Psychoanalysis: An 'unregenerate Freudian' gives a comprehensive overview of contemporary psychoanalytical thinking, writes John Banville
The great edifice that was Freudianism, which had endured intact, indeed had grown steadily in eminence, throughout the first half of the 20th century, was dealt a hard blow by the second World War. This was an irony that would not have been lost on Freud himself, had he lived to see the questioning of his reputation, which began in earnest in the 1950s and continues today. That a world scarred by war should become disenchanted with its greatest disenchanter is a bleak and bitter joke.
The war had shown us, if we needed showing, the enormities man was capable of. George Steiner, among others, has argued that a new kind, a new degree, of evil was manifest in the Nazi programme of world domination and genocide, fuelled as it was by a queasy mixture of race mythology, bogus science and the simmering ressentiment of the lower middle class.
However, there was another component that indicated the novel aspect of fascism, and that was the drive to aestheticise politics - to aestheticise life itself, in fact. If Hitler and Mussolini and their henchmen were thugs, they were also intellectuals - one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, in the dock in Jerusalem in 1961, could cite in his defence Kant's doctrine of the categorical imperative - and derived their inspiration not from great leaders of the past but from the likes of Nietzsche and Spengler. For the Nazi ideologues, human destiny had a shape, and an aesthetic shape at that.
Freud had clearly recognised the seriousness of the crisis in which society found itself at the end of the 19th century, a crisis which had led to one terrible world war and would, in the year of his death, precipitate another. In his great meditation on the human predicament, Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), he identified "the inclination to aggression [ as] an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man", and went on:
This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with it. And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilisation is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilisation may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species. And it is this battle of the giants that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven.
Adam Phillips, unregenerate Freudian, general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics Freud series, and prolific author - the list is far from complete - takes a steadfastly less apocalyptic though no less clear-eyed view of our condition than his master did. One of the pleasures of reading Phillips is the absence from his writing of that dour defensiveness that marks the work of so many of his colleagues in the field. He has no scores to settle, no wrongs to right, no icons that he wishes to smash. He is too fascinated by the inner self and its intricacies to bother with the petty stuff of what the Americans call "turfing" - making sure that one's own little patch of knowledge or expertise is protected from the other big beasts roaming the jungle. Generosity is the mark of his work.
Side Effects: Essays is one of Phillips's most substantial collections to date, dealing with topics as diverse as Talking Nonsense and Knowing When to Stop, For the Family ("If the family, at its very best, inspires and is inspired by a passion for living together, this passion, like all so-called passions, involves frustration"), Doing It Alone ("the reason most people feel guilty about masturbation is because they fear that masturbation is the truth about sex") and a marvellous piece on education, Learning to Live. If the collection as a whole is in places over-dense and sometimes repetitive, and certainly not as easily approachable as, say, Darwin's Worms or On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored - indeed, the reader may do best to "dip in" rather than tackle the book as if it were of a piece - it is nevertheless a remarkably comprehensive and stimulating overview of contemporary psychoanalytical thinking as well as a supremely confident re-stating of the Freudian conception of life and life's vicissitudes.
Perhaps the central essay in the collection, if not the most obviously imposing, is Waiting for Returns: Freud's New Love, although to hold it so may be to display a bias, since the knottiness of the argument put forward is somewhat eased for this reader by the fact that Phillips delivered it as a public lecture in TCD not so long ago - it is always a help to hear the master's voice echoing from the page. The essence of that argument, if one may make so bold as to try to extract an essence, is that since what we most desire - a word, and a problematic one, which recurs throughout these essays - is the far, originary past, where our parents were sexual beings for us, it follows that what we hate and fear most is the future. Psychoanalysis, in Freud's view, is, Phillips writes, "a treatment to cure people of their hatred of the new . . . " That hatred, that fear, we treat most effectively by falling in love, since falling in love is a way of having the forbidden past by making a sort of model of it in the person of the loved one. The lover is safe, un-taboo, in being "like" the lost mother or father, therefore not the mother or father, since the one thing the parent cannot be is "like" him- or herself.
Modern people fall in love, Freud is saying, as a way of resisting the new; that may be what falling in love is for the modern individual, a staving off of contemporary reality, a fear of the future. Falling in love is the defence that psychoanalysis is organised to cure [italics added].
This is a frightening paradox, that the affect we hold most dear - spiritual and sexual love - may be the cleverest, most efficient, most ruthless means we have devised to avoid our responsibilities; may be, in Phillips's formulation, "a self-cure for living a contemporary life, for facing and making the future".
Phillips is, among his other enviable qualities, a relentless and fiendishly perceptive reader, and the essay Waiting for Returns opens as a consideration of Modernism in the arts, and in literature in particular, and the "striking contradiction . . . that in a period defined by the possibility, indeed by the necessity, of innovation in the arts, Freud was writing about the near impossibility of innovation in the modern individual's erotic life". For that individual, Freud contends, love is always the same old same old - "Repetition, Freud kept showing and saying, is always the issue when the modern individual wants to make it new". The sub-heading of the essay, then, Freud's New Love, must be taken as ironical. There is no new love.
Freud's truths, Phillips keeps on telling us, are hard, and they are not pretty, and truth itself, for Freud, is never naked. We scramble all our lives, with more or less success, mostly more, to cover up what Philip Larkin, in another, even darker, context described as what we know, Have always known, know that we can't escape, Yet can't accept.
These harsh truths that Freud sought to impress on us, and which Phillips among his heirs is most insistently and insouciantly determined to remind us of, were anathema to the great tyrants of recent times, in their determination to impose an aesthetic frame on the organic incoherence of human destiny.
For Freudians, then, the final irony is that the catastrophe those tyrants fomented should have, among its minor consequences, led to a subverting scepticism about the value of what Freud had to teach.
John Banville's novel, The Sea, was the winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize
Side Effects By Adam Phillips Hamish Hamilton, 318pp. £25