all having right now oh we're all suffering from a kind of ADHD we're all addicted to to our mobile phones we can't focus we got what's gone wrong with us you know it and because for reasons that I think will go into this idea of attention has always been very it seems quite loud can you hear me has has been has always been bound up with a lot of moralization and notions about morality that this book is not going to sort of join us worrying about our attention deficit disorder and so on it's not going to blame us for being focused on the wrong things or in the wrong ways when I read this book very quickly a line appeared in the book that seemed to me like the whole weight of my existence was lifted off my shoulders and that line was attention-seeking is one of the best things we do that Utica is one of the best things we do no one had ever mentioned that to me and and I am my desire for attention has always been this a profound source of shame so so so attention-seeking is one of the best things we do even if we have the worst ways of doing it but all of this of course begs the question what is this thing that we seek that's called attention what is attention and should we start there the book in a way is about that question which is when we are attention-seeking what is it we want attending to and what kind of attention do we think we want the book came out of something that I imagine everybody has experienced which is people will say very disparagingly often of children but often of people she he is very attention seeking and obviously we're all supposed to nor so awful and it seems to me quite clear there's nothing else that we can do but seek attention and if you think of it I've gone like this but if you think of in terms of development and child development of course there's something very very powerful about babies and young children it's their capacity to actually recruit attention that they're magnetic in some way if if you like them and so this is a very powerful fundamental thing but it's as though at a certain point and development attention seeking becomes something that is obviously morally appalling so we should learn not to do and yet we need attention so we're in a bind so we have to find acceptable ways of getting the attention we want or need the other bit just briefly is that I think one of the things interests me about attention seeking is the fact that it may be like a probe or an experiment in living as in obvious attention-seeking behavior it's not obvious what it is or if the attention is that's being wanted and I think in a way it's a fundamental form of sociability this it's like a joke which is you do your attention-seeking behavior and you're trying to find out how other people will respond to it as a way of finding out what it is because you don't know entirely what it is you want but you know you want something so the books I think one of the ideas in the book is of course the book is the census in the book but the one of the ideas in the book is that attention seeking is always an experiment in living and I think that's what this this book is short and Adam writes beautifully and gripping me as you know if you if you've read him he's not writing as if for the academy he's writing for the heart and soul and the body of course but but however it's short but I had a couple of people over to dinner and I read the first line aloud and that was it for the night we have too many we either provoke too much in us so it's short but it the problem of attention is is is a constant when you're reading it not because you're bored but because it's thought-provoking it's dream provoking and and a kind of a kind of anxiety attends to that because you're what the book seems to be reading you you're you're thinking about attention and the book is attending to the way in which you're attending to it and it becomes sort of a strange strange thing where am i reading it or is it or is it me reading me am i thinking about it or am I not thinking about it when I'm not thinking about it is that when I'm thinking about it and so on and I think the fact that this object has no name that it's what we're looking but we don't know what it is is the is the experience of the book you refuse to define attention in the book and that makes the book very experiential and can you talk about this idea that the idea of this book is that there are no big ideas yeah I think what I think there's a sentence in the book which is something like it's the difference between knowing what we're doing and following our eyes ey yes and I think in a way it's about if it's an it's an obvious thing which is the question is what and who are we looking at who do we want to listen to what do we listen to it in others there's a continual ongoing selective attention going on in everybody all the time and so it seemed to me that there's something very enigmatic about this fact because obviously don't notice it why would we took you notice it except when it troubles us so for example I have a phobia or an addiction my attention is very very over organized extremely organized and I think one of the things that psychoanalysis but not only Psychonauts but also psychoanalysis frees want to do is to be unser do Sneed to organize one's experience into one big idea so that it appears in psychoanalysis there are a few big ideas that called sex or reparation or depression or what there's a whole range of these things but it seems to me they're all in a way attempts as Freud was involved in to contain whatever it is that's opened up by psychoanalysis because I think what's opened up by psychoanalysis understand if it generates a lot of anxiety and a lot of excitement so then we've got to have an idea about what it is say psychoanalyst are doing or what you go to a psychoanalyst for so our attention has to be organized in the practice of doing it but in going to see a psychoanalyst you're you've organized your attention to go there and then you're going to be in the kind of analysis that I value invited to be an attentive to speak without attending to your words without as we're trying to say the right thing or did the wrong thing you will just speak insofar as you're able and what that means is in the process of doing that it opens up how much more you've been attending to the new are in fact conscious and in in Freud's idea dream work which i think is a really wonderful idea it's simply animus feelings from notice but basically the idea is we're now in the dream day the day for tonight's dream we've had all these experiences seeing these things smelt these things whatever but obviously no one can predict what they're going to dream tonight and what we do in fact dream if we remember it will happen may well have a detail that we want from the day that we were not aware of ourselves noticing in others the dream maker in ourselves is perceptive in a way that we aren't or underwear of being so the other thing I suppose around and this is that we are much more attentive than either we can be aware of or want to know about so there's a kind of a multiple perception going on that is focused and contained and when there's too much anxiety it's over contained but I think there's always a temptation this is where the big idea comes in because the big idea is like a sexual perversion it's something we can do to organize something that feels to protocol so if I can organize my sexual desire into a sexual perversion I one thing that is a precondition of my excitement then it's as I've solved the problem of the variety of my own desire I know what sex is for me whereas no one really knows what sex is for them but it generates the kind of anxiety that would make one want to narrow it to a big idea and I think fraud has the big idea actually is that we don't necessarily need big ideas that's the kind of experiment he's inviting us to do now which is I think why when one one's reading the book one finds one's defenses are very oh there's no big idea and and and and and and so there's nothing it's you know so that any notion of having mastery over in the position of reader is very quickly dissipated and it's an extraordinary experience but there were a couple of things that you thought I was in trouble I guess when you said that I thought of some either happened to me which i think is linked to this which is I was standing in the shallow end of a swimming pool in America and a four or five year old little girl swam up to me beaming she stopped in front of me and she said you're odd what's odd about me and she said you're not my dad and she burst out laughing and swam over to child development there is something called eight-month anxiety or stranger anxiety but then somebody had a more interesting idea which is that at eight months it's not that the child perceives a stranger they perceive somebody as not mother which is a very very interesting and a very very different idea so you could imagine adult life is a process of going on meeting different versions of not mother and not father and so I'm not sister nor brother and so on so forth and so around this is the idea of attention you in a sense start attending to your mother parents forever the question then is what kind of attention you can give or what kind of attention you find yourself giving to not mother or not father whatever and so your attention begins although you don't think of it like this obviously very very organized you have objects to attend to and then something happens and it's not that you've stopped attending them but you attend to other things as well and then attention gets very complicated I say and that one thing you I'm of course thinking about the way in which I'm ferocious over my own children's distractions and the kind of rages but one thing that you mentioned there which you mentioned in the book which which is an extraordinary formula really which is the idea that things become interesting we things only really become interesting to us when we become interested in our interest and in your description of that process we only become interested in our interest when our interests have started to disturb us which I think you linked to that bit becoming attentive to outside the family it could you suggest a little love yes yes I'm gonna be interesting is well I suppose you only have to attend to your interest when it begins to persecute you if I begin to become very very interested in pigeons I think then my attention is very very organized I have to be hyper alert to that and then it seems to me you can't help but be interested in your interest and one of the things about all symptoms is they of course organize your attention and they make you think about yourself if you're anxious or depressed or whatever it is you are thinking almost only about yourself so in this story the aim of psychoanalysis is to free you to lose interests in yourself you know this you can lose in turn yourself such that the external world and other people and so on become as interesting as they in fact are a symptom is something that closes that down and everything returns back to what looks like base it isn't actually but it looks like it is so I think you become I think we become interested in our interest either because it interests us and it's pleasurable of the interested in it or because it becomes a problem it becomes something we can't help but think about and the idea of self interest being a kind of inability to attend a sort of kind of dreadful narrowing of attention widget this is it but this book doesn't have a big idea but at it I have said it does have a structure and and I think the structure is is telling because as I see it the structure begins by seeking attention there moves towards receiving attention which you call shame and attention what it is to be on the end to be seeking this thing and then getting it and then how do we feel about that and the word for that is shame actually yes and then and then and then we move in the fun part to losing attention as though that as though that's the kind of necessary process it would you was it a thoughtful no no that sounds right to me but it certainly wasn't but it does it that certainly makes sense and what's interesting to me about that is that it was at the very last minute that I changed the order that I thought that shame descent should be the second chapter and that explains it in a way but I think that the I think the middle bit so to speak which is about shame and attention is about I suppose two things one is how shame constrains and organizes our attention and what kind of attention we're giving ourselves when we are mortified the parts on I should say that this book also has you I mean one thing you've already indicated is that psychoanalysis pays attention to our inattention and that's its method you have this beautiful idea that the that before that psychoanalysis appeared it was as though symptoms were calling for a new type of doctor calling out saying nobody is paying attention to me so that there are subjects in attentions in the form of their symptoms were directed towards a doctor that was yet to be invented and for you this is inattentional invitation is endlessly generative yeah it creates a form of wanting that has to invent it so yeah so that psychoanalysis comes along to pay this attention to our inattention and then as you said the dream the dream work is the sort of record of our unnoticed noticing but then what's fascinating about that you says but and yet the result is something we don't know how to pay attention to we don't know how to pay attention to dreams well that seems to be amazing I mean that when we're dreaming we can't help repair tension I mean does say on the whole one isn't one may be distracted in the drama of one's dream but one's not distracted from one's dream and that something amazing is produced by us but obviously not in a sense not by us and then when we wake up and if we remember it it can feel fascinating extraordinary and completely baffling so it's as though we haven't found the attention or we don't want the attention is that we might give it that would be worth giving it now very often other people's dreams depending on whether we love observe them or they're in psychoanalysis other people's dreams can be very boring but or and that itself seems to me to be very interesting because they are clearly on a sense of profound bulletin from the self to the self but it that's another place where we occlude our attention because why aren't we fascinated by the pills true why when somebody tells us dream I'll be wired to so they were telling us a great joke well we often switch off and so this seems to be very extraordinary that we've made something at night and after all no one has to be taught how to dream will most of us almost ever does it and we make something that we couldn't possibly have calculated and we look at it but not with our eyes we wake up to it and we're baffled and then I mean modernly there's the interpretation of dreams which says well you could do this or if you do that then this happens etc but of course historically there have been lots of different ways of reading dreams but lots of people have been in different ways curious but but with well a function of the dream as its meaning in some sense well it not being clear where the meaning comes from and what Freud does is he democratized his dreams everybody has them and all you've got to do is free associate with the right person there's no that you can't be I mean you are the expert on your own dream but you may need help with your expertise there is this I mean you say you you quote Freud is saying that he has a prehistory in the form of poets right that he's not the first to pay attention to an attention and your own book goes Renaissance literature 18th century literature Jane Austen James Baldwin modernism and you set one point I'm not here writing an intellectual history I'm noticing some recurrent concerns and a persistent vocabulary that keeps reappearing but you do also tell this rather tragic story about the fact that our acts of inattention which are in the sort of paradoxical universe here the ways in which we're calling for attention the things we aren't noticing we're doing other very moments when we're attention seeking actually and they're very motor when we need other people when we need other people you see most people just don't notice those actually are kind of our symptoms or slips these are mostly just disregarded yeah so so so even though the classroom where I mean you took a lot about regimes of attention where we're forced to feel terribly terribly bad about focusing on the wrong things being distracted daydreaming and so on and yet the classroom the figure the figure of that authoritarian teacher in the classroom is someone who will notice our every inattention actually so I wonder if somehow this sort of therapy is linked to a kind of institutional kind of way of being do you know what I mean yeah I mean the context would have to determine the way in which things are understood or seen and in what is seen and I do think it's very interesting I'm not doing it may be tragic but it may not be that so many things are missed you know the thing Henry James says be someone upon whom something it nothing is lost it's a version of that nava see no one can do that really but the question is how much we can bear to be attentive how much we can bear to be in touch with reality because if we are sufficiently in touch with reality there will be a huge amount of stimuli of unnoticed acts now the problem is that if somebody doesn't get our joke we might have to devote our lives to finding the person who does and that would be true of our slips our gestures or whatever it is that we don't know but actually we want somebody else to recognize in some way or do something with because I don't is that we want to be understood I think it's we want what we do to be transformed into something else that keeps the thing moving in some way so I don't think it's the quest for the great understander I think it's a quest for the great transformer probably I know obviously people are different about this but it's more like that and we're doing and we're doing all sorts of many more things than we realize and then we are totally depending on other people to see what gets picked up and you can see as a child growing up you become habituated to the things they are likely to pick up and the things they don't want to pick up and so you become in a way regimented inevitably not there's not a vile but you are regimented so the question is what happens then to the un-- either unseen or unacknowledged or unrecognized parts of oneself and you could think well it's a quest some one of the things you might be doing is either a defeated Nisour the quest for whatever it was about ourselves that our parents couldn't recognize or miss recognize in certain ways so all the time looking for the better audience but it is a kind of performance artists I think that's why attention seeking is you know it's very generative very creative its its inventing forms of sociality that might not yet exist and ways of doing language and that's why the disapproval is such a killer because it crimps the thing right from the beginning and so the child really loses heart about exhibitionism i making an exhibition of yourself why not there is I mean a kind of counterpoint a counterpoint to this is is it Ernest Jones who quote is this a fan I haven't heard the words of a fan Isis I don't even heard the word before which is I imagine you see people who come to you with this this I mean this is in this huge yeah as this idea that people might lose all interest in everything and in life not because they're inhibited but because they really have lost their appetite for life so attention as just attention seeking has ended yes exactly and and that would be the tragedy so so so do you have a theory of series of theories about what leads to that well I I would imagine there at least two things here one is either desiring has met a very very poor or humiliating response and or maybe the same point one can't back one's desire or something has happened so there's a retreat it could be thought of as a lack of confidence or traumatic withdrawal as in there's something I've designed that is too disturbing to me so my experience is I have no desire there's nothing I'm interested in now today would probably called depression which for some people may add something to the conversation but philosophy may not and really it would seem to me you know the question would be what's your lack of interest a self cure for what was the original conflict or problem that mobilize the lack of desire as the only way out or through it would be like that I mean that the figure of the hysteric appears later in the book in in shame and particularly linked to the two women in shame actually but where where she's also suffering from desire but she's also the figure of the ultimate attention yeah seeker how do we incorporate her dealings with desire well like when one way of putting it without glamorizing it is that someone who whoever these people are are like failed artists they haven't got the message through there was a very interesting paper by um mastered con called grudge and the hysteric where Kant says the question is why are these hysterics so Florida so bizarre and the answer is they have their people have no confidence that they can find a place in other people's minds so they have to be more vivid more enigmatic more dramatic to actually capture somebody's attention and make somebody think about them so it's partly an attempt to be in one some someone else's mine such the one can be thought about and then there can be an exchange it could partly be a fact that it's a language that hasn't yet found its interpreter there might be lots of things we do that are on the spectrum with what was once called hysteria that are all at the moment messages that misfire or enigmatic messages or things we have no other way of communicating about but with our bodies or through bizarre speech or whatever it is but it's as though they're they're looking for their listeners and I think when in shame every night I've been there all along but the the I got to watch it I've read a lot about shame but this section on shame is Cheney has really really been an extraordinary uh it's as if everything else I read just matters not not a joke but this section on chain is so powerful a shame narrows our attention so that we're unable to focus on anything but ourselves so we're losing attention to all the other things we might that might interest us and that focus on the self becomes self mortifying a desire to disappear and you quote sources where the desert it all very familiar to me I have to say where the the feeling of shame is is that I'm completely transparent to others they can see right through me and so on and you say that that this is well as before I bring in the really exciting idea I want to bring in this link to the notion of trauma where trauma is that which is unable to read ascribe or transform itself and shame is linked here to being in a situation where you just can't imagine anything else any ever being able to read ascribe or turn this event in this experience into another possibility to well it's as though shame exposes the truth about yourself as though when you're ashamed you're a really malign essentialism has taken hold you failed to be the person you should be and really are so there's a catastrophic self-betrayal going on here what but the power of it is that it's impossible to then think or talk about whether one really believes in the things when I supposedly violated because in that sense shame is conservative it gets you back to a position of knowing exactly who you should be I the person who doesn't do the shameful act now if you give this a moment's thought you can see that on the one hand there's the mortified person but which is worse the mortified person or the person who's mortified them here's the part of one's self that has made one feel ashamed is a monster is a really cruel humiliating figure so it's the shame rule the shamed worse so to speak and why is there there's such a violent internal tyranny because in shameful experiences one is supposedly dealing with what are consensually agreed to be the most accept unacceptable parts of oneself so it's as though when we feel shame in a way we've returned to normality we've remembered who we really are so you could see a shame experience as sometimes that but also sometimes the point of which it has been decided that the conversation was stopped here and if you give us a two seconds thought you'll know that there were supposedly extremely shameful experiences in the past that have become in inverted commas normal but this is extraordinary I mean let's say 30 years ago and probably today there are people who felt deeply ashamed about being gay and there are people now who don't how's this happened what's the process but you can see retrospectively that the intention to shame is itself of what opposites persecutory but it's also an attempt to stop the conversation to stop change to over contain something why and there so there's this experience shame like I can't begin to tell you how much I recognize this as my own attention seeking which is quite compulsive is always followed by weeks of unbearable shame about what what what the hell was I doing the but if I think about that yeah there's not a contact you personally but if we have this conversation now and then for the next three nights you're in a state bearable in subject the question would be why you need to do that to yourself you knows what's the project here well you could think the project is to shut you up and others the messages don't do that again okay if you do that this is what's going to happen what that stops is the thought about the enjoyment of what you've done and the possible future of what you've done I it could have some momentum it could lead to the next thing you do but actually the project here is to make sure you don't ever change as long as you're ashamed of yourself after this you will never do anything again if they win I guess that's you so with the the I think perhaps so here we have a kind of a sort of desert you you your final thing as an appendix which happened to be where you began this whole yes attention-seeking project which is Stephen Greenblatt on distraction and you you quote him saying that the job of the critic really is to track the movements that provoke the most intense pleasure and the most intense anxiety and I read your book with the most intense pleasure and the most intense anxiety and I think the intense pleasure was feeling amongst other things attention seeking is a good thing and the intense anxiety was that self-interested is the most stupid thing we do and that's the narrowing of attention and I kept noticing that I was that it seems to be all about me so the shame tonight would be that I said this and I made it all about myself so that so that said that so here's where I'm just going to read you because the most extraordinary line a style so this is comes out of ad Miller's response to Jane Austen saying that her her writing is the product of a shameful relationship to marriage then we get James Baldwin and his writing becomes a product of a shameful relationship to Love Actually and affection and then we get Freud who's who's writing as a product of a shameful to sexuality or sex so we get sort of marriage love and sex are all kind of creating these shameful relationships but the point is that they are we managing to be described in you and so you say our style is always a shameful relation to something and it's amazing statement our style is always a shameful relation to something can you talk about that yes that um if we're to a writing star but it could be personal styles in all sorts of ways ah whatever else they are attempts to transform the things we feel we need to conceal because obviously if shame is the only game in town then concealment is the only game in town then performance as the only game in town in which or all the time flirting with what's going to be exposed on what you can manage to conceal so one of the ways of thinking about style would be it's an attempt to transform expose and inhibit or expose an acceptable ways such that something can move you can go on writing or go on performing so the star will be the word for a process of transformation and I think in terms some of you mentioned earlier I think what is interesting here this to me is that if a trauma is untransformed one transform will experience then every single thing that we believe or repeat is akin to a trauma unless we've transformed it so if let's say it's a bit of a world under you're a psychoanalyst if you become a client in or Lacanian or a Freudian then in a way you've been traumatized by these people because you've been unable to transform them enough into something about as it were your own so that there's in this there's the wish to be traumatized which is the width wish to submit which is to do with the fear transformation so any experience you can't transform and shame would be like a it's like a emblem of this it's worth wondering why you can't or who's stopping you and style is such a that's one many more first term because it I mean it you could say that style is for personality your character that when you meet a person's character you're meeting their shameful relationship to something yes and what they've done with it and what they've done with it yeah no I have to say there is a thing that's no now there is a sort of Philippian style I know if you've heard of this but that I mean you'd have a style and and I think it's very recognizable I think it's very marked and and is it a shameful relation I read this book and wondered if it's a shameful relationship to attention that it that it's is it I would have thought it must be whatever else it is it must be that I mean the thing about one's style is for me is that it's like your smell you can't smell it you need other people to tell you about it I mean I believe I've got to starve I can't recognize it and I when people say it to me I can really believe them but I don't know what it is because I just write it you know it's all I'm trying to imitate myself so to speak I'm just writing these sentences that occurred to me but nevertheless I infer that unconsciously what is going on is the attempt to transform many experience that I don't know about into something that is acceptable interesting engaging pleasure and so on with a wish to get a response that will enable me to go on transforming it that's why I think is going there is in this book I mean I mean when you say shame is the thing that will not be read described and Yuri described it yeah I'm um can I find the you say this amazing that shame is I I haven't got it here but you some point you say shame is in some ways the attention-seeking of the exhibitionist who feels ashamed is going out there and because you point out that people like uh who are very easily ashamed or addicted to being shamed go do it again and again and again to themselves even though it repeats and repeats from a piece and they can't get past it so as if they are going out with a kind of end of language moment this sort of met this sort of end they know they want something but they have nothing there's no vocabulary and nor does anybody else or you don't know whether anybody else does you know this is where your own listen sends or where you want it to end such that there's something else that you haven't thought of because I presume we do these things either to master them I hoping that it could be revised and or because they're so pleasurable you know it may be as one conscious pleasure but there's something because the rush is why would anybody risk being shamed you know me to be a say a stand-up comic or for us to sit here whatever there are lots of risks in these public performances and people enjoy them and people are drawn to them and people want to watch other people doing them and it seems to me that one of the things we might be watching is the spectacle of between concealment and performance and what actually lands what engages you in that so that yeah so that's the idea that somehow in those moments of repeat humiliation and attention-seeking one is every time invent in in a state of inventiveness and and and and being generated it's quite hard for me to get across I think but I'm fascinated that the order came to you lost because I then we then move on to I don't know how I'm doing for time but we then move on to to what you call vacancies of attention which is a quote from Samuel Johnson's Restless and and and you link and this is the we're now in the 18th century and and we're linking Samuel Johnson's history of Restless to Sterns tristram shandy and vacancy is a pretend this vacancies a potential it does feel like we're talking about the internet now because we're talking about the Happy Valley and and and the kind what is it when you have everything at your fingertips basically whenever everything is we're now say a click away bear to satisfy you and yet it creates more and more distraction and can we talk about the role of inattention in this story yeah I mean one of the things that interested me interest me is the way in which when we're taught say you know to read books or to look at pictures or whatever we're obviously taught a kind of attention it's quite interesting to also think what kind of distraction does any artifact leader onto or any person you know that we we know what the official forms of attention and tented miss are but we had also wonder and what are the distractions to which these objects or people need us in others all that does is it gives attention to the fact that the mind is vagrant as well as focused and so there's always a lot more going on the one can be can be aware of but one does get glimpses of it and the question is in a way you could think well what's a ganar says it picks up on the glimpses it encourages you and enables you to follow up and through with things that just fleeting across your mind or minimal impressions or whatever they are but the things that you're tempted not necessarily actively to dismiss but just not to bother with and so I think you know it's very interesting Freud's idea that the best way to listen is not to concentrate it's like the Maren Miller thing I quote what she says she said to me once when I paint a tree in a field I look at everything but the tree and that's a very very interesting idea you know once you get over the sort of you know nafas endless of it because you can see in a way what she's getting at is that concentration actually limits attention if you listen if you were to listen attempting a certain kind of attentive state as a psychoanalyst you would of course find what you're looking for because that's what attention is it it's the satisfaction of preference or assumption so that you have to listen find a way of listening in a different way so you yourself and indeed the circle patient can be surprised so the the interesting not the only interesting moments but the interesting some of the interesting moments are when one it one is surprised or the person was seeing as surprised as if say this hadn't occurred to me until or I hadn't thought this and I think there is I think you are moving towards read description or maybe releasing yourself from a traumatize relationship to Freud in some way in the in this book but because for its free-floating attention I mean you're that you're completely standing up for it but you are troubling his description of that as to do always with sexuality or to do with wanting and then you move into this wide angle detention at the end of Marion milna which is something else initially it has a very it's not to do with wanting no it's not and the question is if it's not doing on what is it to do with or does it have to be to do with anything but there are clearly ways of looking that are not about satisfying once or are not desired driven in the familiar pitch we have desires so what would it be like to be perceptive without being desiring and that's something we can't imagine but if the idea attracts your attention it means you can imagine something but wish did you think she was able to do that I think she was yeah she was totally convincing and I I imagine we've all had moments of this I don't think this is really science fiction I just think it's very hard given the way we've all been educated to imagine I mean the the the other the also the Stephen green back to because you have these two sort of I think three descriptions actually at the end one is I mean and also you set this up at the beginning because you asked at the beginning which i think is really the key question but what would a life without a focus without even feeling you had to have a focus look like be like and so it would you say that's the question yeah definite yeah and and how does that fit with also a life of wanting so it's also let's have another kind of life but how compatible of these lives and can we imagine what it would be like to live without purpose and obviously people gotta earn their living and so on so forth so it's very hard to imagine it's not unrelated to Josh Cohen's but not working I mean I think these are probably all in the same sort of area of preoccupation which is how much are people suffering from a tyranny of purpose or tyranny of thinking they know what they want and you know again retrospectively you can see when psychoanalysis writes about sexual perversion it's actually writing about people knowing thinking they know exactly what they want you know there's a psychotherapy version is a story about consumer capitalism it's about people induce being induced to believe that the thing to do is to be able to know what you want and then have the wherewithal to get it what it can't allow for is a you might not know what you want and so all wanting might be experimental and be life might not only be about wanting there could be something else you could do in fact that because you talk about regimes of attention and one of them is morality morality is nothing if not telling us yeah what we should be attending to and what we shouldn't be attending to the other one you know Matt of course coined sexuality which is a regime of attention it's all about that and then another one is creativity which is a sort of sublet is what an attempt to get away with attention seeking without look as though it's something else but the really kind of extraordinary one actually you just referred to as the economic one where our home language for attention is economic so you pay attention and and even the notion of interest yes and what you invest in and what you invest in and even vacancies a bit of attention has a kind of commercial yeah it's if you think of it if you think of the difference between taking a three-year-old child for a walk and going for a walk with a three-year-old child you can take a three Rotel to the park to the shops if you go for a walk with a three-year-old child you'll sort of go round in circles you might not get 30 yards from the house if you literally follow them where they go and that is young relatively unmet attention and it's a very very interesing experiment because of course if you're cross impatient adults you'd think you know for sake let's do something but actually the child is doing something and you will see just how intent they are but it's unform you'll a table and it is by our standards profoundly non purposive if it's not we're not getting anywhere we would say and the child of course is getting where they want to go it's very very different you you're very careful to make inattention a form of attention and attention a form of inattention and to make attention and distraction not opposites but meaningfully related to each other but you do also say that attention nourishes us and distraction is a kind of family it furnishes us and is that way well yes but or sometimes and the risk would be for this to become a big idea because sometimes attention can be radically depleting and distraction can be amazingly enlivening as we know so it I think it's it gets back to the big idea question if there's a big idea then the big idea is what we should be attending to and then there's the problem of distraction but the distraction could be the protest against the big idea or it could be the thing the big idea doesn't cover so that I'm supposed to be reading this book but I'm daydreaming about what I'm gonna force up all by my girlfriend or by children whatever it is and the question is should I actually be reading the book who says well lots of people say I should be but then there might be a whole lot about Bill Lewis say no daydream I mean when it costs got a very interesting distinction between fantasy and Fanta sighing Fanta sighing he says is like a bolt hole so you go to this place in your mind but there's no nourishment nothing happens you go there to stop time and then there's real real fantasy which is like the formulation of desire as a way of getting to reality in which there can be real exchange and nourishment so the kind of distraction that I wouldn't promote would be the kind of distraction in which there's no nourishment you don't feel more alive you feel more depleted last time I interviewed you you hear about in writing your other book I asked you what the interesting is I don't know if you remember this is where the interesting is and you said it's whatever gives you an appetite for the future and it really it's really stayed with me in this book that we there's a tristram shandy functions and there's the notion of the hobbyhorse which essentially is you know the thing you're most interested in ah but you describe a hobbyhorse as a refuge from the future no well as an adolescent boy your hobbyhorse can be masturbation the most thrilling list for exciting thing on earth but over time it may dawn on you or you might find out that actually there's one thing better and that's a relationship with a real woman and that's where there's exchange so in the masturbation fantasy it's thrilling but fundamentally dead there's no future egg unless it becomes a way of experimental action and thought it becomes a way of imagining the sex that you might then have but it's all to do with how much fantasy gets you to reality and makes exchange possible that isn't enraged so you don't then find a woman and get enraged with her because she won't be part of your masturbation fantasy you meet her one because she is somebody else and that's the point whereas if you get stuck in other words if you are fixated and can only pay attention to a masturbation fantasy you will have no experience or you'll have murderous no experience what is it did you give me the sign I think I saw the sign okay okay um um he said when I was questioned awesome Oh shall I ask no do one ask one last class of you don't say I've got too many last things later yes questions from the floor I think I'll take three questions and then and then at a time one here just the way you were talking about shame and you close down you don't want to reveal what is it that's oh so freeing when someone is open or vulnerable and able to talk about their shame because you said there's such a push to cut there's such an effort to close down and not not reveal but then what happens when it is revealed well presumably the freedom is reactive to the previously felt constraint that the shame has been a way of holding oneself together circumscribing ones behavior and if this is not a suggestion that we should all do the shameful thing at all it's just that we should be able to have a conversation about the shameful thing and then we can decide but clearly if there's some release yeah I made an enormous race but then it seems to me this has got to be a story about consequences because there's enormous release and then what is there and then what is there and as how does the story continue and of course it'd be different for each individual person but I think you need a long-term view and a short-term view you broke my three questions rule but that was between you two I mean now we'll do three questions yeah that's the question I it might be tangential I don't know if it's but but what kept occurring to me when you talk about attention is those when people can look at the same thing and see very different things and what what does that say about attention and the I guess the personal experience what says a lot it's the point in a way isn't it which is that there are multiple aspects so I can something lots of different points of view and lots of other people can see them from points of view that I can't imagine I mean we can't see ourselves as other people see us the point about attention is there are multiple aspects and then the question becomes which are the aspects that we want to include and why and which of the aspects we want to discard but it's all about that things look different from different points of view over here you've talked about what shaming does to us and I was thinking if you could talk a little bit more about the act of shaming what is behind it and what does the person who is doing the shaming get and don't get the or doesn't get well I assume this is a sadomasochistic contract so to speak you know that's that the wish to shame is the wish to expel and punish the part of oneself that one is ashamed of that's one of the things that's going on and also and it's part of this that there's presumably some exhilarating sadism in shaming other people it's a bit like saying it's you and not me and there's the presumably a kind of relief in that so it's a kind of distance regulation but I think the wish to shame is where this all starts you know if I force my three-year-old child to go on my walk and I muck her for walking around in circles she's gonna know about what shame is and she's then gonna have to do two things she's gonna have to dissociate her wish to have her own walk and manage the rage that's been evoked in her by my treating her like this so it's as though shame seems to be shaming somebody is like a form of humiliating revenge um and it's got to escalate you know if you shame people then presumably it can only carry on so just behind here in know just just like leg behind yeah then we have I'm wondering about the connection between guilt and shame if there is one no there is one and it's it's in the book but broadly speaking I mean all the formulas obviously are neater than the experience but in guilt you let somebody else down and in shame you let yourself down that's one way of putting it so the guilt is to do with one's obedience to the external authorities shame appears to be to do with obedience to the internal God's absolute gods but one thing is much more apparently sociable in the other one of the things I try and convey in the book is that actually shame has more to say about sociability than guilt does because I think guilt is about abiding by rules shame is about something much more profound and thank you very much it seems to me that the two things that were guiding what you just told us about where psychoanalysis and then the act of reading or literary criticism and it just struck me as you are talking that the principle meeting point between the artwork and the analy's and is that they both in some ways magnify our demand for attention they're saying interpret me and I guess my question would be that given that both the analyst and the reader don't say this is this they just say I've noticed this in what ways to both the reader and the analyst and attend to something in similar or in different ways well the salient difference is that the analyzer can answer back in the book can't and that does make a lot of difference but I think still it doesn't alter the fact that there is an exchange going on in fantasy but I think when you're reading a book I mean I'm sure everybody but when you're reading a book you are having a conversation with the author or something akin to a conversation with it's with the author but with something or somebody with the language so that I think that in a way it's like um conversation by other means but it's similarly an exchange of words just wonder if there was a if criticism is always shaming like if it were has this of a useful function like keeping someone safe yeah I mean it's a good question because of course we're encouraged to believe that we should be good at taking criticism so that's a really impressive thing to be able to do it certainly isn't my experience I mean I'd much rather be praised occasionally people say critical things that engage me and I'm struck by them but I often feel got out now that's me I'm not saying this is true of all of us but I do think that there's something that the risk is the criticism becomes the wish to shame you know that at one end there's an ordinary attempt to modify or a genuine question at the other end there's a wish to humiliate and it would seem to me much better if we stop humiliating people and start asking them questions not questions we know the answer to there's a couple of questions at the back not three - just wait no just one at a time is the new policy new rule would you say that the need to apologize is connected to shame I think the need to apologize is a magical solution to shame and I think it's a very bad thing I think people shouldn't apologize and they shouldn't forgive but that's just what I think just as an aside okay one more question I was just thinking this Yeon Lee thing that I kick over my not why are you saying that like um she said she she feels very ashamed of herself she's afraid prone to shame I'm sorry can you speak up sorry Holocaust um so so it's right at ye only so straight ashamed ourselves you sorry prone to shame and she came to loved novels like Jane Austen or whatever because it was like a fantasy of being in a world where she didn't exist just how loads of you were talking and uh she was had nothing to do with it and so doing like you're saying about the idea of style as kind of a way to transform shame but is that kind of attention outwards to novels whatever cannot be transformative in a way this a light you saying that thinking about the self is the most damaging kind of thing that kind of self isn't resolved in shame or what else can there be the comedian Chinese one would ever thought most people in this room had the experience of reading being transformative but the most interesting thing to me about it is that it's transformative often in indiscernibl ways I mean that say one doesn't really know the effect of a book one loves or hates on oneself but what one does know is that something in one is compelled to go on attending to it and that seems to me the thing to go for to follow that for whatever reason you want to go on reading this book but it's not a cost-benefit analysis it couldn't be because the book you're reading is part of the dream day it's simply part of something that may or may not be made into something and will be digested in unpredictable ways and and you may never know but you may know the experience of reading it felt very very compelling we do seem to be coming to this idea of reading actually and and you do mention in the book that actually reading is one of the main ways in which we notice our inattention yeah so it's when you're reading you saw anything I just read three but I didn't notice anything and it could be because you weren't engaged by the book it could be because I'm lying four pages ago engaged you too much and you and what you did whilst drifting off with carry on or you're reading unconsciously so in fact you were very engaged but you've can't remember the last three pages but something was going on and it it reminds at one it reminded me of proofs days of reading his essay his essay is about reading where where he you know he does say in that essay that actually he sort of prefers books to people because you can tell them what you think in a way that you can't you can't with people but the extraordinary story he tells about reading is that at the time he was doing it in his childhood everyone thought first isn't interested in us he's only interested in his books and he was shutting out the world with his books this is but the legacy of that reading is that he forgot the books but because he was reading he remembers the people and the places as though the books the reading was causing him to pay attention to the other things I I coming back to this because I I cannot emphasize enough how much this book has meant to me I've read it a few times because my mind kept drifting and sometimes it were drifted beautifully and sometimes anxiously I might look at my phone and I'm sort of checkout brexit or something well it did it did both intense pleasure and intense anxiety and you say at one point that the shame can be suffered and it can be punished but it can't be read and one of the things that happens in moments of shame is reading becomes impossible I feel this book is unbelievably original it's experiencial we don't know what attention is there's no big idea but we know it's not a commodity and we know that an object is defined by the distractions to which it leads and and and I think something here has happened in the history of attention in the history of psychoanalysis a read ascription has occurred and style is doing new things I really recommend you read this book a lot of times and and whether or not you figure out what it's doing for you I hope it gives you even a modicum of what it's given for me thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: London Review Bookshop

Views: 30,529

Rating: 4.7943444 out of 5

Keywords: Adam Phillips, Freud, psychoanalysis, shame

Id: hymXObsn30w

Length: 64min 20sec (3860 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 19 2019