The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  Phillips is an odd choice to edit the Freud translation on many counts, not least because he doesn’t know German, the language in which Freud wrote. When I mention this fact to the eminent literary critic Frank Kermode, who is a Phillips enthusiast, he is somewhat taken aback. “That’s a tremendous bit of cheek, isn’t it?” he says, half admiringly.

  This lack of a seemingly essential credential, however, seems not to have deterred Paul Keegan, the former editor at Penguin Modern Classics in the U.K. who conceived of the project. (In the U.K., fifteen volumes are planned, and six have already been published.) Keegan knows Phillips from their student days at Oxford, where they both studied English literature. He was interested, as he explains it, in publishing a Freud “free of the fetters of the Freud industry.” Phillips, with his constant venting about “the institutional hypocrisy of psychoanalysis” (and, no less important, his unparalleled ability, as Keegan sees it, “to work the angles”), was just the person for the job. “He’s his own one-man band,” Keegan remarks. “It’s all been done on a harmonica.”

  The Penguin translations aim to present a more accessible and vernacular Freud, freed from the cult of genius and from the straitjacket of Strachey’s dowdy and somewhat creaking rendition. It is a prospect that Phillips gave thought to over the years, well before the new edition became a gleam in his publisher’s eye. “By pooling the language of psychoanalysis rather than hoarding it … psychoanalysis can be relieved of the knowingness that makes it look silly,” he writes in On Kissing, “the knowingness that comes from its ‘splendid isolation,’ the fantasies of inner superiority in the profession.”

  To this end, Phillips has boldly dispatched with internal consistency and a uniform technical lexicon and has imposed a thematic rather than chronological organization. You might wonder how a craft as facilitating (and, ideally, invisible) as translation can change the basic thrust of a book. “All translation is to some extent misrepresentation,” observes Louise Adey Huish, in her preface to The “Wolfman” and Other Cases. With Freud, however, it appears that the effect was to make him less—rather than more—lucid. “Freud was not the father of psychobabble,” Huish acerbically notes. “Very few of the terms he coined require a dictionary to make them comprehensible to the ordinarily educated reader.”

  Phillips has written the introduction to only one of the books (Wild Analysis) but was in charge of selecting the translators and the writers of the introductory essays; the essayists include specialists in literature, philosophy, and the history of science, as opposed to writers on “hot” topics dear to psychoanalytic journals like psychic trauma and boundary violations. There isn’t a shrink in the bunch, and none of the translators was given instructions beyond the one to follow their own noses. Some of them hadn’t read Freud before. One, Michael Hofmann, who had signed up to do Wild Analysis, decided not to go ahead after reading it in the original.

  The idea to update and condense the magisterial standard edition—sometimes referred to, tongue-in-cheek, as the King James Version—was spurred by the expiration of the Strachey copyright. Strachey’s Herculean labors, under the watchful eye of Anna Freud, Freud’s youngest child and the only one to follow in his footsteps, took place over a period of twenty-one years (1953–1974). His work has long been regarded as an exhaustive triumph of fastidious scholarship. “We must fall back on square brackets and footnotes,” he vowed, “for we are bound by the fundamental rule: Freud, the whole of Freud, and nothing but Freud.”

  Still, there have always been questions about the aptness of some of the vocabulary—for example, Strachey’s use of “instinct” instead of “drive” for the term Trieb—as well as the possibility that he denatured Freud’s vivid style into the polished and stately prose of a Victorian gentleman: “a cross,” as the Cambridge historian of science John Forrester summarizes it, “between Thomas Hardy and Julian Huxley.” Some criticized Strachey’s translation as a well-meaning but essentially falsifying effort to present Freud as an empirical and systematic (indeed Darwinian) thinker rather than a subtle and allusive poet of the unconscious life. In the hope of making him more acceptable to a skeptical medical community, Strachey set about “scientizing” Freud, adding concrete qualifiers like “degree” and “level” to Freud’s metaphorical imagery, and introducing clanking Greek words like “cathexis” and “parapraxis” into the text in place of Freud’s more colloquial and plainspoken German.

  It was Bruno Bettelheim who first brought these concerns to wide attention twenty years ago in an essay in The New Yorker in which he suggested that Strachey had literally taken the soul out of Freud. Bettelheim focused particularly on Strachey’s translation of das Ich (the I), das Es (the it), and das Überich (the above-I) into “ego,” “id,” and “superego,” which, he proposed, set up a depersonalized paradigm of mental processes that was colder and sharper edged than Freud’s more organic conception.

  Of course, these issues, intriguing though they are to scholars and critics, pale beside the larger issue of Freud’s relevance—or lack of it—as a figure who speaks to the twenty-first century. The true believers, like the psychoanalyst and overseer of the Freud Archives Harold Bloom, maintain that Freud is the central consciousness of our time; he is, as Auden had it, “a whole climate of opinion.” For them, the small mistakes here and there—as in Freud’s consistent reduction of women to biologically inferior creatures forever in mourning over their lack of a penis—add up to no more than a few shadows on the lustrous face of genius. On the other side, there is the hallowed vituperative tradition of Freud bashing, which proceeded in piecemeal fashion with Karl Popper and Hans Eysenck in the 1950s and ’60s and went on to claim ever more cultural ground. It is perhaps best exemplified by the gleefully sustained attacks of the literary critic Frederick Crews, a reformed believer whose 1980 article “Analysis Terminable” could be considered the first real shot in the Freud wars. For this group, the whole enterprise of psychoanalysis is no more than a colossal con job perpetrated by a wily and ambitious half-baked theoretician on his cowed peers and on a gullible lay public.

  Enter Phillips, the man who, as he himself might say, loves Freud but refuses to be enslaved by him and has thereby succeeded in moving beyond the raging ambivalence (or sadomasochistic “enactment,” to borrow from the florid jargon of shrinks) he maintains is inherent in all our relationships. Having long been convinced that “psychoanalysis … is useful only as … one among the many language games in a culture,” Phillips is apparently unhampered by unconscious conflict—which invariably results in the need to deify or diminish a chosen object—and is thus left free to rescue an embattled Freud from his champions and detractors alike.

  “Freud is not a sacred text,” he told me. “I never thought psychoanalysis had anything to do with science. It has been servile in its wish to meet scientific criteria to legitimize him. I want people to read Freud as you would any great novelist. His books are not accurate accounts of people. Every psychoanalytic text, as Auden said, should begin with ‘Have you heard the one about…?’”

  * * *

  Phillips’s office is at the top of three flights of stairs in a scruffy whitewashed brick building down the street from Dakota, the chic restaurant on the corner where he and I repair for a late lunch. His determination not to take himself too seriously (or, at any rate, not to seem to be taking himself too seriously) is disarming. He cheerfully admits that he’s “not good at punctuation,” and when I ask him why he is resistant to drawing even the most provisional of conclusions in his own writing, he offers a simple explanation. “I don’t know how to elaborate thoughts,” he says. “I write sentence to sentence.” Dedicated to what he calls “the transformative effect of listening,” Phillips is alert to the loopholes in conversation, the dropped questions and trailing clauses, the partly said or the left unsaid. This receptive attitude helps to explain the rapport with children and adolescents that shines so clearly through his writing, in which he comes across as the least patro
nizing and most charming of allies, one who is willing to acknowledge the hopeless error of grown-up ways.

  Phillips, who will be forty-nine this September, was the principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London for a decade before going into private practice seven or eight years ago. He pulled back from working with children after he became a father—to Mia, who recently turned nine. (Phillips and the critic Jacqueline Rose, his ex-partner, share parenting responsibilities.) “Part of my internal myth,” he says, “is that I could listen to anything. But when I had my own child, I could bear much less about the way children had been treated. I’ve seen many brutalized children, and it was like losing some kind of protective covering.”

  These days he mainly treats adults, who come to him by way of referrals, by word of mouth, or from reading his books. He sees most of them for forty-five-minute sessions, but since he is reliably unorthodox (“Anxious practitioners,” he points out, “need rigorous technique”), he also sees patients for an hour or occasionally for double sessions. He has been known to sit on the floor and says he works well “on demand,” seeing patients when they want to come rather than at regular times. Although Phillips cuts a sufficiently glamorous figure to earn him the sobriquet “the Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis,” he firmly states his preference for the common over the uncommon patient. “I don’t want to see famous or rich people,” he says. His only criterion for treatment is that he be “moved” by the person he is working with and that “there’s a conversation that’s important.”

  I am inclined to believe him. He appears genuinely appalled at the blatant materialism of contemporary life and has few acquisitional habits beyond college-dorm staples like books, CDs, and plants; he does like to eat out, he admits, as though it were a fantastic indulgence. He is particularly incensed by the greed of his colleagues: “Any analyst who charges a lot of money is in my view betraying the profession.” His own fees are modest, at least by American standards, ranging from no charge to forty-five pounds (roughly seventy-five dollars). “If you want to make money,” he snaps, “go be a film star.”

  Phillips seems to have led a remarkably charmed life. He grew up in Cardiff, Wales, in an assimilated Jewish family (his grandfather’s surname was Pinchas-Levy until a customs official at Swansea decided to replace it with a Welsh one) and remembers feeling “very well loved” as a child, with parents who indulged his passion for tropical birds. (“National Geographic was my childhood pornography.”) He describes his parents—both of their families came from Eastern Europe—as having suffered from “pogrom anxiety.” Although Phillips, who has one sister, lived in a Jewish house in the boarding school he went to and spent a summer picking apples on a kibbutz when he was sixteen, he insists that his background protected him from feeling the presence of English anti-Semitism. “I’m an accidental Jew,” he says heatedly. “It’s a contingent fact that one is born one thing and not another. I don’t believe Jews are the chosen people. I don’t believe our having suffered on a colossal, cataclysmic level should be recruited as a kind of special pleading.”

  After doing a year of graduate research on the poet Randall Jarrell, he went into training as a child psychotherapist. The catalyst for his change of professional direction was D. W. Winnicott, the innovative pediatrician turned analyst who rendered psychoanalytic dialogue accessible to the skeptical lay reader. (He is responsible for such iconic phrases as “the good enough mother” and “transitional object.”) Phillips had come upon Winnicott’s Playing and Reality when he was at Oxford. “I remember reading it and thinking, ‘This is it,’” he says. Years later, after his own “eclectic” psychoanalytic studies and training (which included being analyzed by the mercurial Masud Kahn, who was an analysand of Winnicott’s and whose sexual peccadilloes and rabid anti-Semitism eventually led to his being ejected from the British Psychoanalytical Society), he would put that excitement into words. Phillips wrote to Frank Kermode to ask if he could contribute a volume on Winnicott’s work for a series called Fontana Modern Masters that Kermode was then editing. He included a short piece he had written on tickling, which Kermode passed on to Richard Poirier at Raritan, thereby launching Phillips’s writing career. Winnicott, the first of his books, was published in 1988.

  Not everyone, of course, is convinced that Phillips is either a true original or a knockout stylist. Monogamy, a collection of 121 aphorisms that is short on text and long on blank spaces, was largely savaged. Indeed, it shows Phillips at his worst, being clever and obvious at the same time, as if he were writing a self-help guide to erotically challenged readers of The New York Review of Books: “A couple is a conspiracy in search of a crime. Sex is often the closest they can get.” Phillips’s propensity for post-Lacanian abstractions and flashy linguistic inversions irritates critics like Elaine Showalter, who noted in a review of Phillips’s last book, Equals, that his observations were “pithy rather than persuasive.”

  In the end, what remains up for grabs is how many of Phillips’s ideal readers—“those who are curious about Freud as opposed to those who are convinced of his truth or falsehood”—are out there, waiting to hear a story about something called the unconscious. “The idea of a standard edition,” Phillips points out, is “implicitly sacralizing.” Instead, this intellectual impresario is offering a new and slimmer model—a “slightly wicked” Freud, as John Forrester calls him, one who has been snatched from the lionizing acolytes who laid claim to him and dragged into a less rarefied orbit, where he can be seen acting recognizably human. Phillips’s Freud is “always torn between being a lover of conversation and a lover of being right.” You might say that Phillips wants to restore the radical nature of the psychoanalytic enterprise—“Freud backed off and got afraid”—and transform the Doktor into a man for the transgressive moment rather than the calcified ages. “You can no more own Freud,” he declares, “than you can own Henry James.”

  Certainly, this Freud is a less daunting one, more conducive to the insouciant pleasure of discovery than Strachey’s weighty entombment allowed for. And perhaps reinventing Freud as a literary figure on the order of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka rather than presenting him as a rigorous cartographer of the mind is a canny way to keep him alive in the public imagination. It’s a gamble that Phillips, for one, is prepared to make, and he has the charismatic presence to persuade a lot of formidable scholars and writers to come along with him for the ride. Even some of these people, though, have their doubts as to where it will end. “If Freud is simply another writer-philosopher,” observes Malcolm Bowie, who was a professor of French literature at Oxford and is now at Cambridge, “there is no need to shackle him with quack-like claims to scientism or, indeed, to the pragmatic alleviation of suffering. But it is also to diminish him.”

  The truth is that Phillips has made it clear that he doesn’t give a fig whether the institution of psychoanalysis endures, just as he, like Freud, is not all that smitten with the “romance of cure,” preferring to see his sessions with patients as “a pretext for togetherness, a way out of loneliness.” Still, I suspect he loves his Freud, the one who encourages a view of complicated selfhood in the same way that Dostoyevsky or Shakespeare does, with the kind of disinterested love he admits, in a touching moment, to feeling for his patients. “They matter to me a great deal,” he says, with quiet conviction.

  There is no doubt that they make strange allies—the pared-back, fast-moving enfant terrible and the serious old professor with his cigar and his beloved collection of antiquities—and it is hard to imagine what would happen if these two men ever ended up sitting next to each other at one of those hypothetical dinner parties. One possible scene is that Phillips would tell Freud to stop worrying what the Joneses and Jungs think, while Freud would tell him to grow up and get an e-mail address. Or perhaps they’d drink a toast to their shared interest in plumbing the depths of ordinary unhappiness—what remains after the neurotic misery that brings people into therapy has abated.

  “
We have to learn to enjoy the things we don’t like,” says Phillips, in the way he has of making deeply unconsoling things sound seductive. “Our desires are in excess of any object’s capacity to satisfy them. But I’m not for this vale-of-tears approach. The point is to find out what it is that makes one’s life livable.”

  BLOOMSBURY BECOMES ME

  (LYTTON STRACHEY)

  2002

  I still think of it as the summer Lytton Strachey saved me. I was nineteen or twenty, and life should have been tipped in gold, glinting with possibility, but it wasn’t. I see myself lying in the garden, muffled under antidepressants, sunk in a silent mourning that was impinged on only by the constant trilling of the cicadas in the bushes behind me, and by Michael Holroyd’s two-volume biography of Strachey. The books came as a boxed set, like The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which added to their aura. They have been with me through several apartments, and by now they might almost be taken for antiques, with their embossed endpapers, faintly penciled underlinings, and yellowing pages. Volume 2, The Years of Achievement, 1910–1932, lost its dust jacket somewhere along the way, but otherwise they sit intact on a bookshelf within view, as they have always done. (Holroyd went on, with astonishing industry, to publish a wholly new one-volume biography in 1994, drawing on previously inaccessible material—much of it to do with Strachey’s homosexuality—and although this book duly stands next to the earlier version, it does not have the talismanic value of the cased edition that got me through that unhappy summer.)