Adam Phillips & Paul Holdengräber discuss 'Missing Out'

[Music] [Applause] the the expression of the inexpressible also how the dissonance between children and grown-ups but the reason it seemed to me a wonderful poem was because it was about how children are always up against their parents self preoccupation that in talking to your parents because your parents have their history and their preoccupations with them and that very strange experience the child where on the one hand you assume they could only be attentive to you and you also know that there as were in their own minds the poem is very poignant about that about how you can't as a child you can't quite however responsive your parents are there's always a sense in which the response is inadequate and either that prompts you to be more as well poetic or it creates a kind of retreat and you can't give up like the man who swears in the shower what does the poetry afford us at other languages can't I do I'm not sure I don't know really what the answer that is but there is something I think in what Mervyn is said which of course comes from in a way romanticism which is about the idea that the children speak a language that is a very fundamental language even though or because it's less sophisticated that the mere fact the children are new people means they're coming to you a new ppl so they're coming to the tools that everybody has completely fresh and what it means is that they that they show the adults things about the language that the adults have forgotten the other bit forgotten or forgotten in the sense that there's such an elaborate of sophistication by the time you get to be an adult so you've got so many ways of saying and not saying things on the various things about doing child psychotherapy is that you can say anything to a child because it's either water off a duck's back and there's not interested or they're completely gripped there's very little middle ground so you see children are really alive and enlivened by certain things you say but if they aren't engaged then are engaged at all and you can see they just manage you they learn to manage the adults who got all these things to say many of which they're not interested in how do you manage their distraction well I would i partly allow for it as in you know that they should be free to do that but i would want to engage them but it's a it's a real lesson in the way in which children drop adults more than adults drop children because children actually are only interested in adults when they're interested of course they evolve ways of I mean so they they're honest I dress they're honest exactly but they're the rubbers all the words are not quite right this will happen tonight a lot is that a lot of the words we use won't be quite right yeah I think that's right but I think the children are not true realer more passionate more profound well I don't think any of that's true but they are new people so they're they're beginning their starting it out I mean the infants and also born into the atmosphere the emotional climate of their parents histories and characters but what happens to us because you know in in thinking about the ways in which you you talk about children I'm reminded this happens all the time in the experience of reading you I'm reminded of the the great eight elegy of little care where Hilke talks about us being turned around something we've been turned around from the open space in which we existed animals exist that children existed and confines a put on us he says in German via Hatter so um did rate who turned and twisted us around so much and that's what happens we we lose something in the process in the process of being less new we lose something we lose the ability maybe to to name things there's a when one of them Berryman's dream songs he has the line Rilke was a jerk do you remember that no it's a very bit of but with what I mean what I mean by saying this whether or not one thing's is true is that the trouble with that locust stuff is to me there's something very precious about it I mean I can see the point of it I can see there's something poignant about it I also think that in a way it's very simplest which is that parenting is very very selective it's not unconditional love that parents love and like certain things about their children and don't love and like other things and children of course adapt to this and pick it up so very soon there are whole reams and realms of experience and feeling and thought that simply cannot be articulated in the family and this is true of all families because it's like an aesthetic criteria the child picks up very quickly what is lovable about him or her and what isn't and has to deal with that and that we've all dealt with that that's what growing up involves but what it means is that it leaves us with fantasies of an endless unrealized potential and all and modern people often think things like if only I had different parents then where's because the point is that you the ponty you do only have the parents you have that's the point of your life there weren't other parents and that's what you're actually dealing with and it always involves somebody could either be called a sacrifice or relinquishment or a denial or something and then what seems to happen is that that the very things that were left out so to speak or unrecognized or unacknowledged press for recognition in adolescence and adulthood it's almost as though we're always trying to partly fill in the gaps in our parents capacity to recognize us or we give up what we we attempt to do with parents to wish for other parents we do in relationships we have with each other and particularly in a relationship you're interested in as am I the relationship with one's partner ones lover one in in your new book missing out you have a passage where you describe the wish if only he or she were different if only she or he were somewhat able to change the way I would wish them to change what's very striking about that thought and it's very vivid obviously a new second house but obviously everybody has these conversations is how much people feel they know what their lives would be exactly like were their partner to change in this desired way as though this is really a specification that if only they would do this then everything else would follow and everybody on the most level no that couldn't possibly be true so ones living in a very strange omnipotent omniscient fantasy about danger a dangerous one well of a sort of very very violent one because the coercion is a magical one it's ain't the other person if only you could be more tidy we'd be happy together if only you could be whatever it is and it's gonna be located somewhere example you chooses is very apropos to to lot to me I I feel that and I use the messy one of them I am the messy one I live my life as I often say between chaos and entropy somewhere with a to meet but but you're also very interested and this is a digression you you're also very interested in messiness you're very interested in well use anybody not I mean I you may be right it's just that it seems to me that one of the things the way that the language divides this up in a kind of binary is that there's mess and chaos and this order and something else and clearly it isn't as simple as that but very often between couples you will find that one of the were given couples only ever have three or four arguments of their own specific repertoire one of them very often is about order what is that about well we couldn't generalize about that but I think it must it could be about for example a fear of a sort of emotional chaos or feeling being excessive unintelligible too much to manage in some way because you could think well what did it what's the fantasy of catastrophe here let's imagine the house gets totally messy what's going to happen well you know there won't be a catastrophe will happen for example is it we won't be able to find anything and that's a very odd thing so in each case presumably somebody's got a fantasy of the catastrophe that will occur if the person doesn't change mess also is a way of hiding things from oneself could be yeah I mean Mary Douglas said this thing about dirt is matter out of all plays yeah and that seems to be very good so formulation for this and that everybody is going to be preoccupied with something to do with dirt hygiene order intelligibility given the kind of cultures we've grown up in your new book missing out in praise of the unlived life it's very much about this strong I mean in so far that it is about something which itself is a dangerous comment but it is about to some extent the great attachment we have to a life we fully imagine but they're absolutely not living yeah and it feels hard in some way not to take it to heart the unexamined life you write is surely worth living this isn't the prologue but it is the unlived life was examining it seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living the lives we are missing out on the lives we would be leading but for some reason or not and in some way that first line is you you're truly putting Plato on his head am i yes in in sofa and plato was maybe also a jerk but you're putting Plato on his head by saying I mean pay to believe deeply that the unexamined life was not worth living and here what you're doing is imagining in some way that our greatest fantasy is about a life not lived messing we're missing we in not intentionally missing out but missing out well there isn't I see I think there's a tremendous snob a sermon believing the only examined lives worth living because clearly there are all sorts of lives and no one's in a position to decide that but what what is unavoidably true is that we are and this Ana starts inevitably right in the beginning of our lives we're fantasizing about what we don't have that's what fantasy ears effectively so it's an imagining of a felt absence or deprivation and I think the question is what happens to that fantasize because you think of it very simply in terms of a lot of people having be familiar with the story but if you think of a baby and this is a this is a construction there's always nobody knows what babies think but the baby is hungry it fantasizes what it wants to eat and it waits and if it waits too long then this turns into rage and then it might be very difficult for it to eat but if it comes within a sufficient amount of time then the baby can enjoy the meal but a lot happens in this process because first of all a child registered in an immediate sense a need then there's a fantasy about what was satisfied and then I did it meets the reality of what will approximately satisfy it and everything depends upon what happens in that process because if the child went it's it's very familiar this we're looking forward to seeing somebody and we wait too long for them we can't be with them and they arrive you know it's amazing what word that you mentioned that because in some way your book is an elegy to the fact that we're not special yeah that in some way we begin our life new thinking we are highly original highly special and growing up is a slow but sure process of realizing that we really are not well and just to continue with using the same example as you used of waiting I don't know if you remember in fragments of a lover's discourse in Bach there's a great passage on waiting a lover waits yeah yeah it's never the other who waits it's never the other who waits he or she waits bastards never clear about gender waits and realizes that waiting is not a particularly good thing to be doing so he goes out and walks around the block so that he shouldn't be put in that position of waiting then comes back and the lover is still not there and he does the same thing until they finally meet and the lover feels terribly original in doing this but what Bach talks about in fragments of a lover's discourse is that everybody does this all the time and therefore our specialness is very much put into question yes I mean it's usually we are all original but we aren't all special in the sense that ideally our parents make us feel special insofar as in so far as they can they organize their lives around our needs so we begin ideally with a sense that it doesn't matter to somebody else that we have a need and it must somebody else that they will find out what that need might be and do what they can about it but in the process of growing up it's going to dawn on everybody that there's scarcity and that there's a limit how much anybody can have and that there are an awful lot of people in the world so no one it's very unlikely that anybody's going to add grow this experience which is on the one hand if you're lucky a feeling that somebody cares enough about what you're feeling to think about what you need and then you will then grow up into a world in which people will do this less reliably probably because you'll never have that kind of intimacy as an adult with an adult lover as you had with your parents not it's not the same but you will never have that kind of attentiveness to your need and that is I think the thing that makes all the difference but I think the other thing that worth pick ever the Bart example is that this story is potentially very violent and disturbing because it's not simply when you wait it gets worse and worse and worse it's that when you wait you either become if you wait too long either vengeful and destroy the world that makes you wait or defeat it are you give up on your desire because you can't bear waiting involved so everything hangs on it seems to me what that waiting experience is like and then later it'll hang on how people the people you find yourself falling for deal with the waiting question whether they keep you waiting whether they anticipate they'll have to wait for you all that stuff is going to be repeated but but it is a question of timing it's very it's a question of time to the question of imagining what the other person can bear and what you might be doing to somebody by making them wait and can they be how much can they bear before it becomes unbearable yeah and also why do you want to make them bear something why do you well you might want to sadistically make them feel that they're the needy ones and you'll be on need I mean a basic sadomasochistic arrangement would be the sadist believes I can do whatever I like to you because you'll never be able to leave me the masochist says you can do anything you want to me as long as you never leave me and that's the basic one of the basic sort of patterns of this so how waiting is exploited between couples or between people is very powerful I think and it brings us to the core of of the book missing out in the first on the in the prologue still you say we also learned to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like the book is about some versions of these double lives we can't help but live there is always what will turn out to be life the life we led and the life that accompany that the parallel life or lives that never actually happened that we lived in our minds the wished-for live or lives the risk untaken and the opportunities avoided or unprovided we refer to them as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us but for some reason and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason they were not possible and what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives indeed our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for an endless tantrum about the lives you were unable to live I get to comment on that the books a comment on that yeah the the book is really about frustration and it's about the unavoidable nature of frustration and about what we end up doing with the experience of frustration because I think it's impressively unlived life in the sense and praise of them live life in the sense that there's always going to be a large amount of unlived life we're always going to have a sense of an excessive sense of our own potential or simply an unrealistic one cuz one couldn't know what own potential is and one can never know the contingent circumstances weren't once the live one's life in but whatever those circumstances are there's always going to be frustration and there's always going to be the response to it and so in a way the book says something very simple it sort of reinvents the wheel in a way it just says this that if we are made if we feel phobic of frustration if we can't bear our own frustration then we are never going to be remotely satisfied that it's it's only in a state of frustration that's held or tolerated that you can begin to find what it is you might want and if you live in a culture which is always offering you fairly instantaneous if you have learnt enough satisfactions then you're very likely to learn to fob yourself off and never and never to get to the point where you might have more of a sense of what you might want more of a sense in in some way of waiting exactly of being actually able to wait and assume in the participating yes some way I mean a culture which doesn't permit foreplay is a culture which is lost should we just pause at that moment and yes certainly a culture that is okay um if if we are um if we live in a culture that discourages states of anticipation or that it assumes that really we can't bear it or little drivers matter we'll get too anxious then what that means is all the imaginative space that frustration opens up is foreclosed so it's as though I feel slightly Restless agitated I have a bar of chocolate I have a bath I found somebody cetera and we all do a version of this what's very difficult is to actually hold that state so you get more of a sense of what it is my one might want because what happens is very quickly the way one fobs oneself off becomes an addiction every time a bit restless a chocolate and that that becomes simply what I do and then we're left with a whole range of unform you lated needs or desires because every time I feel this state of sort of restless agitation chocolate comes to mind and even though I know it doesn't satisfy me that's what I will do and you know lives are based on things like that it's like chocolate so that so that the book is saying if we can if we can have well first of all if we can enable arch or if we bear our children's frustration because it's very difficult to let one's children be frustrated because most people can't bear being hated by their children and childhood is intrinsically frustrating but if the parents can let their children wait the children can then find that they're more able to imagine and dream and so on so that and in fact frustration should be taught in schools it should be a subject because children know a lot about frustration and they need languages about it that make it more alluring and interesting and intriguing rather than just terrible or frightening or whatever so be very good if I think education if that was done but I think it but it's in in a sense you it sounds flippant but it's actually quite serious now I mean III know you mean it and in a way it could be a subject talked in [Music] introducing children and maybe adolescents to political philosophy yeah or drama or their host a whole range of things but but by political philosophy and politics I actually mean that a response to a non society which doesn't accept frustration is a consumer society that immediately offers what people supposedly imagine they want but in which worse than that I think because I think two things happen what it's very bad already I know it is bad one thing one thing that happens is the people have habitually fobbed off so you don't know what they want means just it means be placated so instead of it being we us really working out what you want for dinner tonight I said we're having pizza and that's it that's the end of the conversation okay so it's a it's a foreclosing of the issue so mother says to tell Joanne I produce orange juice and the question whether the child can think beyond those two or whether that constrains the repertoire you don't mean yeah yeah I do so in the frustration story that I'm trying to push here the two things can happen I think one is that we get we don't we don't discover our satisfactions the other thing is we that we turn being frustrated into itself into a pleasure into a masochistic pleasure so we begin to enjoy our deprivation and once that happens it's very very difficult I think for anything to shift but on the other hand in in missing out and in your work in in general and we'll get to the ways in which missing out is part of your work in general you you find that frustration is comes with a certain form of optimism and that we really really need it yeah we need it in order to be poetic in order to be imagine what you think yeah in order to fail we need we need the in cetacean maybe the invitation that reading itself which I'll get to in a moment officers frustration is part of it yes and I'm not getting it and it's a kind of hope or kind of faith when you're frustrated initially you have the hope of a faith of the belief that there is something in the world that might satisfy or might at least appear something of your frustration so it's a real frustration is a real belief in the future in the end in his first stage and then everything hangs on what happens next but it's very very optimistic in principle there's a line that you quote in many books and that's something that I want to talk to you about this the quotation of certain lines in many books because I think some extent Adam we share this I mean you write it I say it you have a group of quotations that come back again and again and again and I have people think I have an enormous amount of quotations in my mind but I really only have half a dozen they're very good I mean one of my very favorite is Oscar Wilde who said that there's only superficial people who do not judge by appearance well it's love that and when I say that people are always amazed by the fact that I remember all these quotations but there are a few and in reading your your earth as it were in the last few few weeks I've come across certain citations quotations that matter to you very much and this one is I think a couple many of them are but this one of Marshall Sahlins I like very much a people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy I'll leave it there I mentioned a moment ago just a few quotations I'd like you to take me back if you could to the moment actually when you when you discovered reading and when when reading started to matter to you the the as it were the crime scene that moment when reading became something more than just reading words on a page I was actually as a child I wasn't interested in reading at all but when I went to school as a sir adolescent I had a school and English teacher who talked about literature with the same kind of passion that my family talked about each other you know that there was a kind of intensity in this engagement but I'd never heard before and it was very very contagious and very very inspiring and he was I don't know of a second under who's here but I had a teacher who'd been taught by leavis at Cambridge and leave this was a little critic in England who really treated Lingus treachery as a kind of secular religion it was the kind of answer to what he thought was a post-christian society and my teachers school felt something comparably zealous it wasn't zealous as in we were told exactly what to read him what to think about the books but we it was conveyed to us that these books really didn't matter and that you were involved in some regard action for the profound human values in reading his books and that was conveyed very very powerfully that the way to learn how to live and to live properly was to read English literature and it worked for me I mean that's it I felt it in and it was immersive it was totally immersive yeah you know what comes to my mind as you say this is that you rebelled against it in that in that your teacher may have taught you that literature in some way answers such and such questions in more than one way I think that what you would you teach us and I think the way in which you live literature if I can presume that I know that is precisely believing that it's only an inspiration it's only an invitation you don't quite know what it offers you don't quite know what it promises but it does something yes if you happen to like reading it has a very powerful effect on you an evocative effect but it's on me so that it's not as though when I read I'm gathering information or indeed can remember much of what I read but it is like dream work in the sense I can feel it having an effect on me and I know the books that gripped me as I everybody does but their effect is indiscernible I don't quite know what it is the lever side position is that it more or less is that it makes you a morally better personal it seems to me that isn't isn't clear but what it isn't clear not to me no but what is clear is that there are very powerful unconscious evocative effects in reading books that one loves and it's a bit like what you're saying about having the same Reptar of quotations because presumably you have we have these repertoires because there's something about these quotes that we want to go on thinking about the matter to us they're not just sort of dishes that we usually like James the way they are and and in some way they well in my professional life they served me very well but they serve me because they they're not name-dropping in the sense that they are there because they they helped me think they hope me further my way of being they are the words I wish I had had but I have to attribute them to someone else well a stir of all our words but that's true of most of our words I mean there's somebody else's but but it's very selective isn't it because you've read however many hundreds of thousands of books you've read but but the expectations have stayed to haunt you and and that's the interesting thing isn't it please you know why those six or eight or ten or whatever they are and you might think well and I'm sure it's true they're useful that pragmatically you can use some situations but why well because presumably you want them read ascribed there's still something in them you want to know about so in yeah so that actually every time you use it it's like a love test it's it's a bit either merwin poem which is that you say it again say to me or to the audience whatever it is and my assumption is that unconsciously so to speak you're wondering what's going to come back when you say it and that's an attempt to go on working out what is in it for you so it's helpful it's yeah it's full of desire but you don't know what it is you want but you do need to go on saying it because you want to find out what - what it will elicit again and again as long as it takes because when you've as it work or what you wanted it'll disappear the reaction to that is I mean when you say that I think of it and I think how sad that I mean how what a relief it would be for some people who wouldn't who you know who wouldn't have to hear this over and over again no but could be relief for you because what it would mean is the stories moved on and you would then be freer to have another one okay I didn't want you to say that but you see that I mean that that would be a good example of the way in which things can be anxiously held on to as a kind of set of tools for fear of what would happen were they to be relinquished now you could actually change your repertoire repertoire as we all could but suddenly for the UN but you hold on to your options by a lot yeah why I think for the reason I'm saying because there's something about these quotation whichever they are that go on preoccupying me in some way and they come tomorrow and I write they come to mind so they get recontextualized every time they run down and because this they're like dreams in that sense there's something in the matters and I don't know what it is so I go on repeating them and people do say it's back and in a way that is again brings us back to MU in something that we can't quite formulate yes but the 40 yes but the thing about the Merman poem is that it seems to me he's saying there in the poem that you can't quite formulate it if no one responds to it that if your parents are preoccupied in that way you'll always stuck with this feeling that you can't get beyond a certain point because what you're wanting is the response that makes a difference that is a Reedus ssin so you get something back that modifies what you've said and that's the point of talking and and most of your life is spent well maybe not most of your life but a lot of your life is spent listening yeah but what I described to you is what psychoanalysis is people later yeah because that's what you're into my real Oh people say things to you new settings back to them that's all it is and people say things to you and you're entirely depending on what occurs to you it's simply about what occurs to you in that conversation and what sayable and and whether the two people fear for whatever reason this is worth going on with that there's some things are some appetite in it that even if you can't say why you want to go on with the conversation it feels necessary because everybody's got their set of quotations even if they're not literally quotes they're just stories about Who I am you know I'm a very shy person my mother was this my father was that we've all got this repertoire I've kind of stultified formulas about who we are and they're there presumably partly because we want to unpack them and partly because there's a lot of anxiety and not thinking them so people come to analysis will talk to their friends whatever to have these things renewed or revised even though at the same time they would be anxious about that happened I was going to say the desire for change is also filled with trepidation yeah and in some way analysis is but another form of reading or rather rereading yeah it's another for reading it's another form of coming back from school as a child and chatting with your mother around the kitchen table they're all similar sorts of things in which whatever your preoccupations are are recycled and reconsidered through a conversation with somebody else there's a as I said reading you makes me think of many other right as many other quotations and there's one quotation I'd like to read to you rather slowly and carefully and want you to pay attention to it the way you did to move in its [Music] before Marcel Proust wrote remembrance of things past he wrote the text which was an introduction to his translation of Ruskin on reading so it was a an Ruskin's text on reading was a text on reading and Puss wrote a text on reading on reading Ruskin and translated it and this is what he saves in one of the passages if we spend the evening with these friends talking about books it is because we genuinely want to we often take leave of them at least only with regret and once we have left them none of those thoughts that spoil friendship what did they think of us were we not tactless did they like us or the fear of being forgotten in favor of someone else all these quorums of friendship expire on the threshold of the pure and peaceful form of it that is reading there is no deference either we laugh at what Malia has to say only just so far as we find him funny when he bores us we are not afraid to look bored and once we have definitely had enough of him we put him back in his place as abruptly as if he had neither genius nor celebrity that made me think of well what does it make you it really cuts both ways it's just metal why don't you could think how marvelous what a wonderful resources you can read but also in that it seems to me Prust there's a real despair about human relations that actually sociability is so difficult and so problematic that thank god there's this refuge which paradoxically is about sociability so it's a very strange thing he's very vocal here because that's like a man on the run from something isn't it a man who really desperately needs I think everybody who loves reading knows that something about this that at one level it's a refuge from other people it's a wonderful hiding place as you know post in on reading talks about the dangers of reading yeah reading that becomes a palliative for life and also he book is obsessed in the novel about reading people as though if you can read people like books you'll be you could be okay was he keeps fine of course it really isn't like that it doesn't work it doesn't work that way because this is why I mean the the in that account that's why you can't just read psycho antic theory instead of having an analysis it isn't like that in a way it makes this issue very vivid that actually if you want whatever it is that psychoanalysis has got to offer you have to have the analysis you can't just read the books for the same reason I also found it interesting his notion of tact and his notion of jokes because in your chapter not getting it you speak about jokes and jokes are problematic on so many levels because they well they demand a response they're not unlike gifts which demand yeah a response as well I've always been surprised in this particular culture in America that there's such a thing as a gift shop as if a gift could precede its donation a very strange thing but a joke demands a response and a joke also excludes and the joke is also there to use a word that I very much like that you use in missing out humiliation but jokes are no Emin if you in a way you've said it but jokes are real test of sociability out there because if I tell a joke do you tell true now if I say to you I'm gonna tell you a great joke obviously I can't tell you a great joke I can tell you a joke and you will tell me whether it's great in your response if I'm was to tell a joke now it could be excruciating the embarrassing or roaring success but it would be like some love test to the audience am I are we all together in this or in fact am i and I salute do I think something's hilarious we actually nobody's even amused but indeed might be embarrassed by so it's a real test of sociability in real test of sort of one's relationship to the group the other bit I think that's very interesting which is the thing Freud says which is we never really know what about a joke amuses us and in that sense jokes are like so tacit communications in the sense of if we get it we laugh but what we don't get is what getting it involves we don't actually know what we've got all we know is that we've been amused and for it makes it as you know a lot of this because there is a lot in it because it's a very strange form of you never know the joke whether it's creating a collusion or a collaboration you know whether you've got a sort of gang of accomplices who all share a sense of humor whether it's a cult so to speak or whether it's a group of differently minded people whether you're coercing a sort of group by a shared sense of humor and for it is obviously very onto this because he's wondering what what kind of intimacy jokes create and and do they in a sense crate do they sort of gloss over differences between people are they like magical acts of intimacy where people say well if we share a sense of humor then and I think all those things Freud is suspicious of not in a cynical way but in a genuinely questioning way you know wondering what we're doing with this stuff what you your response makes me think of one of the comments I hate most I actually a bore when people tell you I know exactly how you feel but in a way you you wonder why anybody would would want somebody to know exactly how they feel I don't know what happens then let's say you know exactly how I feel about something what is it assumed that will then happen as a consequence of this because it would seem to me self-evident that people have a limited apprehension of what is ever feel may be merely no no I think a lot probably but I think that it's it's defended against because the anxiety of closeness whatever nevertheless it's always going to be approximate it's never going to be that intimate there's a passage I haven't lost your attention ever well but that wouldn't be that wouldn't be so bad no it might well let's see no you speak about that so interestingly to my mind in in terms of children and their attention and how much we should learn from there but seems so lacking in attention in children actually is is something we should pay more attention to yeah let's a really exhilarating ruthlessness the you tell you think you've got this great story I want to read them and actually if they lose interest they totally there's interested and there's absolutely nothing you can do so in other words they insofar as they're they really live by their desire and then of course they learn to look after us and so they will sit there dutifully and listen to the story but actually you can tell with very little children if their knowledge did they are not interested and another way of saying it is that they're polygamists they're promiscuous in their attention or their attentions driven by something else other than loyalty you didn't lose me you say we are in actuality something we don't have the wherewithal to recognize and that seems to me to to go in the direction of an unknowability we have towards our silence yes I think that I think the thing is is that not that we don't we can't know things but that the risk is that we use knowing in bits of our lives where it doesn't work or where it's actually not the point because the book is not against it is sort of against self-knowledge but it's it's it's not against knowing things or knowing people in a way but but what it I think is trying to say something about how in a culture that puts so much value on knowing it's a bit like the sailings quote you know any culture that cermets value or knowing must be very friend of not knowing and you know it's very clear that there are limits to when you say you know someone it's very hard to know what it is you're really saying now that maybe you can't articulate it but it could also be something like using knowing where it doesn't work or that you want or there's another form of know yes exactly creative this form form the form of knowing that strikes me as the most valuable one is when where there's a lot of Unknowing yes in that which is you know the knowing that we we we get when we fall in love for in the essence and I think that the words are so important in that particular case we we fall we're off balance we lose our sense of of bearings in some way but we insofar that we love someone we can't quite say why nothing is not adjectives all and it isn't worth it I think in those cities are true we really know that other persons I'm profound sense and we really don't and and you could think that that that fantasy of knowing is spurred by or prompted by something like this person has a very very powerful effect on me and it's so overwhelming that I'm going to manage this through a fantasy of knowledge because I think part of again Proust is very interesting at this that knowing people is often very much about dealing with the anxiety that one can't control them as though if I know you understand you in a certain sense I will have some sense of sort of what you're doing and where you're going when you're not with me was in fact I don't have any sense I don't really know that so it's it's partly a question of what we use understanding to do and and the example given in the book is as young children we listen to adults talking before we understand what they're saying in exhilaration yeah and it's very very it's a very very powerful thing that and that's what after all where we start we start in a position of not getting it and it's true of listening to music too I mean the the emotional impact of music is so incommensurate with what people can say about it and it's that seems to be very illustrative something fundamental that that very very powerful emotional effects often can't be articulated but you know something's happen to you but you don't know what it is which which brings me back to what I think reading does yeah you know not but this chapter which which haunts me really the second chapter of your new book are not getting it you you must be aware of the overtones of not getting it and what that might mean yes and just the pressure how much the pressure to get it spoils one's experience of it because if you read a poem and one way or another you're urging yourself or being urged by an institution to understand it the experience of reading the poem is very different if you're it's a beginner bit like what moans saying about pleasure if you read the poem in a way that gives you pleasure or if the poem gives you pleasure then you can have an experience of it the risk is that the will to understand preempts the experience of it and I think you know you question people why would you want that and the answer would be because the experience could be disturbing not simply you will feel things you don't want to feel but the pleasure could be disturbing not just the suffering as a pleasure and what you discover might be or what you feel what the poem actually voc's in you what it calls up in you but you may not be able to articulate but you're and again you'll find yourself going back to certain poems again and again after all there of 50 words on a page but you go back because something that really matters to you is evoked in you by the words and if somebody said to you well what is it or what is your favorite poem mean you may well be able to be out to answer it if you've been educated in a certain way but I think you'll feel the gap properly between what you are able to say and why you go on reading it and that's why in because obviously partly the book is is to do with psychoanalysis in the sense that a psychoanalysis bent on understanding people is going to be very very limited and pre-emptive I think it's much more about some sort of experience that goes on between people that could be described as an unconscious exchange or something like that but it's not merely read ascribing somebody's such that they become like a character in a novel it's really showing you how much you'll wish to know yourself is their consequence of an anxiety state about what it what it's like to live yourself not knowing what's going on and how much perhaps you you need to live in that way of not knowing or there's no other way to live that's what's happening anyway actually but it's concealed or covered up or ass waged partly by fantasies of knowing who we are when people say I'm the kind of person who my heart always sinks because you always think well sort of or maybe but you know it's not the whole truth and it's a bit like your quotations these are formulas we've all got about ten formulas about who we are what we like kind of people we like care and all that stuff it's actually often really banal and really really repetitive and the disparity between how an experiences oneself as were minute by minute and these phrases is ludicrous it's like the caption under a painting you think well yeah I can see it's called that but three quotations come to mind in missing out one of them the first one I'll read seems to me so important from Randall Jarrell the way we miss our lives is life this I want more about what's a great it's just a fantastic line well I did I think partly this is an example thing we're talking about you say that you setting what is it about now I don't even want you to tell me it and what it's about but I must say I've I want you to say something about it but before you do I read this so many times I thought my goodness this is fantastic but I just and it's just a few words it could have been your seven words which I will tell in a little while but what what does it mean and and do I want to know what it means but my goodness it is so true yeah oh yes oh it is so painful because it is so true what's painful about it okay I won't dance Oh tell me what it knows what is painful about it you mean just know there's only lost well loss interests me greatly yeah music could be extremely comforting couldn't it it could be a way of saying actually that's what a life is it's the lives you don't have as if to say don't worry because that's what a life is you should be think your Telekom I live a reason no no no no no I don't say anything but just generally what I'm saying is there could be a comfort in that line and the comfort would be something like you don't have to worry about trying to have the lives you think you're missing really could just think the way we miss our lives is life or you could think this is terrible this is true it's a catastrophe because we're always in a state at me redeemable morning I I think I am approaching more the latter than the but what does that mean I mean it means a lot of things but do you do you approach it more in in the first way of I think those things are true you know and that is what is interesting to my mind is that both things are true and that your work is always about them Evelyn's and it's always about the in-between it's always about the fact that both things can be true and it is both alright and a catastrophe yeah yes exactly and one's gonna feel different things at different time like the Emerson said you know our moods don't believe in each other well there's a certain mood in which you will feel Emerson said that there's a mood in which you'll feel this is a terrible fact about life that we're always going to be preoccupied by what we're missing and there's no way around it and in another mood we could think well that's what it is to live a life so get used to it that's the point it's not the problem it's the point okay well you in on kissing tickling and being bored you have this line which in a way it works very well together with with Randall Jarrell what's real life is so often the life and that one does not lead that's wild isn't it yeah and it made me think of of Campbell's line-level heavy attack salt real life is absent which you know Gaddar when misquotes in Kerala food weighs as lava v8 IL the real life is elsewhere but which interests me also because the Godard rotation is when we remember most so we remember the misquotation and you could see why we might [Music] yeah align that that I very much like in in missing out is a line from John Ashbery the worse your art is the easier it is to talk about that that's the best quote in the book it is the best quote why I mean because it made me also think about many put into question my whole life in some way well I won't respond to that now but the the Esprit coat seems to me to be wonderful because it's in a way it acknowledges that Center which were living it we're living in a dream not living the interpretation of one so that actually the reason one does what one does is because precisely because one can't give an account of it if you see the mean so the people are really absorbed in something it is very often the case that they can only do the thing that they do which is why often people who write or paint or whatever find critics very very difficult either because obviously are not being praised enough alternately because it feels sort of irrelevant it feels necessary because clearly art is buoyed up by responses to it but also somehow irrelevant and again it's it's very true in a different way in Psychonauts which I'm sure it's not a great feeling to everybody here but the there's a whole range of analysts who can give extremely fluent elaborate accounts of how they do psychoanalysis and I won you always think if it's like that then surely they're not doing it because the second is about the unconscious how could you know what you were doing on that scale so it seems to me in a way that you know the better your psychoanalysis is the less able you'll be able to talk about it but of course that would also be true of the terrible things people do this is the bind of it but I think what Ashby's just make you a very simple solitary point which is we should wonder about people's fluency about what they're doing in relation to what they actually do just that and in some way does that explain or Express a way in which you approach your own work which to my mind is a form of caress you you its concentric you your you haunt your subjects you approach them from different angles you surprise them you try to encircle them and then you can't quite get to them you release them and then with other quotations or the same quotations you come back to them in the subsequent book well see in a way that might be why I have a would have a conversation with you because the experience is is that I just write and I'm sure what you're saying is true said mean sounds true but my experience of doing is I just write it there's there's nothing else really I can say about except that that's what how it comes out but then you can read it and you can say someone like that back to me and then I could think about it but if you said to me what are you doing in the doing it I've got no idea because what I'm doing and doing is doing it why do you do it just because I because I love doing it and because there's a little drive to do it Rick gives me huge amount of pleasure to do it and because I find it so easy because it's so it's so easy to write yeah yeah yeah yeah which isn't the case with analysis at all no analysis I find difficult but writing a dirt and you write in a very particular way you write with a what one might call a routine you have a very deliberate way of writing you write on the day away of the week on Wednesday you write what happens during the other days when you're not writing is seeing patients but I don't think about it at all really you didn't think about constantly I mean I do when I'm to do it working I do the work I'm not all the time thinking about saying I'm writing not at all it literally stops more or less when I stop and that in that sense it's a bit like all that isn't really but it's a bit like automatic writing in the sense of I'd do it and I revise bits and pieces for not much and then when it stops I stopped it and then I'll do it again when I have another space to do it because sometimes I have a couple of hours in the day in which case I will use those out to do it when I'm actually writing something but otherwise it is just in that day that I do it and that works just I wouldn't be better for me to have more time I don't think you mentioned critics critics right about you you know it was it was amusing to to see a few weeks before you came here that you were on the approval matrix what stuff well I'll tell you I didn't really know either but the New York Magazine considers certain writers school and you were considered cool on and approved by can I just I said yeah for I left my I was gonna have to have a haircut my son who is six said to me as I was leaving you are so not cool and I said and I said good and he there was a paused I could see he was waiting say something even worse and then he said to me even after you've had a haircut you won't look like Justin Bieber so I think he was right but um so you were put on the Sapru for matrix which means that you celebrated by a group of readers who with New York Magazine as as being cool regardless of what your son believes what does it mean to get Adam Phillips I couldn't possibly answer that i mean i all i all i can know is the the things that people say to me about the books when they read them and I don't I don't have a wish it's not up to me but my wish isn't that people read the books and then go away with these theories that I've supposedly got what I want is people enjoy the experience of reading the books and then they forget about them they have their own thoughts and that's it but I don't want I'm not trying to promote consciously anyway a set of theories or ideas there's a spirit I think in the writing there must be but it's really about you read this books it gives you pleasure or because you hate it do you read if those sorts of reasons and then you find you find what you find yourself thinking feeling in the reading of it but that's it I don't add anything psychotic theory at all or any other kind of Theory there you're talking less of your critics and more of your readers you make a distinction I get two kinds of reviews one kind of review says this is not Cystic self-indulgent pretentious empty don't be impressed and don't be fooled and that I get another kind of review it says these books are interesting and it's always one of the two things and clearly they're you know from their own points of view they're both right but all I can do is I can do can't write differently and I you know I'm very very fortunate as I don't have to earn my living by writing so I really don't have to think about that stuff and I don't mean it doesn't impinge upon me but I don't have to be preoccupied by it so I just go on doing it and insofar as people want to go on publishing and so on then that's what happens well they don't write to get good reviews it isn't like that you don't care I do care but I don't it's not the point of doing so if somebody was to write a devastating review of my Beverly give up I know that because just isn't that kind of thing for me I think I mean you you use the word pleasure and the would appetite I mean that's what it really is yeah that's what it is about me yeah now you're writing biography of Freud when you began I mean what what drew you to psychoanalysis I mean I imagine it's a number of things but early on one of the formative experiences was reading the autobiography of Corleone and then you moved away from Carl Jung and studied Winnicott and many other analysts and now you're writing a biography of Freud why am i doing it yeah why are you doing it I mean yet why are you doing it Adam yes but you hope to as I say this I know it's completely the wrong question no no I'm not I'm really not sure it is actually because because the question being I I wonder what it is you you you think you might discover which is a wrong question because you don't you don't know no no there's a different idea behind the book which is not there isn't and is a conscious to discover anything in that sense about Freud what I want to do is write a biography of Freud which incorporates within the book his own misgivings about writing biographies so that it's a book the mid site could be terribly pretentious all very very boring but the project is to be able to write his life because we'd nobody needs another bag refer for and there are very very good ones actually but to write his a biography of short biography in the light of the previous biographies that can say something or include something about his doubts about what is in some ways a very absurd but very absorbing genre which is biographies I give you just briefly a simple example before it makes a huge Pilar about not going to Rome II guess we want to go to Rome can't go there for all sorts of reasons in 1902 I think it is known therefore he finally goes with his brother Peter gay says something like in 1902 Ford eventually conquered Rome he went to the tourists Jones says something like Freud entered Rome in triumph and you can see obviously what's going on here what is well what seems to be going on is there's a rhetorical enforcement of a fantasy of Freud as a hero well Freud says when people write biographies they idealize their subjects or demonize them because they're writing the cordon to their own desire of the subject you know what they want from him well Jones I mean understandably Jones and Peter Kay want Freud to be an extraordinarily masterful person who is having it so there's a huge palavering both us books about Freud self analysis it's great heroic thing well it was impressive thing to do but plenty of people have done things like that in the past as Freud knew people have gone through crises in their lives and tried to work them out through writing and through conversations now what came out of this one was the invention of psychoanalysis and of course that is very remarkable to the people who love psychoanalysis but Freud was writing a long spiritual religious tradition of kind of crisis writing when it's as though you come to the end of something in yourself and you need to do something else and it's it's very very interesting but it's not you know the Transfiguration of the Magi it's it's a limited thing so and it's not that I want to write a sort of antihero disparaging although favorable so that it isn't like ordinary well no absolutely not but it's it's much much seeing if it's possible to entertain Freud's fantasy of a realistic biography what would that mean well I'm doing in trying to find out and it may not be possible thing to do because because in the act of writing you are rhetorically I mean a as Freud says about biographers they have a desire in relation to their subjects there's a reason why they're doing it and they want this figure to be something for so I can't I can't absolve myself I can be more or less explicit it's a bit like you know Brechtian theater where every so often the characters turn around and say something about the play they're in well it would be like a version of that it might be like a version of and it could be terrible but it would be a verse of saying what's going on when if you think of the disparity between living every minute of your life and there's 300 pages of a biography how can we claim to know what somebody was thinking feeling wanting etc when a they are not them Freud's dislike a biography is because it isn't psychoanalysis in psychoanalysis the patient can answer back in biography they can't and that's the difference and it's a very interesting difference it isn't doesn't mean the biographers are no good just means they're very very different they they're different and they they fail because they believe they can be omission yes or they're like bad novels the bad ones and the good ones are like good novels that are slightly different from good novels but I don't know what the difference is I mean I don't know that there's a whole chapter in your book which is in a way a long analysis of one poem I'd like us to listen to Philip Larkins poem and then for you to say something about it this be the villa's they you up your mum and dad they may not mean to but they do they fill you with the faults they had and add some extra just for you but they were up in their turn by fools in old-style hats and coats so half the time was sake Stern and half at one another's throats man hands on misery to man it deepens like a coastal shelf get out as early as you can and don't have any kids yourself interesting interesting laughter at the end sport fraud calls the laughter of unease and it's a very disturbing an amusing poem actually because it's about it's about the determination not to do something that you can't actually know anything about until you've done it and it can't help but retrospectively reflect on his experience of his parents and if he writes in a letter I can't remember this to somebody saying you know I'm very worried that this is going to be the very word of The effect of this on my parents if this becomes my most famous power mother power I'm known for and you can see why your your reading of the poem stresses in particular the ending yes because politics I'm using it for my own purposes but I think that the end of the poem get as early as you can don't have any kids yourself is in on the one hand it says it says very clearly what it doesn't want but what it finds more difficult to say is what it does want so again it's it's a it's to do with the consequences so you get out as early as you can and you don't have any kids and then what kind of life is possible for you well it's not as though I mean there's no way of saying that it could be wonderfully exhilarating you don't know that but but it's as though he he has an absolute determination about something and something has been a catastrophe for him in some way or there's something about it even if it wasn't literally at a story that he can't bear the thought of replicating as though the culture could encourage him in some way just simply to do the same thing again and this is a sort of normative thing and the culture of do absolutely and and and Larkin isn't saying I'm an extraordinarily rebellious individual for a period houmous it just says don't do it a bit like don't repeat the cycle because when he says man hands on misery to man it deepens like a coastal shelf it's a very odd image because misery doesn't deepen like the coastal shelf and coastal shelves don't always deepen but it's a bit like he's saying this is like a geological force there's a sort of erosion myth here this is what's going to happen and actually misery increases trance generationally now maybe that's true it's not as I think it isn't true but it seems to me it isn't entirely true but something makes lark and feel that's the warning he needs to give us because after all the warning is to us it's a very prescriptive poem says this is what this house should live leave home as early as possible don't have any children patients come to see you who want to leave each other and who have children and who so often used the children as a way of saying that they can't leave each other does this poem help you in some way you understand what it is they're struggling with no I don't think so I mean I think that I don't it's difficult to understand what people are struggling with and it is it is terrible as anybody's been through it knows but I think what the poem does is it at least keeps alive the part of ourselves if there is one that doesn't want to have children you know me Darwin says straightforwardly we want to survive and if we can survive well enough we want to reproduce Freud says there's a part of ourselves that doesn't want to survive that wants to die and sex is actually mostly not about reproduction so Freud produces a counter Darwinian myth and whether it's true it's very useful it seems to me to have that in the picture because there are people for whom or moods in which for all of us we don't want to survive and we don't want to reproduce and Larkin is I think is set is because in some ways it's a very bitter poem this but it's attempting as sort of there is a better life here but it depends upon not having a family of course for loads feel that's true so this is an idiotic prescription or cynical one but it is least keeps alive in the culture the idea that a heterosexual man can avoid the pressure to simply replicate his family of origin in some way and it keeps alive also I think in people who have children the possibility of what it would be to live a life without children and it reminds them their ambivalence about their children what effect me well it means the people we are all very disturbed by the fact that we love and hate our children and we'd rather have feelings about them that we like understandably you've said to me that children are unbearable they are sometimes now but it's very fearing hearing a word such as unbearable from you makes me pause well it depends on our individual experiences but one of my experience about having children is that you you feel so intensely about your children that there's something unbearable I admit all the time but intermittently they are so evocative and one feels such a passion for them that there's something unbearable but sometimes I'm not behind their minds and their minds of our vulnerability and they reminds of how little we can protect them from and we remark and they we remind them they remind us of just how I'm unprotected we offer more feelings for each other and I think every parent feels this in closing or nearly closing another line you use again and again and again from Emerson which I really love from experience the individual is always mistaken he designed many things and drew in other persons as Co adjustment and who agitators coadjutors let me try that again the individual is always mistaken he designed many things and drew in other persons as Co adjutants quarreled with some or all blundered much and something is done all are little advanced but the individual is always mistaken it turns out somewhat new and very unlike what he promised himself it's fun unbelievable matches okay oh yes Emerson agrees with Freud in a company different way Emerson agrees for it in that he believes that our mistakes are as truthful as our competence and you can't design your life because the life isn't that kind of thing you're Freud will will be closer to two romantic Freud yeah it won't be Freud as a sort of it won't be Freud as a reductive megalomaniac scientist it'll be much more for it as an ordinary Jewish man with six children trying to make a career happening upon something that really disturbs him as a discovering in a sense psychoanalysis and then it generates you tremendous panic what's being opened up and then there's a so the institutionalization of it the grouping around for it they attempt to control it because it begins to proliferate once you let people say what comes into their minds they say all sorts of things and you begin to feel all sorts of things and it's very difficult to contain it so for discovers something that he's very disturbed by that's also very very exhilarating and extraordinary so it's that's gonna be the kind of story so it's a romantic myth story well you said something that that made the audience laugh you discover all kinds of things you you speak about psychoanalysis in that way as a when we start to speak it's a line I've I mean you are part of my lines and one of the line I use again and again and again quoting you is that and you have wonderful things to say about flattery when we flatter other people other people's work something actually is occurring in that moment but you you say that when we we speak things fall out of our pockets and that is really what psychoanalysis does now and it says but at its best it doesn't say and that will make you better it says if you allow that to happen then your life will be different and it's actually impossible to know whether be better or worse to risk but you might feel so risk worth taking so a modern risk that is available to affluent ish people it's may I joined by that it's only suited to offering people a dog that I know that to be untrue but mostly they are the only people who will ever access to it unfortunately but it's something that everybody can use if they like it in closing a passage from monogamy they are fundamentally two kinds of writers just as there are two kinds of monogamist they immaculate and the fallible for the immaculate every sentence must be perfect every word they never tumble one for them getting it right is a point for the fallible wrong is only the word for people who need it to be right the fallible that is to say have a courage of their gawrsh Ness they are never quite sure what might be a good line and they have a superstitious confidence that the bad lines somehow sponsor the good ones do you do you find yourself in one or another of those by aspiration yeah I mean obviously I would want to be the fallible kind because I would want to feel that in the writing I could try things out and I could risk being possibly pretentious gauche or things I would rather not be seen to be to find out what it's like so you don't I mean anybody writes knows you don't write things you believe you write to find out what you do believe or to find out what you can afford to believe so when I write something and it sounds good I leave it in usually even if I can see that it might not sound good to somebody else or - some days it might sound sort of awful or brash or something but I want to be able to have the courage of my brushless in that sense safe of writing things I don't don't leave things in that I know to be terrible or I don't as will believe I don't do that but if there isn't a doubt about it and it sounds interesting I leave it in and I want to be free to do that because that's where why do because when I write things occurred we're thinking they occurred to you as you're right when I'm writing that's that's what happens when you're reading to you and the line no but I do put dots occasionally by bits dots dots one don't small dot very small because those are the passages you will but it range thing you know buddy it's like it sort of fancies because actually what happens is I usually never look at the book again Ashley but never look at the book again no I mean I might reread it but I reread a new copy I never really the same a book I've read really because the dots but they're so is that bit but the other bit is that when I write I can remember things see when I'm actually writing I remember quotations or I remember where they are what is when I not yes because most of time I literally can't remember anything or where things come from but in the notion of writing I can do that but what is it about having a bad memory that is helpful I just believe in unconscious work it's like a you know it's like a superstition I just think all the best work is unconscious you know that that passage in in Beckett the book he wrote about post he says post had a bad memory now of course how else could ever in the book you your seven words are I am a child psych psychotherapist who also writes yeah that's it that's it in seven words that sometimes does everything for me came out of doing child psychotherapy the writing is well I think everything yeah I mean it can't literally be true but yes that was the experience of all those years doing it the missing the missing we experience and missing out we experience the fact that we put so much more effort in some way in our lives in imagining our lives fantasizing about our lives wishing our lives and not quite having that life that in some way painful well we know it is but it might be like the Jarrell cut which is the wishing might be part of having the life the misleading thing will be to to be too literal about and think every time I have a wish I could sort of be striving to gratify it it may be part of growing up the you knowledge that some things you just experience as wishes Adam thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

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Length: 84min 55sec (5095 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 02 2018