#adamphillips — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #adamphillips, aggregated by home.social.
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The disavowal of the Covid-19 pandemic
I was struck by how the coda to On Wanting to Change by Adam Phillips, published in 2021, captured an issue which I have repeatedly returned to over the last few years. From pg 139 written, one assumes, the height of the pandemic:
‘Plagues’, Hugh Trevor-Roper remarks in passing in The Rise of Christian Europe, ‘can be of decisive importance in history.’ Whether or not the COVID virus is a plague, or like one, we are in the gradual process of discovering both what kind of decisive change it has brought to our lives, and what kind of decisions we want to make about our lives in the light of it. It is very difficult to know what kind of Europe – indeed, what kind of world – we will be left with in the aftermath of this devastation. But we can be sure that, despite people’s wish and capacity to return to so-called normal life, the shock waves, the after-effects of this virus, will be felt for generations to come. Those of us who lived through it will become, among other things, the ones who lived through it.
There has been the managing of day-to-day survival, and then there is, and has been, the wholly unpredictable and deferred effect of the trauma.
To say I shared this view would be an understatement. To what extent did we overestimate the “shock waves, the after-effects” and to what extent are they being disavowed? I think it’s a combination of the two. There was a snap back effect which I found sufficiently sociologically implausible that it led me to examine the relative weight I accorded to social order rather than social change. There’s just a deep psychosocial commitment to continuing as we have done before. But the comforts of inertia are much more pronounced when facing what is beyond that inertia would be slightly terrifying. Indeed he actually says that “we must resist the temptation to get back to normal, now we can see more clearly what normality has involved us in” (pg 140-141). In foregoing that temptation, the disavowal and the overestimate meet together because the shockwaves are evaded precisely by a determined insistence on returning to ‘normal’.
#adamPhillips #Covid19 #inertia #pandemic #postpandemicCivics -
The disavowal of the Covid-19 pandemic
I was struck by how the coda to On Wanting to Change by Adam Phillips, published in 2021, captured an issue which I have repeatedly returned to over the last few years. From pg 139 written, one assumes, the height of the pandemic:
‘Plagues’, Hugh Trevor-Roper remarks in passing in The Rise of Christian Europe, ‘can be of decisive importance in history.’ Whether or not the COVID virus is a plague, or like one, we are in the gradual process of discovering both what kind of decisive change it has brought to our lives, and what kind of decisions we want to make about our lives in the light of it. It is very difficult to know what kind of Europe – indeed, what kind of world – we will be left with in the aftermath of this devastation. But we can be sure that, despite people’s wish and capacity to return to so-called normal life, the shock waves, the after-effects of this virus, will be felt for generations to come. Those of us who lived through it will become, among other things, the ones who lived through it.
There has been the managing of day-to-day survival, and then there is, and has been, the wholly unpredictable and deferred effect of the trauma.
To say I shared this view would be an understatement. To what extent did we overestimate the “shock waves, the after-effects” and to what extent are they being disavowed? I think it’s a combination of the two. There was a snap back effect which I found sufficiently sociologically implausible that it led me to examine the relative weight I accorded to social order rather than social change. There’s just a deep psychosocial commitment to continuing as we have done before. But the comforts of inertia are much more pronounced when facing what is beyond that inertia would be slightly terrifying. Indeed he actually says that “we must resist the temptation to get back to normal, now we can see more clearly what normality has involved us in” (pg 140-141). In foregoing that temptation, the disavowal and the overestimate meet together because the shockwaves are evaded precisely by a determined insistence on returning to ‘normal’.
#adamPhillips #Covid19 #inertia #pandemic #postpandemicCivics -
Our pasts are a poem that we have to learn to recite
It is a strange situation because the so-called patient is learning to recite a poem that she has already written (or at least that nobody else has), and already knows; the past, Auden intimates, is a poem we have written but never got quite right; or, the past is a poem we tend to forget, one we learn to recite but where we falter, where we can’t remember or get it wrong, or disclose our history to ourselves; or at least the bit of our history that has made the future so difficult … Freud reveals, in Auden’s view, that the past is a poem that we keep failing to remember; and that we need those poetry lessons called psychoanalysis to learn to recite the poem, and to see where we falter. It is an extraordinary and wonderful idea that our personal pasts are a poem that we have to learn to recite.
Adam Phillips, In Writing, pg 21-22He wasn't clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
like a poetry lesson till sooner
or later it faltered at the line where
long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
how rich life had been and how silly,
and was life-forgiven and more humble,
able to approach the Future as a friend
without a wardrobe of excuses, without
a set mask of rectitude or an
embarrassing over-familiar gesture.
In Memory of Sigmund Freud
- W. H. Auden 1907 – 1973https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ZxRs45tTg&list=RDA7ZxRs45tTg&start_radio=1
#adamPhillips #Auden #Freud #history #memory #past #psychoanalysis -
Our pasts are a poem that we have to learn to recite
It is a strange situation because the so-called patient is learning to recite a poem that she has already written (or at least that nobody else has), and already knows; the past, Auden intimates, is a poem we have written but never got quite right; or, the past is a poem we tend to forget, one we learn to recite but where we falter, where we can’t remember or get it wrong, or disclose our history to ourselves; or at least the bit of our history that has made the future so difficult … Freud reveals, in Auden’s view, that the past is a poem that we keep failing to remember; and that we need those poetry lessons called psychoanalysis to learn to recite the poem, and to see where we falter. It is an extraordinary and wonderful idea that our personal pasts are a poem that we have to learn to recite.
Adam Phillips, In Writing, pg 21-22He wasn't clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
like a poetry lesson till sooner
or later it faltered at the line where
long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
how rich life had been and how silly,
and was life-forgiven and more humble,
able to approach the Future as a friend
without a wardrobe of excuses, without
a set mask of rectitude or an
embarrassing over-familiar gesture.
In Memory of Sigmund Freud
- W. H. Auden 1907 – 1973https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ZxRs45tTg&list=RDA7ZxRs45tTg&start_radio=1
#adamPhillips #Auden #Freud #history #memory #past #psychoanalysis -
The murdering of possibility to regulate our suffering
From The Life You Want by Adam Phillips pg 117:
If we wanted a definition of so-called pathology – or our difficulties in living – it may be, in Cioran’s phrase, the murdering of possibility. The murdering of possibility to regulate our suffering, to keep ourselves sufficiently safe. So where Freud’s and Ferenczi’s and Cioran’s question is: how, if at all, can I make my life seem not merely bearable but worth living; how can I justify, or make something I value out of the suffering my life involves?
From pg 118-119:
These questions, in all their apparent rhetorical gravity, may be there … to murder possibility; may indeed be our way of murdering possibility under the cover of pursuing profound questions.
What might we make of ourselves is a call to action, and it confronts us with, or challenges us to ask, what we want rather than what we supposedly are. It makes what we want, and what we want to be … the heart of the matter.
From pg 119:
For the pragmatists, unlike the psychoanalyst, the risk is that we avoid confronting what we want to be, what we might be, what we could be, by telling ourselves what we really are; as though we have delegated what we want to what we have been persuaded we are, or to what we are keen to take ourselves to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ZxRs45tTg&list=RDu9_bnyad6IE&index=2
#adamPhillips #ageing #desire #personality #possibility #temporality -
Against Self-Criticism: Adam Phillips on How Our Internal Critics Enslave Us, the Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations
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Against Self-Criticism: Adam Phillips on How Our Internal Critics Enslave Us, the Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations
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Against Self-Criticism: Adam Phillips on How Our Internal Critics Enslave Us, the Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations
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Against Self-Criticism: Adam Phillips on How Our Internal Critics Enslave Us, the Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations
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When I need to be comforted, I take 6 minutes of my life to listen to a short clip in which Slavoj Žižek explains what he understand to be the aim of psychoanalysis.
"The goal of psychoanalysis is precisely to bring you to the point where you can finally forget that piece of bullshit that is yourself... and finally work for a cause."
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When I need to be comforted, I take 6 minutes of my life to listen to a short clip in which Slavoj Žižek explains what he understand to be the aim of psychoanalysis.
"The goal of psychoanalysis is precisely to bring you to the point where you can finally forget that piece of bullshit that is yourself... and finally work for a cause."
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This is some incredible writing from psychotherapist Adam Phillips. It’s an edited extract from his forthcoming book On Giving Up and is based on the subtle difference between ‘giving up’ something and… just giving up.
It’s a really important read, at least for me, and particularly poignant at the start of the year. The fact that he talks […]https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2024/01/03/giving-up-is-an-attempt-to-make-a-different-future/