One Way and Another

anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physical finite planet is either mad or an economist we don't want to focus politics on the notion that involves the rejection of principles around which a large majority of our fellow citizens organically live we are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would think I worked for a very long time in Child Guidance clinics in South London zone where the population was very very economically deprived what was most striking was how many people could use psychotherapy it had nothing to education class gender age there were lots of people who wanted to have conversations so it really isn't in my experience a middle class seminar on the meaning of life it's genuinely useful to a whole range of people but it all depends on how it's presented and how it's done I can remember some saying to me years ago that actually an adolescent who I was seeing said to me that talking to you me is like sitting around with your mum when you get back from school around the kitchen table well that's a very good model for what psychotherapy is it really is about chatting about the things that matter to you all that happened to in your day of course it's slightly different but it's basically attentive and responsive and it's simply based on being able to listen being able to bear what other people are enjoying and suffering from and seeing what occurs to you of course every but you do a long training putting it like that makes it sound simpler but it in some way it's not anti-intellectual but it's much more about what people feel about each other than about this is a distinction about their ideas it's much more about listening it's a listening you are not a talking cure if you can find someone who can bear what you've got to say and who happens to be able to not need to give you advice cure you or get you to behave differently it's very very powerful because then you can hear what you say and find out what you feel in the saying of it you're an essayist and there's an essay in the book about being they say yes just tell us a bit about why the essay works for you as a form I think because it's it's a bit like what we're talking about it's it hasn't within the possibility of a certain kind of informality it's not technical necessarily or jargon ridden it's not necessarily ideologically biased of course it's full of ideology but the essays that are interested in me were basically the 19th century essays of lamb and hazlit and Emerson we're in the literal sense the word you could try things out so you weren't saying this is true and this is why you were saying this is what occurs to me about this particular subject and you can meander and you can go off the point and you can say things that are off hand and you can be more or less casual and you can be more or less dogmatic but the genre doesn't say this is authoritative the genre says this is impressionistic and if it's if the style works view of a voice in it works you it'll engage you but it's not going to prove anything to you and so again the thing about the matters to me about is that it's very essays DSL like and more often evocative than informative and hopefully you you come away from them having had your own thoughts in the reading rather than coming out of them informed of something so if somebody reason a save mine I wouldn't like them to be able to come out of the reading experience being able to say what I had said I'd much rather the experience was engaging there's a line where you say no one any longer should be trying to persuade other people of the value of psychoanalysis and there's a kind of feeling in that essay that in a sense the fact that psychoanalysis seems to have gone slightly out of fashion that in a way it's so unfashionable people don't even attack it anymore it's not something that you in a way are particularly bothered about or think there's much point being bothered about no I think it's actually a very good thing because I think when it was in fashion which was basically the 60s and 70s and never that much in fashion in this country but in America in France I think it had a glamor attached to it which was misleading in a way and I think what's happened is given that inevitably in capitalist culture there's a fast turnover of therapies it's been in some sense superseded and of course plenty of people class people are in therapy the thing actually hasn't disappeared but there's a general view in the sort of media that obviously Freud is either fraud has been disproven or that's it all that stuff and I think what that means now is that people will only go we're only trained to be psychoanalysts if they really love it because no glamour there's no cultural prestige there's not very much money in it so you have to love it to do it by the same token you wouldn't be joining any kind of elitist group and being a patient you'd simply be somebody who was seeking a certain kind of conversation and then you could find out whether it worked for you or not in the knowledge that there are many many different kind of therapies in this culture there's a super market of therapies so it seems to me it it it gains from being more ordinary it also gains acting from being less ISA taragan specialized that it should simply be the extension of a kind of conversation one might have had growing up as a child no more or no less than that despite the father as you say people argue that lazily assumed that Freud has that whereas being discredited yet Freudian concepts are bounded around in every in the everyday people forever say things like who's very anal what's going on there well it's hard to know what's going on there but I think that one of the things is that Freud clearly provided a language that that made sense for some people of their experience and a lot of these terms have become slightly sort of futuristic as in people use them ordinarily I mean in the best sense let's say without really knowing what they mean as if somebody does really know what they mean but I think Freud if you like that kind of language he gives you a language to describe a whole range of very ordinary things it's quite interesting that the language catches on at all because obviously there were lots of people around when Freud was doing what he was doing that were inventing their own mythologies in different ways but actually this was the language that stuck and I imagine there may be sociological reasons why this may be the case but I think that at a certain period it seemed to be an evocative informative language and people could speak with a bit more supposedly scientific authority of their ordinary experiences you don't think the perhaps we use these concepts in the way that we do because it makes them easier to deal with in a sense by having but we cover we accept a bit of it and we talk about the subconscious but if we accept a bit of it we don't have to deny it entirely which would be much more difficult to do on the other hand we don't have to get into the theory in more profound ways it's a kind of comfortable distance from it to use it in this kind of a narrow way I think it is but in a way psychoanalysis is about comfortable distances in the sense that it's about the analyst being able to read ascribe what the patient so-called patient says in ways that the patient can listen to and be interested in so in other words it's like it isn't alchemy but it's like a version it's it's read ascription things have got to be said in a way that they can be heard and heard in a way that they can be really taken in and so I think in a way the way the language has taken off in in ordinary discourse is comparable to what happens in psychoanalysis which is you get a glimpse of something and you treated as ordinary but there's still an acknowledgement devis there's something else going on let's look at a couple of other reasons why it may be that we are resistant to these ideas what one is that psychoanalysts don't really offer to heal in the conventional sense and when people talk about things like cognitive and behavioral therapy the big point is that it it heals or it is said to heal that if the claim that is made the obvious point here is that it depends where your criteria for cure are because you can invent a treatment that has built into it its own cure if you say that mean if the cure for example is getting back to work or being happier or straightforwardly you have a phobia you get over your phobia there are lots of ways of describing what would constitute a cure I think the point really about psychoanalysis is that it doesn't work instrumentally you know that's very often the simple symptom is something that brings somebody to therapy it's like a conversation opener it's a way of beginning to talk about the things that matter most to you and then the conversation evolves if the therapy works into all sorts of different areas of one's life so that in a sense there's always a pragmatic element to it it is genuinely about problem-solving but there's also a different kind of element which is much more to do with what matters most to people whether or not it makes them happy and one of the joys of your size is the is the starting of the everyday you know they say on clearing an essay on clutter boredom the everyday is a really important part of the way in which you look at the world and the significance of the everyday and it's at the house that's like analytic kind of process as well so talk to us a bit about about the everydayness sense how does one deal with being so fascinated by the everyday because by definition we're surrounded by it well one of the things that struck me when I went into psychoanalysis and I started training was that given psych analysis in fact about the most ordinary things in the world it's actually very difficult to be interested in it because it's quite hard to understand a lot of it but I found it was so that immediately puzzled me that there was a kind of level of ordinariness that was both engaged clinically but in the writing you wouldn't have gathered that so that was one bit the other bit was very much as you've said which is that there is only ordinary experience in a way or most of one's life is ordinary experience or the extraordinary extraordinary lated to some ordinary fancy of the ordinary and it seems to me this and again this comes partly out of doing 17 years of child psychotherapy as in if you talk to children a lot and you talk to parents about their children there's a sense of it is that being sort of full of wonder or sentimentality it's all great all extraordinary in a way when people talk out their children they're very very engaged so people talk really interestingly about their children in my experience even when they think they're being boring so there's that bit the other bit is that children growing up is the most ordinary thing in the world it's also very very puzzling for children because they're new people so their lives are not you can't say they're continually extraordinary but they are acquiring a sense of the ordinary and in acquiring a sense of the ordinary they don't know where to start except with us because we're all they've got so it's partly to do with that it's partly to do with being I think suspicious of the kind of grandiosity and pretentiousness of large theories and of what I would take to be grandiose claims to explain enormous phenomenon the family you've started just in that last answer to talk about children parents and it's interesting I don't think there's a in this collection anyway an essay on the family is such but the family is everywhere of course as you would expect what do you think is going on in terms of public discourse around the the family right now where it feels as though we idealize the family on the one hand on the other hand we say that it faces greater threats than it's ever faced and of course one of the kind of one of the people's reactions against psychoanalysis is what is what it says about the family and people feeling that somehow that undermines the family which implies a fragility in terms of our sense of the family yeah well it would seem to me given we've all grown up in a version of families that we know all know how difficult it is I mean not surprising given who the members are I think that certainly when I was beginning to Train which was in the 80s 70s there was for example a then famous book called the death of the family by David Cooper and there was a huge part of the anti-psychiatry movement was anti the nuclear family movement because what effectively psychoanalysis was invented at the turn of the senton last century in Vienna to deal with the casualties of bourgeois family life as all Freud's patients were people who found family life intolerable or unbearable one way or another so psychoanalysis has always been about the way in which families don't work but what it has never managed to do is to give another picture of what might work better really mean so there's a continual critique going on which has in it an implied assumption that if only will you get something right it would be all right that's one thread the other thread says this is structurally impossible that growing up as a child is fraught with conflict being a parent is fraught with conflict being a couple is fraught with conflict so it's not a question of how can we make it more harmonious it becomes much more a question of how can we find a language to talk about the difficulties within it and also what what are our ideas about what it is for a family to be successful but it seems to you thing you've described on the one had tremendous idealization of the family and tremendous despair are symptoms of a real uncertainty about what people are supposed to be doing in families and I think a lot of parents certainly feel that they're sort of adult impersonators I mean you know why did why did child-rearing books sell on the scale is so because people have lost confidence in true forms of child-rearing I mean in the past you would learn how to bring up a child from your own parents or grandparents or in the culture now people really believe there are experts on child rearing that's an extraordinary kind of cultural development as if to say somebody must know how to do this and that this is in fact the most ordinary thing in the world my sense is and that and your book in places as well that there's a kind of weariness with more traditionally scientifically based ways of thinking about the mind for example evolutionary psychology or neuroscience but yet Freud himself was fascinated by evolutionary psychology he was fascinated by neuroscience and when things go on in the brain there is something neuro scientific by definition going on in the brain when you talk to somebody there is something going on there and it's something which can be observed and what we are has evolved for someone there is some evolutionary foundation for it why is it that you seeming curious about that stuff as if in a way to talk about it is it almost dangerous no I don't feel like it's worse than in curious I'm unmoved by it it's not I think it's wrong or form lots of it sounds true to me the way you've said but I'm just unmoved by the sentences so I do I'm not fascinated by the brain this is not to my credit to understand but people have different interests and when neuroscientists write about the brain I find it incredibly boring now clearly most people to Callisto I didn't find it fascinating but I find the brain the least alluring body part I prefer faces much more much motion faces so that I really think neuroscience is for the people who love it and it's not that I want to I want to swayed people from reading it if they love it I just it doesn't work for me I am interested a theory which is going to loosely derived from the ideas of Mary Douglas which which argues for that there are kind of four ways our thinking about change in the world there's this hierarchical way there's this individualistic way there's a kind of solid ristic Akala terran values based way and there's a kind of fatalistic way and crudely speaking these would seem to map onto the idea that individualism is aid that hierarchy is ego and that kind of solidarity is kind of super ego and that fatalism in a sense is to do with you know being aware of our own mortality or whatever do you think there's any value at all in seeking to kind of take Freud's idea of the psyche and apply it at a society is a possibility of some kind of fractal theory here which starts with our own psyche and then understands how that plays out in in organizations and structures in society as well because the one thing that put me on tests is that that theory that that cultural theory shares with psychosis this notion that these forces are constantly at war with each other that any attempt to bring them to some kind of peaceful resolution is doomed because sooner or later one will become dominant and the others will fight back when I was training as Charles like a therapist one of my supervisors said to me completely seriously if only they had more child psychotherapists in Northern Ireland there wouldn't be the troubles now if you're educating that sort of thinking when psychoanalyst have extremely grandiose beliefs in their own ideas and really believe that what people are suffering from is not knowing about psychotic theory it really it's really dispiriting especially if you're young as I was then and all the psychoanalytic accounts of politics either seem to me to be grandiose Lee dreamed up in universities or sentimental but if psychoanalysis got nothing to contribute to politics to group life it seems me useless and if it becomes simply a refuge from the kind of things you're talking about to me it's really dismaying it shouldn't be the place you hide from an intolerable world it should as well Riaan Speier you to go into the world and do good things for want of a better way of putting it so I think that psychoanalysis could contribute to that cultural conversation but if it was doing anyway dominated it would be terrible you

Channel: RSA

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Keywords: the, rsa, adam phillips, matthew taylor, psychoanalysis

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Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 05 2014