DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, D. W. Winnicott worked on the adolescent unit of the Paddington Green Children’s Hospital. There, just beyond Hyde Park in the center of London—under threat of constant bombing—Winnicott would make his rounds, asking all his patients the same question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Asking this seemingly banal question was all Winnicott needed to do to get the children to imagine going on being, surviving the bombs, getting out of the ward. When my mother was three years old, her own survival at stake, her answer to this question was “a fire truck.” She thought she could be anything, and she chose a heroic machine. Psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden has called this question an ontological one, because it is about being rather than knowing, about helping a patient become rather than interpreting them. Of course we can, and sometimes should, interpret the answers. After all, a fire truck is not just shiny and red, it also puts out fires, and my mother did grow up to put out a lot of fires. But to give in to the temptation to interpret—what Ogden calls the impulse of “epistemological” psychoanalysis—is to miss the implications of Winnicott’s question. To be truly alive, no matter our age or circumstance, we should all be able to imagine growing up, always. We should remain in the subjunctive mood, in a state of becoming—never reaching a destination or hardening into any one thing. To have grown up is to have stopped growing into something else; growing’s end means death, and not just physically.
After thirty years of writing and clinical practice, the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips is still growing up, and the possibility and impossibility of that process is on his mind. If we read Phillips chronologically, we grow with him. First came the supposedly fun part, with books on kissing, on flirtation, on monogamy. Then we aged, found wisdom and equipoise, and more books followed: on kindness, on balance, on curiosity. We also found middle age wanting, and so: on escape, on inhibition, on wanting to change. We worked through it until: On Getting Better. This is an incomplete selection from his staggering oeuvre, one in which Phillips has reconfigured the theory of psychoanalysis by offering it as a commonplace book, one that breaks open and breaks down the signal moments of life. The commonplace, as it were, is the consulting room. The experience of being there, of its theory, is then sent home to us.
Phillips’s larger project has become clear: to rewrite psychoanalysis, without patients, for people. Rather than make case studies from his psychoanalytic encounters, Phillips makes a case for encountering psychoanalysis in our lives, and for how its articulation of what troubles us, its demand that we resee what we think is settled, might help us all. By renovating and popularizing the work of the British inheritors of Freudian theory—in particular D. W. Winnicott and the influential analyst Wilfred Bion—he’s helped readers begin the difficult task of thinking about feeling. Our reward, for following along over the past three decades: On Giving Up.
AS WITH MANY OF PHILLIPS’S BOOKS, the premise of his latest is something like: This thing you know? You don’t, not fully. Anything you think you know contains its opposite, and by ignoring its opposite you remain unfree. Phillips offers, in his own words, examinations of the “essential and far-reaching ambiguity of a simple idea.” The way you understand or articulate certain concepts—intimacy, inhibition, unlived life—obscures how you might really feel about them. Things get interesting, Phillips teaches us repeatedly, when we hold not just one side in mind; entering the laboratory of ourselves requires first sitting in our ambivalence. This is also the premise of psychoanalysis.
The deceptively simple experience under examination here is “giving up.” Phillips approaches it from many angles, through thought experiments and readings of Kafka, Beckett, and Shakespeare, and assisted as ever by Freud, Winnicott, and others from the analytic tradition. As he considers both the hero who never gives up (Oedipus, say) and the person driven to suicide (the ultimate giving up), Phillips re-poses a central psychoanalytic question: Why do people attack their own aliveness, their own vitality? In a culture that values heroic perseverance and commitment, we might think it cowardly to give up on something, but we may also acknowledge the need to make “improving self-sacrifices”—to give something up. Phillips shows us that by paying attention to what happens when we give up and how we feel about it, we might see that “something is handed over, a necessary deal has been struck, a point has been reached, a crisis has occurred, an exchange has been entered into.” That we make sacrifices in exchange for something else shows us that giving up “is a form of prediction.” What and how and why we give up can reveal things about our desires and how we have anesthetized ourselves against them. Phillips wants us all to investigate the ways we have learned to manage life and consider how in doing so we might be preventing ourselves from really living.
The patients who seek the couch are those who can’t give up their repetitions but want to. The rooms of AA are configured around this premise, as are dozens of other places where surrender is the first step. Sometimes, Phillips argues, to be aliveat all, we must give up. But we must look beyond thinking of giving up in terms of “profit and loss” or “success and failure.” Instead, Phillips posits, these moments of giving up occasion a “redescription” of ourselves. This is achieved only after great friction—between ourselves and who we might wish to become. When we hear of a friend entering psychotherapeutic treatment or quitting drink, we might know a story of why, but not really what it took to get there, to hit rock bottom—booze or no booze. And anyone who has hit it knows that bottoming out is also always a process of becoming. In Phillips’s formulation, giving up on one thing invites the arrival of another. It prompts the question, “What happens then, if?”
In analysis, what we hope comes next: the patient reaccesses their curiosity and is willing to investigate an aspect of themselves long enough to want to make a change—not just in a habit of mind or behavioral pattern, but in the entire set of life conditions that occasions it. This is, by Phillips’s account, deeply rare and likely fleeting even for those who manage to get there. His project in the essays in On Giving Up, he says, is to “acknowledge how much work, how much discipline and diligence and obedience is required to sustain this project of not-knowing, of informed ignorance.” The titles of the essays read like an index of despair: “On Giving Up” is followed by “Dead or Alive,” “On Not Wanting,” “On Being Left Out,” “On Not Believing in Anything.” “On the Pleasures of Censorship” seems like it will throw us back into joy before Phillips picks up the pace to close out, ending with the short meditation “On Loss” and an epilogue. Though the mood is overtly bleak, Phillips flips the value of his inventory of exhaustion by suggesting that in greeting more fully what is dead in us rather than merely burying it, we might slacken the hold of our symptoms.
It is in between Freud’s life and death drives—going on and not going on, going on alive and going on merely living, giving up (bad habits and deadly ideals) and giving up (resignation)—that Phillips’s book lives. The first essay is in the death column. We learn that we can’t get away from ourselves. We repeatedly seek a way to endure and ultimately give up. The second essay moves to the opposite pole, to life: how we might give up to flourish, yes, but also how, in order to be truly alive, we must accept the conflict and uncertainty around what to desire and what to give up. Here, Phillips turns to Winnicott’s “aliveness,” which he argues is the absolute organizing principle and contribution of Winnicott to the discipline. Winnicott shows that we all go around killing off our liveness—by simulating omnipotence, by generalizing, or, as psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas argues, by abolishing difference and being basically fascistic in the mind. For this to stop, Phillips argues, we have to let go of this particular “self-cure.” The things we do to shore up the possibility of living—possessiveness, say—are the very things we must also overcome to come alive: “one’s habitual tactics and techniques for deadening oneself, the anaesthesias of everyday life.”
But these ways of being aren’t just called in to ward off what is so difficult about being alive, like the friend who has given up watching the news during a genocide to preserve their self. Phillips also wants us to consider the other direction: how we kill off what is pleasurable in our daily lives to mute desire. Phillips—much like Winnicott in the adolescent ward—says we can begin to feel alive once more if we “ask these questions.” The right questions can ask us to imagine going on being, can allow us to ask ourselves not what happened, but what happens next.
My favorite of the essays, “On Being Left Out,” is, in a way, exactly what it sounds like: an ode to FOMO. Social exclusions (the lunch table, the party) return us to that first exile, that ur-moment for psychoanalysis, the primal scene. Our parents are doing something without us (that it is sex only turbocharges the loss). Again, Phillips wants us to take another look: we are not just excluded from attention, but also excluded from ourselves, from who we might be (here Phillips plays with Kafka’s “I have nothing in common with myself”). Phillips writes, “Whether Freud was writing about the Oedipus complex, or negation, or the death instinct, he was writing about leaving and being left out as constitutive of who we are. We make ourselves up through our exclusion of ourselves.” That exclusion is populated with detested and exalted others as well as possible versions of ourselves.
“On Being Left Out” might also be called “On Growing Up.” “What then?” is already a serious question for Phillips when it pertains to one person’s Friday night—it returns us to how we could get beyond “Not Wanting” and to desire. But Phillips also points out how exclusion is often the engine for revenge—not just between people, but between groups as large as the nation: “They organized my exclusion, so I organize theirs.” This is a dangerous fantasy, one that happens at the level of policy. Phillips offers a quiet caution: “Revenge makes exclusion permanent.” What happens next, then, if we try something else? What happens next, then, when we lay down our arms?
PHILLIPS IS FOND OF MANY CONSTRUCTIONS, for instance: “What then?” or, most obviously, “On X.” These have become, for me and for many others, I’m sure, a new grammar of the psyche. He also likes writing about what particular theorists “add to our story,” where the story is both how we view the social plane—human relations in general—and what psychoanalysis allows us to see in the stories we tell or have been told about ourselves. Both here and elsewhere, Phillips will write, “What Freud adds . . . ” or “What Winnicott adds . . . ” In On Giving Up, Phillips describes the “psychoanalytic story” as being “about how we get from wanting to wanting to be good, or bad, or kind, or cruel, or honest, or cunning; about how biological need (and its attendant emotional engagement) becomes morality (and its attendant emotional conflict).” It is a story about “how need can make us cruel and kind.”
Typically, an analyst who wants to illustrate such a story will turn to a patient, or a set of them, for evidence. But Phillips does something different: On Giving Up,like his other recent books,is a book without people, or at least the usual sort we might find when we read analytic theory. A long time ago (but not at his start) Phillips took a radical stand. He departed from the singular mode of address of psychoanalysis: the case study. In an interview from about a decade ago, he noted, “I never write about people I see” (this isn’t true, as Phillips goes on to say—he used to write some about his patients, but then, as it were, he grew up). This is an extreme ethical stance, which holds that no amount of disguise, no amount of grouping patients together and making them a composite, no amount of permission, gets around the ethical problem of writing about the people seen in the consulting room and breaching its privacies. It goes further than either the American or International Psychoanalytic Association standards. For Phillips, the zone of exchange between analyst and patient must be protected. Treatment for money is one thing, but Phillips argues that a patient has to be able to come to an analyst feeling that the analyst isn’t looking for anything in exchange—things like little stories or clusters of symptoms to populate their writing.
This is not to say that the book is without individuals—there are many: Shakespeare, novelists and their protagonists, and even Freud himself become characters. Following Wilfred Bion, Phillips binds these characters’ stories together with what he has learned from experience—both clinical and personal. By protecting his patients, Phillips has given himself Freud’s original task, before he started writing his famous case studies of Dora, the Wolfman, and the like: to invent (here, reinvent) psychoanalysis without the aid of clinical examples, without patients, to generate a theory of the consulting room without anyone in particular consulted. After all, the first patient of psychoanalysis wasn’t Anna O., not really; it was Freud himself. Again, that serves the story of psychoanalysis just fine: “There may be nothing else we can do but go on inventing competing and complementary accounts of the ways in which we are and are not the authors of our own lives.”
ALONGSIDE THE MYTHIC RETELLINGS and Phillips’s turns to, say, Robert Musilor Thomas Mann, there is another cache of evidence: the reader of On Giving Up. All of us have a childhood, all of us have our insufficient self-cures. All of us struggle to get to aliveness, to give up without giving up. Phillips seductively insists that you, reader, you are the case. Now, let’s work it up. Without other patients to distract us, we are asked to read for and with ourselves. Phillips makes this appeal slantwise, tucked into the epilogue. He gives us another question, which he says is always the question: “What are we going to have to sacrifice in order to develop, in order to get to the next stage of our lives?” Psychoanalysis is indeed a science of devil’s bargains about how to emerge more fully under the conditions that make emergence impossible, that do censor us—sometimes like a mother, to keep us alive, and sometimes like a fascist, to destroy our aberrance.
For psychoanalysis, children are often understood, privileged even, as knowing what life is like before repression and self-cure fully take hold. The problem is that by the time the child grows up enough to lie on Freud’s couch, all we have are our memories of that earlier scene. By the time you read Phillips, you have been made to grow up, both by society’s hand and your own. “So success,” writes Phillips, “is a form of denial. Competition reveals nothing. Adulthood is a sham.” The plea then at the end of the book, and at the end of the day, is to consult one’s self with enough curiosity to mitigate our brittle and repressive qualities. Phillips points out that if we were once forced to “put away childish things”—that is, what we wanted to become—“we put them away somewhere.” And if these things are not gone, they might be retrieved. Phillips shows us how to grow up by continuing to grow up, without becoming adults.
Perhaps apocryphally, Winnicott would later say that he wanted to be able to answer the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” until five minutes before he died. We are, we can understand from Winnicott, always in the process of becoming, always growing up. Pacethe notion of midlife crisis, to “go on being” for Winnicott was a project without end, until it ended. But only with true death. Clare Winnicott, his second wife, reported that, when he was actually at the end of his life, Winnicott said, “Let me be alive when I die.” What Phillips adds to this story is that, should we wish to achieve that daunting aim—to live before we die—our self-cures must be cured. To do so, all we need is that nearly impossible capacity: to not know (yet).
Hannah Zeavin is an assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley. She is the founding editor of Parapraxis magazine.