A Conversation with Adam Phillips

It’s my privilege to introduce Adam Phillips as NCP’s first Master Clinician in Residence. This program is designed for our institute to interact with someone who has produced a significant body of psychoanalytic writing. Phillips’s books and essays are grounded dialectically in clinical knowledge and a subtle understanding of the therapeutic process. His visit will present him an opportunity to be immersed in the life of our institute, exchanging ideas with our candidates, members, and faculty.

I have twenty-eight questions.

Fine.

You proudly call yourself a psychoanalyst and yet you did not attend or graduate from the British Psychoanalytical Society. Can you tell us about your analytic background and your immersion in psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic supervision in London?

I don’t think of the word “psychoanalyst” as an honorific, just as a description of a kind of work. I trained—I would have to go back a bit just to make sense of this. I studied literature at university. Before I went to university, I read Winnicott’s Playing and Reality. Having read that, I knew exactly what I then wanted to do. So when I qualified—that is, when I got my undergraduate degree—there were then three places in London you could train. There was what was then called the Hampstead Clinic, which was Anna Freudian. There was the Tavistock Clinic and there was a place called the ICP, the Institute of Child Psychology. The ICP was nominally eclectic and what that meant was there were Jungians as well as Anna Freudians and Freudians and so on. I then applied for the ICP partly because I thought it was obviously the worst place and partly because it was eclectic. Within six months of my starting there, it folded. We were then taken over by an overarching body called the Association of Child Psychotherapists, and what it meant was that in practice I was trained at the Tavistock Clinic and the Anna Freud Centre. So entirely by luck, I had in a way the best possible training I could have had. In the middle of that, I also had a middle group analysis and a trainee post in the Middlesex Hospital, the Department of Child Psychiatry. Then, for the next seventeen years or so, I worked in the National Health Service as a child psychotherapist, and that was working in child guidance clinics, child psychiatry departments in hospitals, children’s homes, etc. A whole range of things.

Excellent. Thank you. You were analyzed by Masud Khan. Without impinging on the privacy and integrity of that relationship, can you share the experience of being on Khan’s couch?

[Laughs] Yes, I can. But again, I’ll have to tell you all a bit of a story about this as background. When I went into psychoanalysis, I knew nothing about it. I’d read books. I’d never met an analyst. It wasn’t in my world. So I didn’t, obviously, know who anybody was. I didn’t know how the whole thing worked. I was also twenty-three, so I was really young. When I got into the training, I was given a list of analysts. One of the people on the list was Masud Khan. I can remember going to an exhibition with my then-girlfriend and there used to be phone boxes in London. Of course there aren’t anymore. Going to a phone box and ringing up this man, Masud Khan, and he answered the phone, which I was surprised by. Anyway, he answered the phone and I explained I was in training to be a child psychotherapist, and that I wanted training analysis. He said to me, “I need to let you know that I can’t do anything under fifty pounds a session.” I said, “How about five?” He said, “Come see me on Monday at two.” [Laughter]

You anticipate my next question.

Which is?

Khan himself has been the subject of significant controversy in his analytic career. No one disputes his brilliance as a thinker and his versatility as a writer. He is the subject of Linda Hopkins’s biography, False Self [2008]. Were you disturbed by learning of the loose boundaries between Winnicott and Khan during and after Khan’s analysis? How did you feel about learning of his sexual relations with several female analysands, his expulsion from the British Psychoanalytical Society, and his anti-Semitic outbursts late in life?

I think anything I say about this is going to be provocative, but actually, it made no difference to me at all, any of that stuff. I believe a lot of it was true. It wasn’t that I was in a state of denial. But I suppose it becomes a question, or there are two questions here. One is how complicated you can allow people to be. It’s also a question about love, really, and my relationship with him was completely trustworthy. And I had no reason to doubt his integrity in relation to me, and that was what counted. And I also knew that I could ask him about anything that was said about him, which I sometimes did. And he was not defensive about these things. It didn’t have much effect on me and it hasn’t subsequently. Not that I thereby endorse some of the things that he may or may not have done. But it hasn’t altered my view of him.

What was the frequency of your analysis?

It was four times a week for four years.

How important and how trivial is analytic genealogy? You were analyzed by Khan, who was analyzed by Winnicott, who was analyzed by Strachey, who was analyzed by Freud. That’s a distinguished line of analytic ego ideals.

I like the idea of it—in some ways. I think there’s also something fanciful about it in that I don’t think there’s a source that one can get closer to in psychoanalysis. I do think that that is an interesting genealogy that I happened to enter upon, but of course anybody who goes for any kind of therapy is entering into a huge, unknown history. They’re entering into their analyst’s own childhood and history; they’re entering into their analyst’s transgenerational history; they’re entering into a huge set of assumptions about what a person is, what a person might be, what a person could be, and so on. So that it seems to me that there’s a version of this going on in any relationship. I don’t feel beglamoured of it. When you recited it then I thought, that is interesting, and of course it must have its effect. For me, it’s fantastical in the sense of I can’t tell myself an interesting story about those facts. I was told stories from within that tradition in my analysis. For instance, just very briefly, because this I think is a good one or a very bad one. You’ll have to see what you think. [Laughter]

It was a question of mine, and you said you are haunted by this story. I’m curious about why it haunts you, and do you see this vignette, if it’s true, as an example of the young Winnicott’s compliance, or as an example of Strachey’s analytic rigor about how to listen to a patient?

I see it as part of Winnicott’s compliance, but I don’t see it as rigor. I see it as straightforward authoritarianism because, obviously, nobody else can decide what is significant beforehand. I don’t like the idea of there being people who can claim to know when other people are really speaking. I think that’s a terrible idea. But as part of a mythology of psychoanalysis, what it does is it focuses one’s mind on the question of what is real speaking or, from a psychoanalytic point of view, what is it to really speak? I think those are interesting questions.

Can one ever work through the analytic transference, especially if one works in the field, particularly if it is a training analysis?

I think Laplanche is right about this, you can’t resolve a transference, you can only displace it. I think it is absurd and unrealistic to be too ambitious about “resolving” transferences. Transference is one of the mediums of sociability; it’s not only the way the past preempts the present and the future. It’s also the way it transforms and enlivens them. There is really no such thing as a training analysis, as everyone knows who has had one. Training analyses only exist because there are so-called trainings, and people who believe psychoanalysts are trained. You can no more train someone to be an analyst than you can train someone to be a poet or a friend, or a parent. The only question the student of psychoanalysis need ask herself is, who do I really enjoy talking with about psychoanalysis? And it could be anyone.

Your interest in psychoanalysis began at the age of seventeen. It came through reading Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections and Winnicott’s Playing and Reality. What specifically resonated for you in that reading experience? Why after developing an affinity for Winnicott’s book did you decide you wanted to be a child psychotherapist? What was the inner connection?

I read Memories, Dreams, Reflections when I was sixteen and I’d just started reading books. I wasn’t a child who read or wrote or any of that stuff. But I had a teacher at school who taught me English literature in a very powerful and passionate way. Anyway, I came across Jung’s autobiography. When I was sixteen, I was interested in what I then thought of as the depths. I read Jung’s autobiography, and I thought this was an amazingly exciting life. I imagined that Jung was in the depths or knew about the depths, and I thought it was absolutely an extraordinary account of somebody’s own myth, mythmaking. But it was the first remotely psychoanalytic book I’d ever read.

It’s going to be interesting because Saturday we’re going to be having a conference almost exclusively devoted to Playing and Reality, so this is going to be a homecoming for you.

Well, it was of course very interesting, as it always has been, rereading the book, because the book gets more and more interesting to me and more and more difficult to understand. But it seems to me a very remarkable book, out of which a lot of future psychoanalysis could come.

Your first experience of reading Freud was also very powerful. His description of Jewish family life was familiar to you. What specifically do you recall about it that made it seem uncanny? What text or texts by Freud influenced you?

I think in the first instance what amazed me about Freud was how accessible he was, that it was entirely readable. I can remember reading Civilization and Its Discontents and Beyond the Pleasure Principle and thinking these were, as they are, extraordinary books, essays. I think that there was something about Freud’s sensibility. I wouldn’t have called it this then, but there was something very familiar to me about his preoccupations. Freud talked about things that my family talked about. They didn’t talk about them psychoanalytically, but it was all there. So when I read Winnicott, Winnicott’s very, very English and my family—well, I am very English but certainly my family were not, so having read Winnicott first and then Freud, Freud felt much more familiar to me. It wasn’t quite uncanny so much as very, very compelling. There was something about the voice that was very familiar to me and also there was something very hospitable about it. I thought Freud wanted us to read his books. I thought he wanted us to be interested in what he was interested in, and I loved that. It seemed to be really genial. In my fantasy, I thought of him as a very, very ordinary Jewish man who also did something rather extraordinary, but that he was really ordinary in the best sense. And it’s a very interesting life story.

Winnicott, you say, is quintessentially English and Freud essentially a godless European Jew with close psychological connections to your family. Would you agree that a consistent thread runs through your writings, namely a dialogue between Winnicott and Freud, reflecting the two dominant parts of your origins and education, two strong components of your sense of self?

I think that must be true although, you know, I’d be the last to know and the first to find out, in the sense that I think other people might have a clearer sense of that than I do. I think it must be of some significance that these are two preoccupations, but of course they’re not my only preoccupations, and I’m much more interested in William James than I am in either of those two people, or in Wallace Stevens or, I could go on.

Go on.

Well, I don’t want to go on too much, but for me these people are writers among many other writers I’m interested in. I don’t think of any of their works as being the “supreme fiction.” I’m not suggesting you’re suggesting that either. But they are part of what I take to be a cultural conversation about certain preoccupations and they’re compelling versions of this. I don’t think Freud’s better than Henry James, so to speak, and I don’t think we need to rate them. There is an elaborate cultural conversation going on in which there are clearly discernible themes and preoccupations.

Phillips is an anglicized name. It was changed from Pinchas-Levy when your grandparents emigrated from Russian Poland to Cardiff, Wales. We analysts know proper names are significant in the formation of the self. Are you predominantly Phillips or Pinchas-Levy?

Yes. [Laughter] The Pinchas-Levy thing I only knew about when I was considerably older. The story in the family was, and it sounds true, which is that they arrived in Swansea, which is in Wales. They said Pinchas-Levy, and were called Phillips, because Phillips is a very common Welsh name. And that seems entirely plausible. Phillips seems to be anonymous to me. Pinchas-Levy seems excessively middle European. I’m struck, though, by the fact that my partner and my children want to change our name to Pinchas-Levy, but I don’t. [Laughter]

Why was your family so committed to being assimilated?

A lot of the British Jews of their generation really wanted to be British. It wasn’t that they were denying being Jews, because certainly nobody I knew denied they were Jewish. They had tremendously powerful aspirations toward what in short hand we call the Bloomsbury Group, let’s say, a fantasy of cultured English upper-middle-classness. My father was also in the war and in the war he met a lot of very, very posh ruling-class people whom he clearly liked and I imagine aspired to be like. And there was a very, very powerful wish. It was a combination of not to stand out, not to stand out as vulgar—in other words an internalized anti-Semitism—but also a feeling in a family romance way that there was something wonderful about British culture. Now of course this was not a consideration of the Empire, racism, etc. It was a fantastically pastoral myth of England as a wonderfully civilized country, which of course actually colonized most of the world in the most appalling way. But of course there was and is a myth about England as immensely civilized, which in some ways you could say it was, or could have been. But it very much appealed, partly because it felt like a real option. Jews who went to other countries didn’t feel this in quite the same way. I don’t know if this is true, but it seems to me to be true. Whereas in some ways it wasn’t that there was no anti-Semitism in Britain, but it wasn’t as virulent as say it was in France or Italy, so there was a kind of hospitableness in English culture. My parents, certainly, and the parents of my friends really responded to that.

Did you notice you used the word posh? I learned that word when I was in London. Did you hear him say the world posh?

Do you use that word here?

No. It’s a great word, though.Adam Phillips: It is a good word.

You have said your parents were left-wing and that politics were much discussed in your family. What specifically were their politics?

My parents were socialists, anti-Tory, anti-royalist, and so people troubled by privilege, especially by the privilege they aspired to. If you lived in Wales in the time I was growing up, the news was dominated by the fate of miners and the trade unions. I was given Michael Foot’s biography of Aneurin Bevan for my bar mitzvah; that more or less answers the question, at least for those who know who Bevan was. If you don’t, and you are interested, you should look him up. ¹

In the elegant book you wrote with Barbara Taylor, On Kindness, you explicitly link kindness and fellow feeling to the politics of social democracy. How politically engaged are you? Should analysts be more public about their subjective, progressive political positions (or reactionary ones for that matter)? Is socialism as a form of government and social structure a logical and inevitable expectation of those immersed in the British independent group, a humane extension of the relational point of view?

I think psychoanalysis doesn’t make sense as a refuge from politics. There are no refuges from political, from group life. We are always involved—in Crick’s definition of politics—in “the conciliation of rival claims,” both internally and externally. Psychoanalysis is a way of working at a more truthful sociability. If analysts are asked about their political positions, there is no reason they shouldn’t disclose them, but they don’t have to, and they don’t have to only do that. The question is never “Am I doing psychoanalysis properly?”; the question is “What kind of person do I want to be?” I do think you are right, though. The often tacit, or implicit, politics of the British independent group psychoanalysis is, literally and metaphorically, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, that is, somewhere between socialism and a communism akin to the seventeenth-century anti-royalists like Winstanley. In order to understand the independent group, you need to know about the [English] Civil War, and you have to understand the word “commonwealth,” which means understanding its history and its contemporary distortions.

Has anti-Semitism been a factor in your personal or professional life?

No, not really. It’s hard to tell in some ways because I think part of the wish to assimilate is the wish not to experience anti-Semitism. I can remember having dinner with Harold Bloom and he said, “I couldn’t bear being in London because the English are so anti-Semitic.” I was amazed by that. And I believed him; it wasn’t that I thought he was obviously wrong, but it hadn’t been my experience. It had been the experience of people of my parents’ generation much more than of my generation. But I haven’t directly experienced it in my life.

Your family were secular Jews who did not deny their Jewish identity. You were bar mitzvahed. Being Jewish for you involves an awareness of the Jewish past and a shared sensibility or collective psychology with fellow Jews. Do you see yourself as a “non-Jewish Jew”? As described by Isaac Deutscher (1968), Leon Trotsky’s biographer, non-Jewish Jews are committed to the betterment of the common good, to social justice, to thinking radical and revolutionary thoughts and to critical thinking. Freud was a non-Jewish Jew. Are you?

Probably, yeah, I think so. The thing for me is every so often I think being Jewish is the most interesting thing about myself for about ten minutes. [Laughter] And so I have patches when I read lots of Jewish history or I begin to think this is immensely important, but I have long swatches of time where it is of no interest to me at all. And so of course, like everybody else, I’m impressed by what we think we know about the history. You know, we don’t meet Hittites in Barcelona now, but we do meet Jews. I’m also very, very pleased when people I admire turn out to be Jews, but of course I admire lots of people who aren’t Jews. So I, in a familiar Jewish way, I’m baffled by it, but I certainly feel much more Jewish than I do British, incomparably more, whatever that means.

You’ve written that you were inspired by the writings of Jewish American novelists, particularly Bellow, Mailer, and Roth. Besides the energy and vitality emanating from their writings, what else did their works evoke for you?

I’m not sure there was a “besides.” What I didn’t like about them was the scale of the misogyny, and that is a strange, complicated thing here. I assume that psychoanalysis was invented to address everybody’s terror of their own misogyny, and what strikes me about those writers is they’re not terrified enough or ostensibly they’re not terrified enough. But what I did like about them as an adolescent was the vigor and strength of the prejudicial intelligence and the willingness to be brash, gauche, pretentious, all that stuff. There is no British-Jewish culture. There’s no great British-Jewish novel, for example. As an English Jew brought up with English literature, reading American literature was startling to me and it felt very, very much what I wished I’d grown up with, but of course it’s a fantasy.

The music of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell has been critically important in your life and to other members of your generation. You say their music helped you to imagine yourself. How did that happen? Was it the beginning of a self-analysis?

Oh, no. no, no. I think the best thing that happened in my life culturally was the music that was parallel to my adolescence and then the poetry. It was a learning experience in which you weren’t taught anything. But it was powerfully evocative in indiscernible ways such that when you heard those voices and heard that music, you really had a sense of possibility. And it wasn’t defined possibilities. I didn’t want to be one of those people nor did I think how fabulous it would be to be so rich and famous. It was much more to do with the way in which the music communicated something that was not analytic, that was not even thought particularly, but it had a powerful sense of freedom about it, and of sexual energy and of possibility.

And emotionality?

U And emotionality, yeah, all those things. But it was in the tones of voice.

Kohut recommended that analysts listen to chamber music to sharpen their listening capacities. Are you into classical music?

I like classical music as well, yes. But I think the best way to learn how to listen is to read.

In “Against Self-Criticism” (2015) you advocate forms of overinterpretation in understanding dreams, neurotic symptoms, jokes, lapses, and literature. You take positions also against the violence of interpretations that are simplistic, reductive, and authoritarian. Is your view of overinterpretation consistent with Freud’s and Winnicott’s approach to interpretation?

I think it is. In the sense that one of Freud’s most interesting ideas is the idea of overdetermination and one of Winnicott’s most interesting ideas is that the aim of the analysis is to facilitate a capacity for surprise. And both of these ideas are linked to the sense in which analysis, at least to me, is about being able to redescribe the patient’s so-called material and from many aspects. The assumption being it has many aspects, that there couldn’t possibly be a single authoritative interpretation, but there could be a multiplicity or a configuration or a kaleidoscope. There are lots of possible analogies of this. In other words, you’re not looking to get it right. The other very interesting idea of Winnicott’s is the idea that it’s not what the analyst says that matters. It’s whether and how the patient can use it. Now this is a very, very different view of authority, as is indeed Freud’s view of dreamwork. These are very different pictures of human exchange, of sociability. And for me, the trouble with the word overinterpretation is it suggests too much interpretation, whereas what it means really is that you can’t afford to allow yourself to be the emperor of one idea, to allow one interpretation, that things have to be looked at from a multiplicity of points of view; otherwise they are impoverished.

In his late paper “The Use of an Object,” Winnicott argues that he interprets only to let patients know the limits of his understanding. Many analysts interpret to experience the narcissistic gratification of being clever or self-satisfied. Winnicott states that only the patient has the answers, that analysts ought not to deprive the patient of the pleasures of creativity and the joys of self-understanding. Do you agree with Winnicott on this? If so, is this consistent with the strategy of overinterpretation or is this another Phillips paradox we need to play with, not collapse into black-or-white categories, either/or thinking?

I think it’s misleading to say that only the patient has the answers: (a) because it’s not all about questions and answers and (b) because it seems to me anybody could have the answers. That is to say, either the patient or the analyst could say the useful thing. So I think there’s a huge overrating of definitive interpretations. I can see what it is reactive to. It’s reactive to authoritative Kleinian interpretation. But I still think that it doesn’t matter. In the conversation that is psychoanalysis, ideally, either person can say the useful thing. It doesn’t matter who it is. But of course, it would be very anti-Winnicottian to think that only the analyst could or would. That would be an absurdity. There’s a kind of disingenuousness in Winnicott, an English version of Protestant modesty, which is to say, “I don’t know anything. I’m very naive. I’m curious. I’m sort of innocent,” etc. Now some of it is wonderful, but some of it is ghastly, as in it’s really arch and it’s stagey. Winnicott very often wants to tell us how little talent he has, but that he’s got one very big talent, which is a talent to elicit the talent of the patient. For me, I’m not saying this is true for Winnicott, but there’s sometimes a disingenuous modesty problem in Winnicott’s theorizing because the theorizing is actually extremely bold and in many ways very, very ruthless and aggressive. It’s almost as though Winnicott was sometimes frightened of his own aggression in the theorizing. He then backtracks.

When I began analytic training in 1980, there was a consensus about three desired outcomes of a successful analysis. Namely, that the analysand would emerge with a firm capacity to be heterosexual, genital, and monogamous. That consensus has faded considerably, except for monogamy, regarded by most analysts as a capacity reflecting a highly evolved, responsible, and above all mature personality. You call into question that sacred cow in your intriguing book Monogamy (1996). What does it mean to be an agnostic on monogamy? If one is agnostic about monogamy, does it mean that everything may be permitted in the erotic register?

No, what it means is you can’t talk on other people’s behalf, so there couldn’t be a position on monogamy. People would have to decide this for themselves and in their particular relationship. The book Monogamy as I read it (and I’m obviously only one reader among many) is neither pro- nor anti-monogamy. The idea of the book is that people can think about it because it is a problem. Now there must be a reason why it’s a problem. The analytic presumption that one could know beforehand the nature of the necessary or the good or the valuable relationship is the problem, not the solution.

You’re advocating not knowing, not knowing in advance.

Not knowing but also experimenting. These are experiments in living. You find out how you want to live with other people. Your life could be an experiment in sociability. There are plenty of people who will tell you how you should live, of course. Plenty of people will tell you that monogamy is wonderful, and plenty of people will tell you it’s terrible. Well, you have to find your way through this. But it would be a shame to assume that anybody could know beforehand.

Including analysts in the analytic community.

Absolutely. Especially analysts. [Laughter]

In a series of aphorisms about the dialectic of masturbation and monogamy, you link the two to monotonous, repetitive, and uninventive stories. For you, how important is the role of storytelling, actually fantasizing, in the sexual life of an adolescent or adult?

I don’t, in the book or outside the book, think of monogamy as linked essentially to masturbation. I think both can be inventive, so to speak. I think there is no sex without fantasy, and possibly no fantasy without sex. I value psychoanalysis because it is alert to just how defensive narrative is; there is a reason people love, or think they love, storytelling. Psychoanalysis frees us not to be overimpressed by coherence. Or by plausibility. Just as, in Khan and Stoller’s formulation, “Pornography is the stealer of dreams,” so I think psychoanalysis is useful because it shows us how much of sexual fantasy preempts, or kidnaps, or exploits sexuality. Fantasy is the formulation of unconscious desire, but with the emphasis on “unconscious,” not as yet known.

In the beginning of life, infant and mother form a monogamous relationship, at least from the point of view of the child. When the infant confronts separation and mourning from the mother, he experiences it as a mutilation. Then you add, “Growing up means becoming a phantom limb. Falling in love means acquiring one.” Is dismemberment an illusion, all that is possible with regard to the romantic couple?

I don’t understand that quote from Monogamy, really.

That’s your quote.

I know. [Laughter] The point is that no one is going to get around the agonies of sexual jealousy, so no one should be minimizing the suffering involved in this, but also no one should minimize the difficulties of relationships. There are many ways in which the mother-child relationship is not the best model for all other relationships. Or maybe we have to find out whether it is. Because I think it’s sleight of hand for me to say we begin monogamous, because we don’t begin monogamous. We begin totally dependent on our mother, or the person who looks after us. That isn’t monogamy. We don’t use the word as babies, nor do our mothers tend to talk to us as babies about our being monogamous. Things are being conflated here that don’t go well together.

You write in your preface to the reissued volume on Winnicott (2007) that he was one of the great psychoanalytic thinkers about the experience of sexuality. This is contrary to your own earlier views, and contrary to Robert Rodman’s biographical view in Winnicott: Life and Work (2003), that sexuality and the role of the father are largely missing from Winnicott’s perspective. What is your textual or contextual evidence for your claim of his “radical redescription of erotic possibility”?

Winnicott’s theory of sexuality is coded in his theory of use of the object. This is a story about how people become sexually alive to each other. It’s useful when reading Winnicott, any couple he talks about, to be able to see it as both as it often is, mother and child, but also as a heterosexual or homosexual adult couple. In other words, Winnicott is talking about lots of ways in which children relate, obviously, exchanging things with their mothers and vice versa. The risk is of desexualizing the theory, and by that I mean colluding with his desexualizing the theory.

Because the essay really is about destructiveness.

Well . . .

It’s about the capacity of the mother and then the analyst to survive destructiveness, not retaliate, and not abandon the child.

Yeah.

I don’t see that as erotic.Adam Phillips: You may not, but my description of this would be that Winnicott is describing what it is for two people to, as passionately as they are able, engage with each other to test whether the other person can survive one’s love and hate. This is, among other things, a story about erotic life, which is what kind of intensity can you bring into the relationship and what’s the inhibition on the intensity?

You insist that Winnicott be currently perceived as a countercultural voice, not just a maverick psychoanalyst, in the small and isolated world of psychoanalysis. Why should we regard Winnicott as a writer who went beyond psychoanalysis and pediatrics? Does this description also apply to your own work?

You can see this in terms of Winnicott’s own theorizing because when Winnicott talks about the use of an object, he’s talking about something being defined by the ways in which it can be experienced and in the best sense used. It’s a clue also about how we should read Winnicott’s writing. It should be used. Because the definition of a traumatic experience is that it’s something beyond transformation. Well, any theory that you’re unable to transform is akin to a trauma. It’s something you can either comply with or not. Whereas the point of all the psychoanalytic stuff is that we make something of our own of it. We don’t use it to abide by. We don’t use it as a kind of blueprint about what to say when. We actually use it as something we can use, that is, transform. Transform means redescribe, reinterpret. So then everybody should, if they’re interested in Winnicott, have their own Winnicott. But it shouldn’t be about learning what Winnicott thinks and then as it were adhering to this clinically, because that is to miss the point. That’s to comply.

As general editor of the new Penguin translations of Freud, you belong to the chutzpah school of publishing, given that you are not fluent in German, not a linguist or a Germanist. You state that you supervised the translations looking for readability, hoping to find different voices in Freud’s writings, multiplying the Freuds available to us with an alternative to Strachey’s Standard Edition. Why do you think we need these competing English translations of Freud?

I don’t think we need them at all, but we might want them. When the topic of the new Freud translations came up, I was consulted, and I said all of the things I thought should be done and then they asked me to do it. One of the things I said—two of the things I said were, first of all, the translators should not be analysts. Preferably, people who have never read Freud, but people who have translated literary texts, so they’d bring something else to it. The other thing had to do with the idea that it was to find out who might be interested, because it’s an absurdity to have something called the Standard Edition any more than there could be a sort of standard interpretation. So Strachey and others had really egged it by calling it the Standard Edition. I thought it was useful to bear in mind that actually Freud was translated. And if you have a translation, you could have another translation. Does it sound different? Now the beauty of my not knowing German, from my point of view, was that I could read these texts comparatively, but not compare them with the original, and that’s what I was interested in. When we did an event when these translations came out to the ICA in London, a woman got up who was obviously German and said, “You’re so lucky because if you’re German, you’ve got only one Freud.” [Laughter] And that seemed to me a really interesting remark. We did these translations not with a view to replacing the Standard Edition or implicitly as a critique of it, but just simply to ask does it sound different? Is it different? Some of the translators found that Strachey was wrong in places. Well, that’s kind of interesting. Strachey’s really good, but there could be variety, and so anybody who’s interested and curious can find out.

There’s a brilliant essay on translating Freud that you included in the recent In Writing (2017), which I recommend that all of you read. It’s an outstanding essay. Did Winnicott suffer from therapeutic zeal, from the fervor to cure? Was he grandiose about his ability to handle any case no matter how primitive the regression, no matter how pervasive the psychopathology, and how distressing and early the trauma?

Jack Tizard, a pediatrician who worked with Winnicott, said in his obituary of Winnicott that it wasn’t that he understood children but that the children understood him. I bet that was right. It sounds right from reading him. I think one of the things that’s wonderful about Winnicott is he’s very, very ambitious, and of course it’s going to be called grandiose when it fails and wonderful when it succeeds. That’s the risk you take. I like Winnincott’s willingness to believe in people’s potential for growth and change. And the Winnicott that writes, anyway, is doing his best to work out what it is realistic to think that somebody is capable of. Of course, no one could assess that, but you can make a more or less informed guess. He may have erred on the side of therapeutic zeal, but I think it’s a better side of the line to err on. I didn’t know him, but it sounds like he really had the capacity to allow people to be, and that in and of itself is an extraordinary thing.

Do you feel strongly about confidentiality between therapist and patient?

I don’t think people should speak of clinical work in public except in individual supervision.

Final question. There’s a journal entry by Masud Khan written on December 21, 1968, after Winnicott had suffered a heart attack: “How wise D.W.W. is, and yet how blind about himself. He cannot accept that anyone else can treat a case. This is a malignant bias of most analysts, an incapacity to believe he can be blind, treat, damaged by others. Hence his incapacity for gratitude! And yet his is the truest and most profound devotion to his patients and his self-questioning vis-à-vis them most incisive and austere. But as a man, he had not questioned his malice, envy, and hate” (Rodman 2003, p. 342). Do you agree with Khan’s harsh and generous assessment of Winnicott the man and his approach to the therapeutic process?

Well, unlike Khan, of course I didn’t know Winnicott. It does strike me as rather harsh in many ways and rather, indeed, malicious and envious. But clearly there was something that lots of people picked up on in Winnicott. Khan isn’t the only person. Kleinian people had much more vicious accounts along those lines. We have got a lot from Winnicott’s ambition. In other words, he experimented, he tried things out, and he left us this incredible body of work which if it happens to work for you is very, very inspiring. He was a very remarkable analyst and there aren’t that many of them. I’d also just like to add that people don’t know much about themselves. The idea that people are going to go around saying somebody doesn’t know much about himself is absurd. We don’t know very much about ourselves. It’s not about self-knowledge, it’s about something else, and I think it’s a low blow on Khan’s part.

What’s the something else?

I don’t know. I could phrase it for you, but it’s actually about unconscious communication. John Ashbery said, “The worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about.” The better your psychoanalysis is, the harder it is to talk about. The scale of authority of these people talking about psychoanalysis is astounding when you think what psychoanalysis is about. How could you know that much? [Laughter] How could anybody be an expert on the unconscious? It’s absurd. So the idea there could be authorative analysts is preposterous. Where did anybody get this belief from? The beauty of the thing is it undoes that. [Applause] You can only ever be a student of psychoanalysis, and that’s one of the great things about it.

In the United States we have a number of theoretical schools that seem further to the left of the British middle group, namely, the intersubjectivists, the relational psychoanalysts, self psychology, and to a certain extent the Boston Change Process Study Group. Has there been any consideration of any of these schools within the dichotomy of the middle school tradition?

I don’t know because I’m really not in the world that could answer that question. But my sense of it is no, I think there’s very little interest. It’s one of the strange things about British psychoanalysis: it’s very parochial and I think it sort of always has been. There’s been French influence. But there’s a weird sort of skepticism about America. Because when I trained, and indeed throughout my time, I’ve always thought there were lots of great, interesting American analysts, and I thought the relational stuff was very interesting and an obvious proliferation of Winnicottian thought. But I don’t think it’s worked the other way around. I really don’t.

What about the reaction to Bowlby and the attachment theories?

I think there’s a great skepticism about Bowlby. I don’t know who I’m talking about now who has the skepticism, but broadly speaking, apart from the attachment theorists, I think that certainly when I was training, people would treat Bowlby as not a psychoanalyst. Now, this is not an interesting way of talking. But I think the feeling was that attachment theory had two ideas and we already knew what they were. And you couldn’t go anywhere with it, you see what I mean, that it had too normative a view of mothering.

That’s also Mitchell and Greenberg’s view of Bowlby in their big book on object relations.

Yeah.

He gets all of one page.

Yeah. And also, Bowlby’s a spectacularly boring writer. [Laughter] And that doesn’t help.

We analysts, I think, are faced daily with the existential implications of climate deterioration and environmental degradation, and I wonder how it influences us, what you think about the implications of this threat, in terms of our work as analysts?

I think that just in terms of developmental theory, I’m wary of making psychoanalytic pronouncements about large world issues because there’s been so much grandiosity in psychoanalysts talking about the political world. Just in Winnicottian terms, given we’re speaking this language at the moment, I think, and in Kleinian terms, too, I think the experience of going on destroying the environment has got to have terrible effects on those who are complicit and those who are doing it. Because if you think of this in terms of early development, anyway, this is what early development, certainly in Klein, is about, which is the havoc created by the destruction of the mother, of the sustaining environment. So the risk, of course, is this makes people more aggressive, not less. Because the wish would be, of course, that it makes people reparative. There are plenty of people, of course, who are ecologically minded and who care about this, but there are plenty more people who don’t care. Quite a lot of people who think it’s all over fundamentally, that the damage has already been done. But I do think it must have an effect on the people that we see and ourselves, that we’re living in a world that we are actively destroying or are complicit with destroying. There’s no way around that, I wouldn’t have thought.

My questions are both related to the subject of desire, and one we spoke about briefly earlier, which is the impact of technology. Maybe that also feels like a big issue [laughs] that you might not want to address tonight. That technology so impinges on space that we don’t have any space to become bored and to just be in our own experience to locate our desire as a result of constantly being connected and impinged on by technology. Obstacles are required in order to locate desire, but what happens when you don’t have obstacles?

I think it’s possible your two questions are linked. I think that it is a very good psychoanalytic idea that the precondition for desire is frustration. In other words, there has to be space, there has to be a gap, there has to be something between the desire and its gratification, because if there isn’t, it isn’t actually desire, it’s something else. That becomes the point. The point about obstacles is that there are intrinsically obstacles. There’s no desire without obstacles because it’s not as though if you have a fantasized wish it’s immediately gratified. It may be immediately gratified in fantasy, but it’s not gratified in the real world, so you can’t nourish yourself with imagined meals. There’s going to be the experience of wanting something or somebody, then, as it were, all the inevitable obstacles to the gratification. You could think the obstacles are both the point and the problem. There’s no desire without frustration and obstacles, and by the same token the obstacles are there to make something possible. Because it’s only with the obstacles that the desire cooks. There’s no obstacle, there’s no process of desiring. It’s about how to get to the object.

I just wanted to make an observation as a kind of resonance with your experience with Masud Khan. It has to do with how I learned from Winnicott, which has something to do with what you said about people, the patients understanding him. When you read Playing and Reality, you knew him. That really rang a bell for me because when I sat with him for a year talking about my child case, I knew him. He didn’t have to say very much, and he didn’t say very much, but I took him in, because he let me take him in and he became my Winnicott. So that’s pretty complex because it resonated with something of who I am that connected with what I could use of who he was, but it had to do with who he was as well. He was also tremendously accepting and validating. I remember when I consulted him about four days after Michael Balint died, who was my analyst, and I needed to talk with him about my experience. We knew each other. He had been my supervisor and he agreed to see me and I saw him for a consultation. Not long before his own death, actually; it was just a little while afterwards. I remember an experience of an extremely valuable validation of my experience of who he was in a certain respect. But then he did something else, which it’s hard to put into words. We were in a passageway. I think I was just going out. And he leaned back against the wall as if to let me have what I had got from him and to use it for myself. And it kind of echoed some flavors of what you describe in Winnicott.

That’s obviously fabulous as a description and I don’t want to do anything to that. But it seems to me, and only you would know this, but it’s something about somebody not needing to impose himself on somebody else. That’s what makes somebody available. When there’s an absolute absence of the need to dominate or control, then anything can happen. Then sociability really opens up.

It seems to me that Winnicott is actually on the decline in terms of the vitality, the energy, that accompanies training. In fact, Bion seems to be the person who has been elevated to the status Winnicott had when I trained. I just wonder if that’s your sense, too, and whether you have some explanation for that, some understanding of why Winnicott isn’t the kind of charismatic figure he once was.

I do think that’s right. I think it’s really good when people go out of fashion in psychoanalysis. [Laughter] Because I think what then happens is that they’re only interesting to the people who are really interested in them. So if everybody loses interest in Winnicott, then somebody’s going to come along and find one of these books and think, “This is it,” and they’re going to be really powerfully affected. Whereas, when Winnicott is the thing, everybody’s got to be powerfully affected, that’s kind of de rigueur. I think people falling out of favor is the best thing that can happen to them in psychoanalysis.

Except if it’s us.

No. No, no, no. I really think this. I think the Bion thing is very, very interesting because I think Bion is the sort of archetypal stage figure. You can see the kind of fantasy he fulfills. He also is a wonderful writer and clearly a very, very interesting man. But I think there’s a kind of austerity and there’s a pared-downness and there’s a tragic view here that is terribly compelling to loads of people. The happily mournful love this Kleinian stuff, of course. [Laughter] Because there’s nothing in Winnicott, nothing in Bion really, about sex; it’s all about profundity. The risk is of people enacting the idea of being deep and thoughtful analysts. It’s one of the most ghastly things that’s happened in psychoanalysis.

Do you think he got some of that from Beckett?

I think that he got some of the best bits of his writing from Beckett. Yeah, I do.

How do you imagine Winnicott was as a colleague in the institute world and the training world?

Obviously, this is an imagining. The people who liked him really liked him and the people who didn’t, didn’t. It’s like ice cream. You love it or you hate it. Winnicott was very, very compelling to a certain group of people, but if you didn’t like him in psychoanalysis, you really didn’t like him. You were really skeptical and you were really suspicious. And you can see why. It’s not a mystery why there was a Kleinian-Winnicott split. They’re very different worldviews. They’re different forms of life. I think in a way it’s a bit like Lacan. One of the things interesting about Winnicott is precisely the conflicts he creates in the group. It’s like Winnicott says, you know, it’s about the environment you create around you. Part of Winnicott’s environment was for people to turn up and say Winnicott is seducing his patients. Winnicott is a magician. Winnicott makes people regress. As opposed to us Kleinians who are doing rigorous, real psychoanalysis. But certainly, if you read the correspondence, it sounds like it was a very interesting time in the British Society, because there was a lot of hatred, a lot of love, and a lot of conversation. There was a middle group that was emerging that was neither anti-Kleinian nor anti-Winnicottian nor anti–Anna Freudian and that was what worked then for those people. Because there couldn’t be a Winnicott group by definition. It wouldn’t make sense. You can’t follow Winnicott in that sense. You can follow Klein, but you can’t follow Winnicott.

In one of your writings you say language is primary. Could you expand on that and the notion of redescription in the clinical moment and its importance in offering something that someone could use in the clinical moment?

I don’t think language is primary. If I said it, I no longer think it. But I do think that one of the great things, and I got this from Richard Rorty, from American pragmatism, which is simply to redescribe interpretation as redescription. When Winnicott says he gives back to his patients what they brought to him, that is to say that they gave him whatever they said or did with him and he could give it back to them in slightly modified form. One of the interesting things about the implications of Winnicott’s work is that he allows you to imagine a psychoanalysis in which there would be no resistance. And there’d be no resistance because of the analyst’s capacity to redescribe what the patient says in a way that was sufficiently pleasurable and acceptable to be listenable to. It wouldn’t need to mobilize a resistance. That would be a description of what it would be to say something that the patient could use—that is to say, they could take it in and make something of it, and with it.

So the whole—all of the frustration in the analytic environment in the relational sense is not to come out of that transference for us?

You can’t—you couldn’t—you may be able to minimize the frustration of the analytic situation, but the frustration is integral to the project. This is not the attempt to gratify the patient. It’s much more to do with, I think, a wish to be able to say something that can be listened to, to be taken in, and be challenged. The earlier comment, the thing about Khan’s anti-Semitism, is that I couldn’t really believe it, if you see what I mean. In other words, I think both things are true. I think it had no effect on me and it must have had an effect on me. That must be right. I think my wariness is of being an essentialist. So my wariness would be to think Khan or anybody is an anti-Semite and that is their defining characteristic. Because I don’t think people have defining characteristics. The wish to perceive essences is itself a kind of tyranny.

In your book on Winnicott, if I remember right, at the end you said that your favorite paper was his paper on communication and non-communication. I’d love to know why, especially since the book presents “Transitional Phenomena” and “Use of the Object” as so profound. What makes that paper top these two?

I think really the account—I’ll tell you what came to mind when you asked the question and then I’ll answer it. John Ashbery was asked in an interview, “Why is your poetry so difficult?” He said, “I noticed that when you try and communicate with people eventually they lose interest, whereas if you talk to yourself they want to listen in.” [Laughter]