Adam Phillips - On Wanting to Change

Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently Attention Seeking, In Writing, Unforbidden Pleasures and Missing Out. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Winnicott

On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored

On Flirtation

Terror and Experts

Monogamy

The Beast in the Nursery

Darwins Worms

Promises, Promises

Houdinis Box

Equals

Going Sane

Intimacies (with Leo Bersani)

Side Effects

On Kindness (with Barbara Taylor)

The Concise Dictionary of Dress (with Judith Clark)

On Balance

Missing Out

One Way and Another

Unforbidden Pleasures

Becoming Freud

The Vulgar (with Judith Clark)

In Writing

Attention Seeking

The Cure for Psychoanalysis

EDITOR OF

Charles Lamb: Selected Prose

The Electrified Tightrope: Selected Psychoanalytic

Papers of Michael Eigen

Richard Howard: Selected Poems (with Hugh Haughton)

John Clare in Context (with Hugh Haughton)

The Book of Interruptions (with David Hillman)

General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations

PENGUIN BOOKS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
New Zealand | India | South Africa

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published by Penguin Books in 2021

Copyright Adam Phillips, 2021

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Penguin Random House would like to express thanks for use of excerpts from The World Turned Upside Down by Christopher Hill, copyright Christopher Hill, 1972, 1975, published by Temple Smith, 1972, Pelican Books, 1975, Peregrine Books, 1984, Penguin Books. 1991, 1991, 2019, reproduced by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd; Overland to the Islands by Denise Levertov from New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2003); and Lullaby by Mary Ruefle from Indeed I was Pleased with the World, copyright Mary Ruefle, 2007, reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Carnegie Mellon University Press

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book

ISBN: 978-0-241-97922-8

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

For Seth Phillips

By understanding and cooperating with Gods purposes men believed they could escape from the blind forces which seemed to rule their world, from time itself; they could become free.

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down

Lets go much as that dog goes,
intently haphazard.

Denise Levertov, Overland to the Islands

People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become.

James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

My inability to express myself
is astounding.

Mary Ruefle, Lullaby

We are changing all the time growing older and older, whether we want to or not while often wanting to choose, or even design, the ways in which we change. Now that seasonal change has been displaced by technological change and climate change, and that there seems to be no alternative for the foreseeable future to a capitalist world order, our sense of the changes that are preferable, or even possible, is itself changing. Change may be sought through politics or through therapy, through religion or fitness, through productivity and growth, through relationships or celibacy, or through art and science. But that change is an object of desire goes without saying now; though it is, of course, preferred change that is wanted.

Indeed, one of the things that defines modern societies is the sheer range of invitations to develop ourselves; with the commodification of personal growth, there are many options on offer to help people become better at being their best selves (or what they take to be their best selves). If nothing is more revealing of a time, or a culture, or an individual, than their fantasies of change how they picture and describe the changes that they desire in relation to the changes they take to be beyond their control we should always be paying attention to how we think about change. And how what we think about change changes over time. Indeed, one of the more puzzling things we have to acknowledge is that how we think about change is changing all the time.

When we think about change now, we have available to us theories of evolution and of natural development (genetics and the life cycle), theories of trauma, histories, political ideologies, religious beliefs, philosophical enquiry, the arts and sciences; and the mixing and matching of all of these in psychoanalysis, and the other so-called psychological therapies. So the story I want to tell in this book and in its sequel, On Getting Better is about the links that can be made between the traditional, and initially religious, drama of conversion experiences as a kind of paradigm of profound change for the better and the usually less dramatic changes envisaged by contemporary psychological therapies, and in particular by psychoanalysis. And about how we got from the language of conversion to a suspicion in the modern era of so-called conversion therapies, and, indeed, to larger, contemporary fears about just how intractable or manipulable so-called human nature is.

Conversion was once the profoundest instance of personal and cultural change; and yet it has become, for some people, the most pernicious and disturbing description of the kinds of change we are capable of. Whether it is conversion to religious fundamentalism, communism, profiteering or gender identity, many people now assume that converting people is the worst thing we do (bullying and humiliation are forced conversions). And yet, as we shall see, the idea of conversion is essential to contemporary accounts of personal transformation, just as it was to the beginnings of psychoanalysis, and of William Jamess pragmatism (Jamess pragmatism in which truth is judged by its practical consequences, and not by its sources and its relation to conversion experience is treated in the final chapter of On Getting Better). Both psychoanalysis and American Pragmatism are driven by a desire to help the individual keep things moving. For both Freud and James, the enemy of pleasure and growth was stuckness, addiction, fixity, stasis. They teach us about the temptations of stultification, of the allure of inertia, of the wish to attack our own development; and they suggest, as we shall see, that conversion experiences all too easily become the desire for a change that will finally put a stop to the need for change; change in the direction of what is, to all intents and purposes, a satisfying and reassuring paralysis (converts to religious fundamentalism are not supposed to convert again to something else). They suggest, in significantly different ways, that we are so ambivalent about changing because there is nothing else we can do but change (as though, paradoxically, the fact that we change is the biggest threat to our freedom). And so psychoanalysis and pragmatism try to make wanting to change both appealing and inspiring, as opposed to it being some ineluctable, evolutionary, biological drive, or fate. They promote American Pragmatism far more than psychoanalysis the strangely radical, modern political idea that how we want to change can have something to do with how we do change. Change as choice rather than as fate. Change as something we make. And so we need to acknowledge, when we talk about change, the way in which psychoanalysis and all the other so-called psychological therapies without American Pragmatism can be merely another coercive, pre-emptive moralism. There are, in other words, two pragmatic questions to be asked of any psychoanalytic or psychological theory, questions the convert always believes she has answered How would my life be better if I believed it? And Would believing it help me get the life I want? And these questions, of course, lead to further conversations about what my criteria are for a good life, and where I got them from; all underwritten by the idea of the unconscious, of what our knowing and our wanting are really up against. We are always involved, or should be, in the giving of and asking for good reasons to change.