RAMS Seminar: A Day with Adam Phillips

the afternoon is going to be structured as i mentioned uh with one part where would be a discussion and interview by dr ron park with adam on his book one way and another which is a book that we had but it's the latest book so it will be discussion and dialogue about the book and then we'll take a break and then we'll have a dialogue and discussion that i'll moderate and also ask about just various general topics and we'll obviously open it up to the audience um so adam flew in just a few days ago and he's flying out so you'll have jet lag coming in and jet lag going back so he'll have a complete check back in either direction so i know it's very tough but i appreciate it again you accept my invitation here so i wanted to introduce dr long quad who will be doing the uh this section of the uh the presentation today dr long clock is a bilingual bicultural chinese american licensed clinical psychologist he received his doctorate in psychology from delhi international university california school of professional psychology he completed his internship at the california pacific medical center's outpatient psychiatric clinic where he received training in psychology theory and worked with adults and individual couples and group therapy his post-doctoral fellowship was at the california college of arts of the arts where he continued studying analytic ideas and worked with undergraduate and graduate arts students in addition dr worked at jail psychiatric services in san francisco gaining experience in forensic settings and working in the institution dr kwok is a clinical psychologist and supervisor at rams working with the in the child youth and family outpatient services and as a clinical consultant for the asian pacific islander family resource network collaboration which is between rams and ada family support dr services thinks and works primarily from an object relations perspective relational perspective with particular interest in neuroscience gender sexuality and identity the editor of impulse newsletter of the northern california site society for psychoanalytic psychotherapy and serves on the neuropsychoanalytic committee of the sacramento institute of northern california he has thought at various settings in the bay area and has a private practice working with adults and adolescents in san francisco take it away thank you all right um so this book one way and another is different from your other books in that it's a collection of previous essays along with along with new essays so i imagine you kind of had to go over all of your previous writings to select the ones for this book and i was wondering what was the process by which you chose them it's very difficult to know is this working it's very difficult to know because in a way i i chose the things that i liked most i was urged by my publisher understandably that this should be in some way representative something wouldn't be represented of in a way so i chose things that i um that still engaged me uh that also seemed to me to carry through certain um so i as you can imagine it's you know it's not fascinating rereading all one stuff so the things that held my attention that still struck me as being interesting i chose and that was more than could be included and then my editor came very very good then he sort of helped basically by suggesting that some things felt more essential to the book as it was even i didn't like them that much but it was basically sort of my favorite what was left of my favorite stuff one of the concepts that was in your chapter on forgetting i think it was was this was freud's concept of deferred action right that things don't make sense at the time but then kind of imbued with meaning based on current contests so as you go back as you went back and looked at your previous works and the things that still stood out for you i'm wondering if you saw something new in them or if you if if your views have changed in your time if you find yourself disagreeing or if there's something surprising in what you wrote in order to have to say something about the way i write because um the way i write is a bit like automatic writing and by that i mean it i can just do it it's a bit like you're having red hair it just is something that i can do so that all this writing has been done it's been done by obviously it's done by me but it feels and it's not dissociated exactly but it's um it's just something that when i start it has a sort of own rhythm to it when i re-read it i feel like constitution by me but i feel like it isn't written by me at the same time it's got a slightly dis detached feeling about it so that when i read it i can read these things in a way quite happily because they feel a bit like they're in by somebody else i don't really think these encode my my preoccupation clearly they do but they're not my conscious preoccupations so it's very difficult for me to see a there's a style edge which there clearly is and b that there are preoccupations i can vaguely see it but it's very hard for me and i'm making sure to because the in the tradition of psychonauts that i read when i was training that you got you had the sense that there were people writing that were participating in a debate as though there were ongoing conversations about theoretical preoccupations well i never had that i never had a partner institutionally but also by the time i trained psychonauts that changed in the brain so i never felt i was part of an ongoing conversation i don't know what most of what contemporary psychologists are banned in that sense um but what i did know was that there were things that i wanted to write about so that um it's like an inter it's more like an internal delirium than the sort of contributions to psychoanalysis thing it doesn't feel like that at all you know be that but i primarily wanted to write things that i like to read that interested me and that was partly because i was so disappointed when i was younger and trained about the psychonautic writing that i read because i thought i think like an isolation thing going and the writing is mostly really dreary and there's no reason why everybody should be right at all but if you have had a literary education which i did have it's very disappointing because there's a lot you know there's a lot of interesting things to say and in my experience there's a lot of interesting interesting and interested people in the profession but something happens to sight to people when they go into the profession and the writing becomes constipated and there's a lot of anxiety about it one way or another so i wanted to have nothing to do with any of that and i then it meant that i wrote and published things in non-psychology magazines i've never i have practicing psychologists but i basically don't do that i've written much more literary magazines where the criteria is different and what i'm interested in is is making i don't do this consciously but i'm in writing interesting sentences um and so that's that's what i do in so far as i can when i then reread them i just think i wonder it's amazing i've written these things and i'm really impressed and surprised because i had no desire to be a writer it wasn't part of my picture myself i really wanted to be a child psychotherapist and the writing started a bit by accident and then when they started momentum so they're very you know they're really minor they're not mine how did the writing start it started because it started it had two stages it started because um crystal bolus was my then therapist and he told me that there was a wonderful french psychic magazine called the new bellerin to see canales which was edited by pontillis they'd start a section where you could write two and a half page or page and a half pieces on some invading psychology so kid asked me if i want to contribute one i went home and i wrote two and a half pages on tickling which is in the book but i wrote it just completely straight out i was amazed by this and it was very very flexible to do so i did that and then um somebody else it could bring him but i'm not sure it was suggested that i write a book on winnicott it was then a series in england called fontana modern masters and i'm sorry i can't look at everybody's possible positions but um there was a serious name and then called fontana modern masters edited by michael franco mode who was a literary critic and a hero of mine when i was at school and kids suggested that i write a synopsis so i send frank um the suggestion and the paper on text frank writes back to me no one wants to tickle old men your paper reminded me how much i miss it would you like to have dinner it was sort of sweet yeah so we then had dinner and then he asked me to write the book um on the basis of just two and a half pages which was to me that pretty much it was a bit like being discovered sort of felt like at the time um then then i just had no idea throughout the book and i met people who were books wasn't in my world so i then did all the research and i thought you'd do the research and then you sit down write the book so i did a little research and i then took a month off work to write the book and i literally couldn't do anything i was just sitting around drinking coffee and i just the last three days of this four weeks i got up to the then typewriter and i started writing and then it never stopped and that was it and so then it just went on that's not stopped and from there it evolved to your current writing practice which in another interview said that on your way to the office the first sentence would come to you and then you would sit down and you would write i imagine there were steps in between from there must be there must be steps in between but it feels completely unconscious whatever that means those i'm not sitting around thinking about these things consciously at all i'm thinking about what everybody thinks about you know but and so i'm not preoccupied consciously planning this but i have a very specific writing time and so it is as though because obviously saying it works unconsciously sort of saying nothing doesn't i don't know how it works um but very often when i walk to work and i was a five minute walk from my my family to my office very often the first sentence goes i sit down and then then i write and sometimes it doesn't happen but more often than not it does happen as though the thing has been cooked so that when people ask me to give a talk say very often you know by the time i put the phone down i know what it's going to be on but it works like that as though the demand crystallizes something that's latent in me but i'm not previously thinking about it and then of course i have thoughts about things and i sometimes write them but that's the the process is there's no process that i know about you there you see an old idea of genius and the inspiration comes from the outside into us and that in some ways art and creativity is being inhabited by something bigger than we are i remember my writing my dissertation just feeling horrified at one point that that something was coming out on paper or on the screen that i hadn't really thought in the sense that i it felt like it was mine i mean i think you you know you you write books because of the books you've read basically it isn't genius it's it's um it's having internalized certain education i think um and you know if you happen to like reading anybody who writes has to read if you have to like reading and you read a lot then you've got all this stuff going on if you're genuine most of it that doesn't mean you can therefore write but you then may be able to write if you then can write then that's what you do but it feels more like that but i never thought of myself nor do i think myself as a writer i couldn't i don't like that sort of thing but i like because what i what matters most to me is doing psychotherapy psychonauts and the writing i love doing but that's it but the um psychoanalysis has more freedom solidarity in it is there a parallel though in that there are times when i'm listening to someone speak and then something comes to me from what they hear and it's and it is based on who i've read who i've trained with the other clients that i've seen what i saw that day and what i'm thinking about yeah i don't know it's definitely like that i mean and in a way it couldn't be anything else because all you know is what happens to occur to you you know you don't know why it occurs to you and you can sometimes retrospectively tell yourself a story about it but it's just things occur to you and based on all sorts of different things i can't there's no in service but there's no causal connection between doing clinical work and writing for me there's an indiscernible connection i'm sure there is a connection um but i don't now anymore i haven't videos written about people i see um and even though people say of course very very important things in psychonauts i don't write them down and they're not included in mine and i've learned to work now when i worked in the health service every imagine literature here every session has to be written now which is really wearing it's a good training but it's terrible you know a certain point but if you've done all that for years and years and years then you internalize remembering things um but other than that i don't i don't now take notes at all but but i'm i'm immersed in these conversations with these specific people and the writing it could you know you could construct that i'm immersed in the conversation myself that could be true but it doesn't feel like that but it is self-correcting i mean that you know you're right i don't do it right but you write and then it has some momentum and then you go back and look at it and then you change it a bit and then you go on so you are having a kind of dialogue with yourself it's when one steps at one door actually when one wakes up or when one goes to sleep you're always you can't really know what you're going to encounter and that's the theme that comes up throughout your this book and and all of your writing is that we're in a world where we don't know what's going to happen next we don't know what we're going to think next we don't necessarily know what we're going to say next and and i know that as i was speaking about some of your writing with the training group at rams there was a comment that kind of said if i think too much about these ideas i feel like i'm going to go psychotic and what do you think that person meant the way i heard it was if i think too much about about these ideas that if that what i want we were talking about the uses of desire that what i want comes from other people that that this vital part of myself is somehow not mine or not me then then who am i and that question can be sort of repeated endlessly all the way all the way down and there's a loss of i think the foundation of the things that at least that i like to have when i wake up yeah and when i go to sleep yeah i mean i i would only want people to read the things i write if they enjoy them and it's certainly not an intent i mean it seems to me i can't really tell if it seems to me that it's better to just read them through not trying to understand them because what i would want to happen is the experience that i like having which is reading being aware of you having your own thoughts it's like a way of thinking so it's not i don't want people to come away and read my books knowing when i think about things but i would like them to come and know what they think so if the book's been evocative rather than informative that's what i want if i could design it so i don't want to contribute to theory because absolutely what does interest me is a way of writing which people a enjoy and b have their own thoughts when they read it and obviously it has an unpredictable effect on different people inevitably but what i don't want to do is write the equivalent of either how-to books or what things mean books that doesn't work for me i also don't want to sort of i mean i couldn't do this it's not questionable i don't want to introduce new concepts or have new theories i want to write really interesting sentences about the senses that interest me and that's it and it's like dreamwork you know that people read them and make whatever they make of them but they're not informative in that sense they won't tell you how to do anything as far as i can tell but they may be evocative they may engage in another and then and then you and when i try to talk about the things that i've read and the ideas that i've had then i always find myself fumbling to try and explain the concepts and i'm going to change thoughts entirely can i say something that's very very people often say to me um when i read things by you when i finished i never remember what's in it and i think great you know if it happens to have that effect because that seems to me what i would hate if i could design it would people coming up oh yes he thinks x or that's that and that's that because i would want it to be a part of someone's dream work not part of their conscious propaganda so it's not there to be remembered unless you have to remember it but i wouldn't want somebody to be struggling to work it out just because i mean papers paper freud's paper on working remembering repeating and working through he describes a task of analysis as helping people remember the way that they can forget yeah exactly and that's a very very interesting idea that people are coming to us because they haven't found a way of forgetting or their forgetting doesn't work for them but they're holding on to something in a way that keeps it in the present rather than in the past yeah and they're holding on to it in a way that tries to make the future like the past there's a gadget for doing that a denial of time passing yeah yeah and also fear of an unknown future and in in the past that they may not actually fully understand until that's the later point in time yeah because i think you started with i mean about deferred action i mean lack on said it takes two traumas to make a trauma as in the first time as it were you have an experience you don't know what it is but something has really happened to you but then it requires a second event so to speak to make it then thinkable and that seems to me to be both true very often a very interesting idea so that it's always a question of returning with a view to make a new future out of a past that can preempt in the future you you write several times about how you use essays as your medium and in the quota that you bring in this book you can't you contrast it compare it with kind of your typical the typical psychological way which is more scientific as you say there's an abstract there's a hypothesis there's a review of the literature and then there's proof there's something a new idea that one is supposed to kind of take with them when they leave a scientific approach versus a more aesthetic one another question this is really a question taste is no sensibility but it's not that i think cycling faith is the scientific rubbish they just don't interest me i'm not moved by them it's like neurology i mean it's a lot of it sounds true but it seems it's totally amazing to me because i'm not engaged by it and this must be with education temperament all sorts of things uh i found it i mean in england i don't work with what it's like here but certainly in britain there was an is a kind of slavish wish for scientific legitimacy as those scientific criteria the only game in town well i just never found that at all interesting i don't mean it maybe i'm sure it is a science to some people and i think science is very interesting but i'm not interested in that bit of it it doesn't seem to me to matter very much um so the idea that we're sort of all sitting around waiting for neurologists to tell us who we are seems to be ludicrous i mean you know you never know where the interesting thing is going to come from and you're a neurologist may have something to say that someone said do you need a bus stop you don't know that so it's really i think much more question of the conversations you want to have the kind of sentences you like and i think people who are training i think with psychoanalysis people should only read the books on the page they really love them like and that might be three but but they really i don't think psychonauts people should get over their resistances when it comes to reading i think they should stick to them but isn't there a way of saying that people should stand with them no there's a difference because i think that on the one hand uh you know let's not give comfort a bad press here but on the other hand i think people very often have a sense of what really moves them or engages them but there's a lot of pressure institutionally internally about what you should be reading now when i think when people train when they're young and or when they train i think probably they should read the basic things but i also think they shouldn't you know people say should people read foreign i don't know what the point is so you can you know you can it's like minecraft's idea for self you can invent a self that's ready for it and read it remember it but you may be totally unengaged by it and i think that's a waste of time really but you don't know what the effect is going to be you don't and you couldn't if you start a paper and you hate it the middle of the paper might be different or somebody might talk about it in a way that enthuses you because that's basically why one lost teachers and peers and so on because people could inspire you somebody could actually make a case for something you could think maybe just much to me when i was at the cca one of the things that drove me crazy was this this notion of approaching art without any knowledge that one should just sort of stand in front of a piece of work and let the experience float over you and i thought no i'd like to know what went behind it because it changes the way that i look at it something that looks amateurish and slapdash could have had a lot of thinking behind it i wouldn't know just by looking at the piece yeah and that's why in psychometric trainings people should be taught how to read you know that they that you really need to know something about um reading and interpretation of text because it's i mean i know to now but in the past it was startling people just literally quote climb or like on freud so the text is self-evident or is it self-evidently right so you simply cited it as opposed to reading it and revise it and make something of your own of it and that's one needs to educate as you say because you need to because given that there's no you know the innocent lives there's nothing it's always going to be mediated it's worth having those mediations educated but not in ways that are against the grain that's all you've got to really desire but i really want for this to be illuminated otherwise it's just compliant and especially to read some of your writing one has to be fairly widely read you make a lot of references and you use you use words in a very specific way often you'll cite the the definition of a word and when i was when i looked at that i thought do you think that the whole history of a word is there in the word itself well it is in the word but it isn't in all the uses of the word so that you might need to be informed but if for example you've read a lot then you will know more about the history of the word than you're conscious of because you would have read lots of different contexts it's for me it would be there like that but that's why i'm interested in dictionaries because to monumentalize this issue and they're also useful because they give you historical history of words but i think that the the thing about all what you need to agree not to read what i write is a shame for me because really i would hope that people would just be curious if you see what i mean that i have these quotes in because i read a lot there's no more to it than that and i hate intellectual intimidation i think it's a terribly destructive thing so i would want people just to be curious i know it isn't as simple or as innocent as that but i would ideally so that these are the things that come to mind when i'm writing and the other words with that now you work a lot with children or you did love children and i work with children now and there's very few things that make language the fact that language is in some ways arbitrary apparent than working with kids because the words that are familiar to you all of a sudden are if either unfamiliar with them or use an entirely different context so i'm wondering if you if you could say a little bit about what that was like for you if you've ever encountered or what do you do when you encounter slain well one of the things i loved about working with children was exactly how you describe which is because they're new people they're new speakers and um so obviously they're very very good appearing to understand what you're saying and they're very very good at speaking in their own way because they're really in their own delirium a lot of the time and that's to me very very interesting and wonderful and sweet and all those things um i sort of feel like i learned it's like this everything i know about psychoanalysis from doing child therapy but also more than that away from talking to mothers about their children the most interesting if you have to like the most interesting thing in the world is getting mothers to talk about children sometimes fathers but it's not usually interesting but mothers when you take away the sort of the aura of it being the most boring thing in the world women's self-consciousness it's astounding and this is like the first biography you ever hear is uh mother still had a child and things people know startling and the things they take for granted and all this stuff so that and because there's a parallel here because when you do psychoanalysis you're a bit like you can sometimes be a bit like in the position of the parent with a child who's learning to speak as you have that you can have that kind of appetite for someone to speak and it's sort of similar that you're facilitating this whatever this is but the other thing that's equally interesting to me is that working with children exactly the way you describe it reveals how um how little communication is between people as well as how much that people are really in their own delirium and they're exchanging things and they're often exchanging things not by intention they're saying things in spite of themselves and there was a very interesting thing that um it's quoted in the book actually um that uh john ashbury said he was asked why his poetry was so difficult and he said um when you talk to other people they eventually lose interest when you talk to yourself people want to are listening and it's really useful as a picture because it's very evident in child nuts but they also do have analysis that um the way most people are talking to themselves and talking to other people and often at the same time and that the clearly the there's a lot of um well what black and we'll call the imaginary in speaking a lot of wishful attunement that is actually managing a lot of real differences between people a lot of tested understandings that may be collusive have you worked with someone who speaks a different language or speaks a different language as their first language wow where i worked in um i worked in a place called campbell world child guidance club where there were on this it was on a councillor stage means housing that's provided and there was something like 23 different methane groups and lots of people didn't speak english and we myself and friends who are colleagues um organized a drop-in service so people literally come exhausted didn't want they didn't come and prepare those reasons but they didn't know how to get there really so people could just drop in and to begin with and i'm sure you must have been through this yourself the question was do you have interpreters or not and what are interpreters what are they doing in some situation what was striking so that's a lot of generalization really but was um but well both class-wise how many people could use psychoanalysis that it wasn't a middle-class thing at all it could be but it wasn't necessary but the other thing was that you didn't necessarily have to speak the same language to be able to do a bit of it especially the children um of course everybody is different so there's no generalization here but it's what i was struck by when i did this was how many different kinds of people could use it if they had an appetite for the conversation if they liked you and then i did and the thing worked now imagine you're not doing the traditional psychoanalysis when you're working in that kind of setting and at rand certainly we teach psychoanalytic ideas but we don't we always put them we can't put them in practice the way that they're written about right any time a paper says five years later i realize that this happened i think well i have you know maybe until the end of the year and then they graduate and they're gone so how do how can i work this way so how did you modify or did you modify yeah i mean that was the great thing about it because it was psychoanalysis was just one thing that i happened to come across in the kind of cultural field of the world i was in and we we were educated in a sort of model of psychonauts when it was exactly as you describe it so everybody was talking about real analysts and real psych and outsourced and of course when you do child guidance work it just isn't like that both the reasons you've said in other reasons too so for me the point of psychonauts was something you used it wasn't something you were abided by as a religious practice it was a way of thinking and a way of talking and so being in a child basket really freed this because it was nothing else you got we didn't want to do anything else but you couldn't do anything like three times a week full-time any of that stuff for years on end so you have to do what you can do and that's why winnicott is really really useful here because winnicott clearly was interested in i mean he was genuinely pragmatic in working with the situation as it was so there was no pre-formed assumed path to the analysis and you worked with what you could in the way you could knowing that the time scale was unpredictable people's lives were very very complicated and for lots of people this was not their idea of fun so that it really was a tricky thing to engage people in the only thing that i did find mattered in the middle of all this was being able to interest people in their symptoms their circle symptoms but if you could actually get people to see the way in which the symptoms like a way of beginning a conversation and it was a way of taking oneself seriously not earnestly but seriously about something it really was a way of thinking then you could adapt psychoanalysis because ideally everybody invents their own psychoanalysis you know you learn the rules broadcast and they're not difficult to learn the theory is actually not very difficult to learn a lot of it and then you're going to have real conversation with real people and it modifies itself you know the aim of an analytic session is not to prove that psychonauts is true the accession is for something to happen fields of value to both of you i think um and that's what you're doing and so you know in that way when it talks about the way the child invents the mother similarly if you take that as your model then of course a certain kind of professionalized psychoanalyst can't work in that situation because you have to allow yourself to be to be both invented but also um formed by the conversation otherwise it simply becomes imposing a story and people know that it's very often produced psychonauts adolescents that they very very quickly check out and they should sometimes i feel they check out because there's a way in which it's not that it's not just that i can pose a story on them but they're resisting the story that they call yeah exactly yeah i mean that's the thing the good thing like i said the resistance is always in the analyst and it's always a bit stupid it's a very good point because if one is resisting then obviously you know you're competing with you know music being outside i mean there's got to be a real good reason for them to be coming to talk to you real from their point of view it's such a common word that i hear that i'm bored it's boring and then of course i read your essay on on being bored and then i try to to explain to his teachers and i was like oh my god i don't know i don't know how to explain this um but there is this quality of of waiting of hoping that there is something out there that will trigger one's desire and if we link it to another idea is that it comes from someone else from somewhere else then they're always waiting for a relationship yeah they went for a conversation but but they're only waiting for the conversation they're waiting for all the other conversations are irrelevant so and you have to know that and and you can't be a sort of performing flee you can't just desperately try and engage them because obviously that's not gonna work but you may be able to have a conversation about something that really does match to them because my experience is yours my experience is that when they are engaged they're really engaged it's not you know even if there's infective some muslims they're basically really engaged it's like the great thing i'm doing child analysis is that with children they either are totally great by what you say they're totally understood and they make it very clear so you can say anything because either water of a duck's back and they still don't notice or they really go through it when it goes by tangier to adulthood and even adolescence people have more sophisticated ways of dealing with what they don't like about other people and that's what you all have to manage in some ways i feel like a lot of the training and the theory that we read and the things we take in are ways to prepare ourselves for this period of time we're not doing something that we're interested in we're doing something that the other person is interested in right now and kind of assuring ourselves that no this is this is helpful this will be helpful i may not know how but but the trouble is we've we're interested in it and invested a lot in it and then you're going to do it and this is that they may not be as interested in it as we are and that's integral to this thing we're talking about which is that we've been talking stuff and how to know what stuff really is but it's sort of some sort of preparation it's like a sort of repertoire of things but nothing could teach you what to say where or to whom it just couldn't be done so that fundamentally you're having a conversation you can't predict with some with it which involves two people who cannot predict what's going on even though their symptomatology is an attempt to predict as in it's an attempt to fix themselves but actually it's like what used to be called chemistry in other words so it doesn't and you can work at resistances like it's a good very good idea psychoanalysis but there's a limit to which you can do that you can't do it forever especially with adolescents in my experience because they they're not interested in that kind of work and also it's a real problem because the age of which they're precise trying to fall out of the world of experts they've understood another world of experts called us and that's important too so you have to be a double agent in that sense do you find that your experience as a teacher and i don't know if you ever supervise i wonder what that what is that like for you how do you approach it well i really like doing it but i i really like doing it with people i really like i don't i don't find it i mean i i don't want sound sort of cue to us but i guess there's a lot of stuff about supervision that when i trained there weren't courses on supervision you just went to people it was a it's like a guild thing it was an apprenticeship you went to cpu to practice no one in that course on supervision and they've learned to present their supervisors and that's sort of how i do it but it seems to me the most ordinary potentially pleasurable thing in the world to talk about how people work just that but not in the surroundings of telling people what to do but i am interested in what how people listen what they make of it how people learn what their appetite for it is all that stuff i think is very very interesting you also you also teach at the university of york and imagine that you're teaching to a non-clinical audience how do you find your kind of your ideas and your training coming into your approach to teaching which i imagine something very different from the listening that you don't really do well i think um what i do at york is i do a morning of what i call people sign up for 20 minute sessions but but they're they're not about something not so literature i do a seminar then and i do a public lecture in the academic teaching of course if you've had an analytic training you have certain kinds of thoughts from anybody a certain kind of thoughts but i don't um i can usually see the difference i think of psychoanalysis as teaching in others i think that it's in the education bracket not the helping professions bracket now i don't know what it's an education in but i think it's education and i think it's education where education breaks down you see what i mean where exchanges become impossible like you'll find it difficult to take things in so what i'm i think always thinking about is where the breaks are on the exchange between me and the other person uh teaching academic teaching is more informational in a certain sense but i'm not very interested in that which is why i want to become an academic i'm interested in conversations where people talk about what really engages them so i do sort of in-between thing which is not any version of you know tell me about your mother but it's but it is about uh it's both about the text they're talking about and what it is about the text that engages them but it's more obviously academic than it is quasi psychoanalyst but and i know when people are coming wanting psychotherapy um i can usually tell i think that's what i said you mean compared to psychoanalysis yeah i mean that's to say if somebody comes for psychoanalysis i don't assume they want it but i do assume they think they want it whereas these young people come to talk about literature um they want to come and talk about this book or this right term but sometimes the way they talk about it makes me think they're wanting me to hear something else and what they're saying to switch gears a bit what are your thoughts on the difference between psychotic modes of thinking and neurotic modes of thinking when i read your writing a lot of it felt that you're talking about in some ways the psychosis of ordinary life but there are people who who are i regard them on kind of a different scale like some of those psychotic terrors that we have that you describe are more real to them more present do you think that there's a difference working with them well the thing is the problem for me about that is that you know i was an adolescent in the 60s so i don't believe in diagnosis and i don't believe in words like psychosis might for me it's a question of whether i can talk to somebody and what kind of unhappy they are some people are much more unhappy than others it seems to me something they're more isolated than others some people are more or less able to talk about what's troubling them i find it very very difficult to engage just because it's it's against a temperamental thing it's not a criticism but it'll do in that sense but i i these diagnostic categories to me are like allegorical figures i can see that groups of people have things in common but the more you talk to somebody the more singular they become to me and so i just find all this stuff when for example to a psychotic thinking well i've obviously because of my training i've read a lot of client climbing stuff i've also subsequently read the leukaemia stuff on this and i've read other videos and i've read searles and all those people and all that stuff i think is really interesting but it doesn't leave me to think extra psychotic it leads me to think that these are all pictures of human possibilities well these are all forms of self-cure they're like the cultural repertoire of self-cure subjects for real difficulties in development so it raised your question i would be thinking much more um how frightened does this person make me feel how frank do i feel on their behalf um how much do i feel about having in common say what i would think as a real conversation because the only thing i'm interested in is whether i'm moved by the person and whether we can talk to each other that's my only criteria now when i you know 30 years ago one of the advantages of the mental health professions a long time ago was because they were less professionalized they were less competent so it meant that i saw a huge range of different kinds of people simply as people were not just diagnosed in that way so there were loads of children and adolescents i saw there and adults that i would never get seen up because they would have been filtered out into areas of expertise so my my history of my interestingness is going to be very different from yours also i trained in britain after land and the anti-psychiatry movement and i really was affected by that and i still think it's basically right um so there's a real historical generation of deficiency i think and i'm very wary of people being too impressed by diagnostics in social media i think it adds to the practitioners fantasy of competence and it too much fixes the patient but there are you know people who had interesting things to say about very unhappy people one interesting impact of the way that training is set up i think in the us certainly here in san francisco where i have the experience is that it's in your training years that you work with people who are the most unhappy and that as you graduate and have the option to choose most people say work with people who are happier and easier to be guided or helped towards happiness but isn't it is the other thing that's true though that i'm not everybody but an awful lot of us are also amazing that there are areas of our lives where we are like these psychotic people here as well as well and neurotic as i wear all sorts of things in other words this is like a patchwork of kind of possibilities and it would seem to me that certainly my work that i've done um i don't feel like i've certainly do private practice sort of graduated into middle class well-being i feel like it's really hard being alive it's really a struggle i have a beautiful intelligent rich et cetera it's really hard nobody's exact so that i don't find you know there are no happy problems i think people really suffer um and people who want to have conversation with us really are really suffering as we are ourselves sometimes so you know i think it's like the thing in endgame you know we're on earth there's no cure for that so if people don't meet the two criterially closed right either they don't move you or they can't communicate with you what then i refer them someday but i do but i do obviously um find a way of saying this that isn't just the way i just said it to you i mean that's to say i want to have a real conversation about that too if i can isn't always possible of course but um i have a strong sense of whether it's going to be worth our while and i think i would betray somebody and myself if i took someone on when i didn't feel there was a possibility i mean the advantage of working in the health search a lot of times for everybody and that was really good it was really a really good training but over time it made it clear to me that i am much like everybody else there are some people i can't work with and that who knows why that is but it nevertheless is true i think it's better training wise to see because everybody think that's the way to learn but i think over time and maybe people are different like this you get a sense of someone with whom you feel and you could be wrong that there'd be too much resentment too much in bitterness or too much cruelty involved and you know there is a limit to what's going on so how do you say can you give an example yeah i mean yes exactly something along those lines but i can also say things like um i've got a feeling that we're not having a conversation we're both enjoying here and it may be true that we need to have a conversation like that for this to work because i've also seen people who've said to them i've said this and they've said to me no i really want to work with you and i've advised if somebody has a really determined feeling even if i feel it's a transference delusion i would follow it but if it's negotiable then i would try and do it isn't that just the precise difference between psychosis and neurosis well i could say of course um but i could also say in my understandings of these words there are overlaps there's a spectrum there they that there are people who are neurotic who can be in psychotic states of mind and psychotically who can live a lot of their lives neurotic etc but of course everybody has different clinical experience if you've spent your life working in natural hospitals you'll have a very different view from me um because i've only like everything a very very small number of people but my experience of those people is i would be very very low to think of a person as psychotic so that's a defining definitive description of them it might just be but how how do you know in a position to say that i mean you need to make the legitimacy but even freud he did talk about the difference between psychosis and what's the even freud what's that going to do i actually will there may be tragedy beyond tragedy there's no question of that but that's a different vocabulary i mean i could have a conversation with you about tragic things in life in a way that i couldn't have a conversation with you about psychosis that would make more sense to me and for me they're connected what's the do you mind what's the connection a child sorry a child what do you mean by that in the family no but what's it can you say more what's the connection in your mind between psychosis and tragedy the inability to reach the soul for me it brings up the peonian idea that it's not just the experience that's the problem it's it's the fact that tragic events kind of impair the mental apparatus and then thus future events are impacted yeah and the way people's self cures mutilate them but the adaptations you have to make you might have to make could be the cost of your life or yourself is there a way in which a therapeutic relationship however whatever form that takes i mean one of the basic is that it reshapes one's himself once uh once tactics for survival are expanded but can the mutilation be healed i think it's a it's an i know it's an obvious answer but it's impossible to generalize i think that and we must i imagine a lot of us have this experience some people feel they have their lives dramatically changed through the narcissists and so on and some people feel they've been made worse and i think it's very very unpredictable because i think there's something very intractable about character i think with children for a very very long time and i think it's very very dangerous to change you know i think the sort of the beyond thing about you know all change being associated with catastrophic change is very powerful for a lot of people and it's a lifetime achievement to evolve a character that can keep you going so it's got to become really painful if you want to change that and it's a tremendous act of faith towards you'll precipitate yourself into an unknown and hopefully better future but i think it's better to have a good conversation than not but i don't think we should be i think there's something very tyrannical about being too therapeutically optimistic but there's something very very dismaying about not being ambitious that's the bind of it because in a way it's a bit like you know as a parent you're the guardian of your child's future best self well once patients are not children i mean they may actually be children but if they're honest but you have to have some sense of what do you think they might be possible without implicitly using that humility because actually no one knows what someone's potential is really and you may be able to see the way in which people are harming themselves but the pleasure they get from harming themselves may be way in excess of any alternative you know i think musculoskeletal yeah sadomasochistic solutions are really addictive and really compelling and it's very very hard often for people to feel there's another kind of life that could be lived so then the therapists themselves require a certain amount of faith and fortitude in the process to to kind of show up in the room over and over again yeah you need something i don't know what it is because calling it i mean it may be faith but i would i would want it to be real you know realistic that you might have a sense of realistic hope if there is such a thing um and that you insofar as somebody wants to go on if somebody goes on believing that something's possible i wouldn't be keen unless i had a really strong conviction to foreclose that but i think you never know with any given person you really don't know what that people are you also never know what effect they're going to have on you and whether they will as it will bring out the best to you or worse and even though the beauty of analysis is you can also analyze that with them you can't it's not is there something that helps you kind of find your ground do you have a touchstone or an orientation i mean something orienting something i think i mean i think really it's my family and my friends if you shouldn't be in some real way but i think that certainly i've had i've had some very very good teachers and i've had good exp and i've had some really wonderful patients and all those things help me i don't really know what it is that keeps on going but i've certainly i just know this because i can i can as well hear it that i've really internalized the winnicott milner stuff not that you know i mean i probably could tell you quite a lot but and not that i can repeat it all on that's it's not like that but i feel i've got that and bits of child development i feel are second nature um and those people even though i didn't meet with those people um they are what clients call good objects in my mind in the sense that i can sometimes think what would exit thought as a fantasy and it's sometimes interesting and useful but there's a version of psychoanalysis that i know whenever i read it that i love and like and i like those people and they represent something very important and maybe now is a good time to open up more questions so if we can open up a few questions and then we'll take a break and then at the end i'll have some questions but we'll be opening it up completely to people so maybe one question okay thank you so much there's something from before lunch i think that ties in here that's interesting to me because you said when uh treatments end badly it's when uh both can no longer bear each other um and you were just talking about how someone is persisting and wanting to continue to work that would be something to follow and i'm interested in when would it ever then be that treatment would end well it might not i mean rickman said this really interesting thing which is that madness is when you can't find anybody who can stand you and i think that's really good that's the way i would prefer and so long as i'm um you know i don't ideally i don't want to live in a world in which there appear i can't stand even though there are people i can't stand but i would want to go a long way with that as far as i could um but it would i would have to be there is the better ones but i have to be moved by this person i have to feel was something sufficiently poignant that it mattered to me such that i wouldn't mind being frightened if you see what i mean it'd be like that and also i wouldn't i'd prepared to risk being wrong but of course you know i don't one wouldn't want to and this i think is part of one has to say which is you don't poison people with hope you know because hope is a fantasy it doesn't mean one shouldn't have it but one needs to be able to ironize it and know that that's all it is so that i'd be willing to carry on against what i took to be the odds and i've done that but but in the full knowledge made explicitly as far as it can be that nothing might happen it could make something worse so then what would be a good ending well i i think a good ending i mean i don't there's no reason why an announcer should ever end broadly speaking i think a good ending is when somebody wants to end and you know having thought about it and talked about it they feel that even though they might still like you it all the rest of it they would rather spend their time and their money doing something else and that seems fine questions yeah thank you it's uh certainly listening to your discovery of one of the unforbidden pleasures and it's not only the accent um continuing this line with whatever psychotic might mean but there are certain patients that functioning on this spectrum that have a way to defy language and borders and boundaries and knowing some stuff about you and kind of going back into being absorbed by a patient like that or letting patient to be absorbed letting yourself to be absorbed by the patient it kind of starts at some point crossing the uh forbidden you know whatever again and and crossing something that brings it more to sameness than difference and one might think about merging one might think about understanding or getting finally something about the patient and about yourself and the question that i keep coming against times and times again is how to speak because as soon as you speak in these moments it it imposes the difference it brings up the rift it disrupts and um and maybe that's the way it should be right and and thank goodness for the language because it's it kind of does something to that state and at the same time there is a sense that being in that state is something that might be curative for the patient and for yourself but yet what is the way to speak to it and i'm not sure if that's the question or comment but some kind of thought association in a way isn't what you've said a description of the fact that it's intrinsically hazardous this that in a way that it's that it's fraught with all those problems and it could not be no one's ever going to come up with a technique or a way of working or a way of speaking that offsets any of those things you'd describe it seems to me and that's the point you can't know whether people are going to be helped or harmed you could have an idea about it we don't know that um you can to some extent imagine what it might be like what somebody's life must have been like such that they have become psychotic for whatever word you can be more or less able to communicate with someone but they may be very very remote and they may make you so frightened or by projective identification they may put things into you so to speak that make it unworkable you don't know it's impossible beforehand the only you know the only sort of schematic answer i've got to this isn't an answer it's a description is and you may know this but it's the difference really between klein and winnicott where in a winter cotton analysis the basic idea would be the analyst fits themselves into the patient's fantasy omnipotence over a long period of time and then gradually interprets their way out whereas in the crimean version exactly the opposite happens which is that every fitting in with the patient is felt to be a collusion and the denial of difference independence now it seems to me my prejudice here is to think not that the money cop right and the client's wrong but broadly speaking there's a real risk in declining thing that it reinforces the problem because it creates a distance and a separateness that the person has already suffered from as a rupture the risk of the winnicott one is that you never get out i prefer that risk but i don't think we should be you know i'm not saying you are but we shouldn't be at all bamboozled into thinking that there's going to be an answer to any psychological question it just isn't like that it seems to me but people can be more or less brave and take more or less risks and anybody who does this work with any real drive is going to come up against the things you've described and there are going to be casualties and sometimes what is going to know it's one's own fault and sometimes it may be one's own fault and it's really bad but i can't there's no alternative the alternative is worse because the alternative is a world of people who sit in problems diagnosing people and prescribing treatments so everybody knows don't work i would like to know your experiences and your thoughts um doing certain analyses with individuals who hear voices with the hearing voices movement also from the uk you know like we don't use labels like oh they carry diagnosis it's affective disorder schizophrenia they are voice hearers um and um strongly encouraging us you know to talk to them about the voices analyzing the content and actually in doing so i think there's so much psychoanalytical meaning and psychodynamic meaning but yet you know the old school is like we don't do psychoanalysis with people who struggle with delusions and hallucinations so i'm just wondering what your thoughts and experiences have this well i think again the trouble i mean in a way the answer to all cycling questions is it's impossible to generalize but having said that um it seems to me that two things are true here one is that let's say you hear voices if you can get together a group of fellow sufferers and you can feel together differently about it and redescribe it then you may have improved the course of your life that doesn't mean that experts like us for the position to say well that's all very well but actually got a lot of problems that we need to help you with that seems to me to be a very poor way of approaching this i think the the plausible is i would want people suffering from so-called conditions to get together and then the onus might be on people like us to tell them what we think but just that but we can't speak an authoritative position because we aren't that doesn't mean we've got nothing to contribute but my guess would be there will only be two see with the hearing voices thing for example it seems to me that some people need to radically dissociate parts of their own mind which come back at them as voices so it's as though they're outside but they're insane it's like you know hallucinating inside hallucinating outside um some people and i don't have huge explanations at all but some people can be engaged in the kind of things that people like us say about the stuff and then they will be the people who might be helped and then the others must do what they want to do but i don't think i think the trouble with psychondic thinking is it seems immensely authoritative to the people who like it but it isn't just advice to a lot of other people and that's the problem that psychoanalysis addresses which is where is that where is it possible for there to be exchange between people and where does it break down but i think it's got to be based on consent that's all but i think if somebody was interested in having certain conversations about hearing voices well that would be great but i wouldn't assume that that was the a the only game in town be the only solution or there was one or they might have been better altogether um so you've been speaking about your uh clinical work uh in this last section and there's been several references today to the obscure connection between the writing you publish and the work that you do one can read quite a bit of your writing and not know as much about your clinical work as we've heard in the last hour and i'm i'm curious about that you know i could imagine from things you've said so far today that you might be uninterested in writing about your clinical work uh is it impossible are you protecting your something to do with confidentiality or the process um yeah is it forbidden i think psychoanalysis is entirely private i don't represent cases in public i don't think people should write about their patients at all because the point about it is is that there's no public world in which it's expressed it is totally private um so the question then is hey how does anybody learn about it and b has one find out about it and learn how to do it i think people who do clinical work if they want to write about clinical work they should make it out you know freud said studies in hysteria he was really shocked that these case histories sounded like short stories well the scientists was because they are short stories well analysts should write short stories consciously and that doesn't mean they can't make collages from bits and pieces of people but i think it's a given um the transference is around the question of what's the analysts want from me and what do i want from the analyst if the patient comes with the possibility they may you may use in the comments their material then it's as though the question that is in question has already been answered and i think it's very important that supposed agreement that the only thing that is used is used between the two of you so i think people should not do case presentations i think it's unethical and i think they shouldn't write about their patients and i don't think you get around the problem by asking the patient but and some people have and there are very very instant case histories notably very few but there have been some wonderful case histories it may be a genre that no one has probably worked out yet i think that's possible there might be sitting in a room at this moment somebody writing a new kind of cycling case history that feels both ethically fine and is really eliminated but i i just i certainly couldn't do it and wouldn't want to i should say i did originally write about patients and i ask them i've done it but i don't like it so this question is um about ethics and the end of reparation um i think we'll see um so i this there's a quote from leo personi um that you uh cite in your book intimacies and he says i i love this quote so i happen to know it by memory i think um the self is a practical convenience raised to the status of an uh of an ethical ideal it is a sanction for violence and um so thinking about psychotherapy um there's there's always already a therapeutic self that that enters the room there's always already um this potential for that self to become tyrannical and to do violence and i wonder if that's just inevitable to the practice of psychotherapy and that when the self does appear if it does assume this more tyrannical form what is how do we refer to it if not how do we refer to addressing this if not in terms of reparation well what i mean a client description i think of what you're saying would be called pathological narcissism and that i mean i think what in the client is i mean you mean that's but in the clanian story um narcissism is pathological when it's a saboteur of one's own development and in order to believe that you have to believe a that there is development and b that somebody knows what it is if the two things go together um i think that i think what leo vasani is talking about that sentence is the way in which the self is a narcissistic weapon that it's as it were it's a fiction constructed to regulate exchange and one of the ways of regulating this change is to make sure there's nothing to exchange with either world is me um and it seems to me that question has to turn up in every analysis because every analysis reaches a point beyond which there is no exchange so you can do a lot but at a certain point in certain patches you will come up against something really stupid really interactable and if it's pushed really loud and then it seems to me you you're involved in the really difficult psychonauts it's the real impasse because you can talk about it you can describe its function so to speak but somebody is giving up a lot because you would only construct that kind of self which we all probably have to some extent because there were real there were once real perceived dangers because you could think for example it is an abstract generalization if the question is why might somebody be like what you describe the answer could be say as a child they experience their parents as abnormally powerful really terrifyingly powerful as though literally then the absolute mood state was totally in the parents hands so then you invent as a child a self that is unimpingable upon indeed that sits secretly in triumph over this powerful object saying you think you're having a tremendous effect on me but actually nothing's happening now i imagine that a lot of people have a version of this it's often quite mocking it's full of internal superiority and it's very arrogant and it's pretty unlisted and it may be an inevitable cultural solution to the problem childhood independence and it's got to be the part one self that needs analyzing and most resists it but it seems to me in those situations um small changes are huge differences one more question before the break you said something before about when you were training psychoanalysis there was a sense in the writing of a dialogue that was going on that you were listening on and that it changed um and i was interested in that statement because that's something in my training i've been feeling the absence of so i was just interested in your thoughts both about what happened in that change and do you have any advice for people who are feeling the absence of that well i think what happened in england was that a group of people aged and died and the project changed because i think that um there were a group of people who felt they had a shared psychological preoccupation they were working on something and broadly speaking it was the pathological consequences of precocious adaptation in childhood let's just call it that and so a whole range of people balanced beyond clinians when they call maryland etc were it's as though they'd organize themselves around not a particular kind of patient but a kind of particular kind of problem and i think the problems fundamentally to do with the difference between collusion and definitive people let's say that now i think if one was that generation at that time this was really very exciting and interesting but once it was over it was really open it couldn't be recovered and i think what happened was that that was also the end of british psychoanalysis having a real cultural significance after that period just ended in the 60s maybe early 70s then psychonauts fell out of its position of some kind of cultural prestige and if two things happened one was it became very scientific and climate supposedly took over so clinian people will still feel they're involved in some project and you can feel inclined in writing they quote each other all the time they're having conversations about something but in the middle group explained and i you know depending on what one is like it's not always which is better because the trouble it seems to me is that it becomes very cultic very very quickly that actually it's as though the preoccupation shrink often around a charismatic leader i think when it comes clearly even though he wasn't literally a leader he had that effect transferentially everybody was dealing with god well everyone's stealing now with melanie clyne sometimes she's called beyond but it's basically and that's very exciting if you like that language the drawback is that of course they all sound very very similar and so i think it's a choice between wanting a consensus group and wanting um a group based on singularity and a more individual thoughts and i wanted that because i it seems to me sacred writing is terribly contagious in the sense of there are leukemians and cliniums and they all write pretty similarly and and really badly and there's no reason why that should be the case so i would want to encourage you to believe to not worry about that but to write things that interest you and when and when people write things that do industry that you really write to them and say that seriously really important people tell people when something's struggling so people have a sense of kind of tacit unofficial community do you have anyone are there any any writers now any clinical writers that you do find interesting i well i like the old ones but i like um christopher burles but and i like um bromberg um and i like the euro demon i mean i like quite a lot of the american relational people some of them in england and this book publicly i don't know and partly because the the real truth here is that i read veritas psychonauts now um i'm not i'm really interested in doing it and i'm really knowing some reading about it but i'm interested in writing about it and i think it's probably to do with age it's no more interesting than that i think it's just a narrowing it's a sort of an entropy effect but i hope and want there to be younger people who write interesting things about psychonauts where are the young generations i mean there's a reason why psychonauts were games so far because the owners of psychonauts were all middle-aged and older it isn't a mystery this but what is a mystery now is why younger people don't write about psychoanalysis practicing because we've never had that experience there's never been a generation of younger people together who wrote about psychonauts they've only been middle-aged and older and that's completely undiscovered the call to action if i remember it is okay so we'll go ahead and take a break probably about 20 minutes you

Channel: RAMSIncSF

Views: 7,109

Rating: 4.9200001 out of 5

Keywords: Interview with Adam Phillips, RAMS, Richmond Area Multi-Services, Mental Health, Non-profit Organization (Website Category)

Id: DYzn4EIOMgM

Length: 84min 38sec (5078 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2015