reading

By the same author

Winnicott

On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored

On Flirtation

Terror and Experts

Monogamy

The Beast in the Nursery

Darwin’s Worms

Promises, Promises

Houdini’s 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)

EDITOR OF

Charles Lamb: Selected Prose

Walter Pater: The Renaissance

Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry

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 new Penguin Modern

Classics Freud translations

Preface

Psychoanalysis for Poets

Tribute to H. D.

Barthes by Himself

Against Biography

Johnson’s Freud

Byron on the Run

Emerson and the Impossibilities of Style

Clough’s Amours

T. S. Eliot and the Soul of Man under Psychoanalysis

Isaac Rosenberg’s English

Zeno Falls Short

Celebrating Sebald

Winnicott’s Lear

Hamlet for Revenge

The Paris Review Interview

Appendix: On Translating Freud

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

Preface

It is often amazing to people who like writing that most people are not at all interested in it. A lot of people, of course, find it useful, but it doesn’t give them the pleasure people who ‘love reading’ can feel; nor the sense that people who study or teach literature can have that reading and writing are somehow essential to the lives they want to live. Whatever the appeal of writing is – and it must be considerable given its staying power – it is not clear how it is best served; other, that is, than by writing itself. Nor indeed what is being served in the valuing of it.

Like any minority interest that, because it is a minority interest, is felt to be perpetually under threat, this can prompt defences (and idealizations) of the so-called humanities that often betray, in their vehemence and the nature of their claims, a lack of confidence in writing; as though without considerable justification it might disappear; as though it can’t hold its own against its competitors; as though we might be in danger of losing interest in language, or in the right sort of language. So when people defend ‘literature’ now it is difficult for them not to sound like people defending a religion, or a political ideology, or a local hospital. Instead of believing that literature, rather like psychoanalysis, is just for the people who like it – that it makes them feel alive in ways they prefer; that it sustains what they care about; that it creates interest and engagement and curiosity; and creates jobs they want to do, and institutions, like universities, and libraries, and publishing houses, which they value – it can be made to sound like a life-support system, or preparation for a moral beauty contest. Exaggerated claims prompt the suspicions they are intended to dispel. The best defence of literature is writing that appeals to people, but in ways they find difficult to articulate. It’s worth wondering what we fear might happen to literature if we no longer defended it.

Because writing can only ever be as good as its readers make it, it is always tempting to blame the audience (people don’t read enough, or properly; they don’t read the right things, and so on). But it is misleading to be only cross with the people who don’t share your pleasures (or your values). People read and write to find out if there is a group of like-minded people; and, if there isn’t, to try to make one. Writing needn’t be a world-domination project – successful writers aren’t like rock stars or celebrities – but just the attempt to find enough people who are interested in what matters most to you. So the whole notion of the successful writer is always contentious, and reading can be one of the things we do in which we don’t have to worry about success. That a writer engages our attention, and how or why he or she does, are the only things that matter. And these things matter because of the thoughts and feelings and conversations and lives to which they can lead.

Both literature and psychoanalysis can help us work out what are the conversations we crave that may get us the lives we want. It is only worth having relationships that bring out the best in us, and both literature and psychoanalysis can give us a clue about what these relationships might be, and about what the best in us is. But commitment to psychoanalysis narrows the mind – over-organizes our attention – in ways that an interest in literature can avoid. The extraordinary range of tones and rhythms and voices and sentences that is literature exposes the limits, and the limitations, of psychoanalysis, and its descriptions of what a person is, and can be. So I have always admired writers – like, say, W. H. Auden, or Randall Jarrell, or William Empson, or Louise Glück, or Richard Rorty, or Marion Milner, or Stanley Cavell, or Wendy Brown– who could be interested in psychoanalysis without having to be committed to it. Writers who could, however inexplicitly, use psychoanalysis, among many other things, to make something of their own. Psychoanalysis is at its best when it is unpredictably useful; when it inspires something other than total devotion, and so stops just repeating itself. The problem with (and for) psychoanalysts has always been that they have to believe in psychoanalysis.

Like all essentialist theories – all theories that, because they know where they start from, set strict limits to where they can go – psychoanalysis makes a cult out of what could be just good company. It is very difficult to go on being interesting and interested – to go on seeing and listening differently – if you are trapped in a vocabulary. It is very difficult to avoid the seductions and grandiosities of generalization if you always already know what you are looking (or reading) for. This is why psychoanalysis applied to literature can be so stupefying. It all too easily assumes, as the critic Mikko Tuhkanen writes, that ‘works of art are like queer adults, who, according to psychoanalysis, haven’t quite got their stories straight’. Psychoanalysis is just one way of wondering what we are doing when we are trying to get our stories straight.

The essays in this book are written in the belief that psychoanalysis has something to offer our reading and writing (and the living of our lives), without being quite sure what that is; while being quite sure that literature has far more to offer, which is not more of the same. Psychoanalysis, of course, has its own so-called literature, just as literature could be described as having an interest in psychology (though reading literature, in all its diversity, can make you wonder what psychology could possibly be). But neither need be a commentary on the other; we can just allow for the fact that they have overlapping preoccupations. That they both contribute, as much else does, to our repertoire of descriptions.

Through psychoanalysis we can learn how to speak more freely without needing people to agree with us; indeed, we can speak freely only when we don’t need people to agree with us (it was left to Freud’s inspired colleague Ferenczi to wonder why it is that we can’t say whatever we want to anyone, and not just to a psychoanalyst). And in reading literature, as opposed to propaganda, something other than agreement is being sought. If people don’t have to either agree or disagree with each other, what else could they be doing together? In both psychoanalysis and what we have been taught to call literature we can experiment with the need to believe and be believed. And, if we want freer speech, to experiment with what we want it for.

By the same author

Adam Phillips

IN WRITING

HAMISH HAMILTON

Contents

Preface