UK Edition 
Why the pressure to be happy is driving people mad
Days after I met Adam Phillips, the writer and psychotherapist, I began to think about the configuration of seating in his room. As you enter, there is a sofa to your left, and on the other side of the room, further away, is a single leather armchair. Does anyone choose the chair, I wondered? It seems obvious, in the same way the three bears’ furniture is easily identifiable to the reader of Goldilocks, that the armchair is meant for Phillips. I suppose his patients automatically go for the couch. There are more of them, after all, with their divided selves. And, anyway, they might want to lie down.
But the point is, Phillips didn’t sit in the armchair; he sat in an upright chair much closer to me, because he knew that on this occasion he was the subject of investigation. I, on the other hand, made myself comfortable on the sofa, and that probably tells you more about the dynamic of the interview than it needs to. Damn, I thought later, I should have asked to switch seats.
I had come to speak to Phillips about Unforbidden Pleasures, his 20th book, and a new angle from which to examine the things we might want. Why do we make certain things forbidden, he asks. Do laws themselves provoke the desire to break them? How can we allow ourselves to live according to what actually gives us pleasure, rather than what we think we’re supposed to like, or what we’re good at? “I think there’s a lot of anxiety and coercion when it comes to real enjoyment,” Phillips suggests. People are rarely free, he says, “to discover what their real enjoyment is”.
In this era of declamatory self-help, it’s easy to see why Phillips’s brand of quiet insight might be hard to place. He makes modest claims for psychoanalysis – it “should not pretend to be important instead of keeping itself interesting” – and he has no truck with any of its competing orthodoxies. (“If the unconscious is what cannot be anticipated, how can there be experts of the unknown?”) Yet he is, for my money, the finest living decipherer of affective life.
In between critical biographies of fellow psychoanalysts D W Winnicott and the young Sigmund Freud, Phillips has written essays, lectures and even aphorisms in an apparently endless cycle of curiosity. Each volume proposes an idea – about escape, say, or kindness, or our failure to define sanity – and explores it with the help of various purveyors of poetic thought, from Shakespeare to Philip Larkin. If psychoanalysis is a way of telling a story – or a way of hearing one – then its project, Phillips seems to suggest, is no different from that of literature.
Over the past 20 years, Phillips has come to rely less on neat case histories and has relaxed into a more playfully digressive style. But always his characteristic position has been to see the point of being difficult: instead of trying to fix something “wrong”, he asks what difficulty might have to say. And that applies as much to the tantrums of a small child as it does to a complicated passage in Paradise Lost.
Phillips’s room in west London is lined, paved and stacked with books. In the time I spend with him, he mostly looks away from them, directly at me, or out of the window, his pale eyes catching the light. I’m not the first person to describe the 61-year-old Phillips as a cross between Freud and Bob Dylan. Among the encroaching paperback companions, we find ourselves talking about the uses of disobedience.
“If you want to know about disobedience, you talk to adolescents,” he says. And then he adds: “It’s quite interesting to live in a culture where lots of people secretly feel that the best thing to be is an adolescent, preferably a rich one or a beautiful one.”
I ask if he means advertising. “Ads, all sorts of things,” he says. “So many people find adulthood very disillusioning. In some ways, you think, 'This is very weird.’ It’s like believing that ageing is the loss of youth.”
At this point, I am stumped. “Whereas?” I say.
“Well, it’s ageing, if you see what I mean. All that’s happening is we’re getting older. But if you idealise youth, then youth is the thing you’ve lost. It’s like believing that what I lost, when I could walk, is the inability to walk. Well, I did, that’s true, but so what?”
Much of what happens in psychoanalysis is, as Phillips puts it, “redescription”. It’s where literature and therapy overlap. As an A-level English pupil, Phillips was taught by a former student of F R Leavis. Having taken little interest in reading until then, he became a convert to English literature. It was, he says, “almost like a religion”. He went on to study English at Oxford, and while he was there he read, more or less when it came out in 1971, Donald Winnicott’s book Playing and Reality. It was the work of a child psychotherapist, but to Phillips it felt like “the next stage of English literature”. He loved the writing, and he found what he wanted to do for a living. “I thought, 'This book has been written for me, to me, possibly by me,’” he says with a grin.
Psychoanalysis was not part of the vocabulary of his parents, who were second-generation Jewish immigrants to Wales, and when he signed up for training Phillips found he was at least 10 years younger than any of his fellow students. In fact, he was told to take a year off and come back. But he was determined – and determined not to be brainwashed. Instead of opting for the Kleinian school or becoming Anna Freud’s disciple, he did a mixture of everything. He didn’t think: “I’m going into the helping professions.” (“Help,” he once wrote, “is a word which has always covered a multitude of sins.”) He thought: “I’m having an adventure.”
One day, after visiting an L S Lowry exhibition, he made a call from a payphone outside the Royal Academy. It was to an analyst who had been recommended for training. “I’m afraid I have to let you know that I can’t do anything under £50,” said the analyst. Phillips said: “How about £5?” The analyst said: “Come and see me.” From then on, four times a week for four years, Phillips saw and studied under the charismatic and controversial analyst Masud Khan.
Khan, a protégé of Winnicott (who died in 1971), was later accused of socialising with his patients and, more significantly, of making anti-Semitic remarks. Phillips says he was never anti-Semitic to him: “He was a wonderful analyst, which isn’t to say all the things said about him are not true. I suspect a lot of the things are true. At the time, I simply really loved him.”
For the next 17 years, as a child psychotherapist working within the National Health Service, Phillips saw children and families, and had what he describes as “riveting” conversations that “were not remotely class-bound or education-bound”. Somehow, on Saturdays, he worked his way back to literature. He always read poetry, and he also wrote some. An early poem, “Intruder”, was published in the London Review of Books in 1980.
Though he still writes regularly for that paper, he now sticks resolutely to prose. His first book was commissioned by a childhood hero of his, the literary critic Frank Kermode. And he tried out some early essays for a French psychoanalytic journal edited by a student of Sartre, with whom he also went on holiday. Freud, the founding father, was always seen by Phillips as one writer among many. “He has a language for things that I’m preoccupied by,” he explains. “But I infinitely prefer Wallace Stevens or Henry James.”
This sort of intellectual exploration is all very well, you might think, but what if there’s an emergency? What if someone’s life is at risk? At what point does Phillips say: “I can’t help you”?
“I think that it depends on the person and the situation,” he replies. “I would be as realistic as I could be. So that if I thought this was, at least in the first instance, medical, or beyond me, I would redirect somebody. I think the superman, superwoman attitude to psychoanalysis is really dangerous.” However, he adds: “It’s also true that sometimes people can get the most from it when they’re most in need of it.”
Phillips thinks there should be a more open conversation about how people can make their lives worth living. This, he says, should be taught in schools, though no one would ever do it. “It shouldn’t be an assumption that everybody has got to think it’s wonderful to be alive. It isn’t, for some people, and it isn’t for all of us sometimes.” Suicide, he says, “is really profoundly disturbing. How could it not be? So this is not remotely promoting suicide, but I do think people should be able to talk about it freely, when and if they feel it. There shouldn’t be an encouragement to be upbeat, because I think it drives people mad.”
Is he wary of medication, I ask, or does he work alongside it?
“I’m not keen on drugs,” he says, “but I’m saying this in total ignorance. In other words, what I’m giving you is a prejudice. I think all suffering is bad, so I don’t think it’s good for people to suffer; I just think some suffering’s inevitable. If it’s possible, it has to be borne. So that, for example, if people get very, very anxious, I don’t say to them, 'Don’t take anti-anxiety drugs.’ I do say, depending on who they are and their situation, 'If you can bear it, it’s really useful to be able to bear anxiety.’ Sometimes, anxiety is the sign of something new happening. It could be a threshold.”
Some years ago, around the time Phillips adopted a daughter with his former partner Jacqueline Rose (he has two more with his current partner, Judith Clark), he decided to stop treating children. “When I went into this, as a boy, I could listen to anything,” he says. “But of course, as you get older you get more vulnerable and less vulnerable at the same time. And once I had my own children, even though I could still do it, I really found it harder. People do unbearable things to children and children sometimes do unbearable things to each other.” He started seeing adults, and went into private practice.
Our conversation is drawing to a fairly natural close when Phillips’s doorbell rings and makes me jump a little. I hadn’t noticed how quiet it was in the room until then.
“Is that your next person?” I say. And in that final moment I have clearly given the game away – whatever the game is – because Phillips smiles as he gets up to answer the door and says, very calmly: “Now, don’t panic.”
The person at the door isn’t a patient. It’s the postman, with a Hallowe’en costume for Phillips’s daughter.
Adam Phillips’s Unforbidden Pleasures is published by Hamish Hamilton at £14.99, and is available from the Telegraph bookshop for £12.99 plus £1.99 p&p.