Reading and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

In this chapter, the psychoanalyst and author, Adam Phillips, talks with Philip Davis, across the breadth of his own reading and writing, about the ‘overlapping and incommensurate’ relation of life to literature and literature to psychoanalysis. Starting from the position that ‘bafflement is integral to a post-religious life or world: we don’t know what we are doing and nobody can tell us’, Phillips talks of literature’s offering the reader the chance to think the strangeness of his or her own thoughts, without becoming, as psychoanalysis is prone to do, an ‘intelligibility project’, privileging understanding at the expense of ‘live surprise’. He also considers how literature can helping create possible futures by offering ‘re-describings of life’ enabling the reader to do or imagine something else. ‘Anything you cannot re-describe is akin to a trauma, and therefore art is to free one’s capacity for re-description’.