In Our Time - Psychoanalysis and Literature

Episode Date: November 9, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss role of Freudian analysis in understanding the great works of literature. Freud said, “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied”. Psychoanalysis has always been more than a ‘talking cure’ and it has strong ties to literature, but one hundred years after the publication of the first great work of psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams, critics are putting the scientific basis of Freud’s work in grave doubt and he is in danger of being pitched in with poets. The great American critic Harold Bloom has said “Freud, the writer will survive the death of psychoanalysis”, and the analyst and writer Adam Phillips seems to go further in his new book Promises Promises where he writes, “I think of Freud as a romantic writer, and I read psychoanalysis as poetry, so I don’t have to worry whether it is true or even useful”.So what is the relationship of psychoanalysis to literature, and if it is to be reclassified as literature itself can it still be practised as a talking cure?With Adam Phillips, author of Promises Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature; Malcolm Bowie, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, Oxford University; Lisa Appignanesi novelist and co-author of Freud’s Women.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Freud said, The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method

by which the unconscious can be studied. Psychonalysis has always been more than a talking cure, and it has strong ties to literature. But 100 years after the publication of the first great work of psychoanalysis, the interpretation of dreams, critics are putting the scientific basis of Freud's work in grave doubt, and he's in danger of being pitched in with the poets. The influential American critic, Harold Bloom, has said, Freud, the writer will survive the death of psychoanalysis.

And the analyst and writer Adam Phillips seems to go further in his new book, Promises, Promises, where he writes, I think of Freud as a romantic writer, and I read psychoanalysis as poetry, so I don't have to worry whether it's true or even useful. So what is the relationship of psychoanalysis to literature, and if it's to be reclassified as literature, how can it be practiced still as a talking cure? Adam Phillips is with us now,

as is Malcolm Bowie, Marshall Fock Professor of French Literature at Oxford University, and we're also joined by the novelist and co-author of Freud's women, Lisa Apinienese. Adam Phillips, a lot or some of Freud's most famous terminology comes from literature. One thinks of the Oedipus Complex and Sophocles Edipus Rex.

Do you think that Sophocles, himself was aware of the Oedipus complex? I don't think he was aware of the Oedipus complex in the way we think of post-Fraudian people being aware of the Oedipus complex. That is to say, I don't think he thought Oedipus had an Oedipus complex. I think this was a drama,

and that in a way we have to imagine that when we're seeing this drama, the people on stage are going through it for the first time. I think what we, or the post-Froidian people, think of as the Oedipus complex, is a well-rehearsed predicament. It's almost like a cliché.

It's like a tag we have. as a constitutive myth of the origin of our lives and the base of our history. So I think it is misleading to think of Sophocles as being Freudian. Well, can we get to the root of what you think he thought he was saying? You have the son kills the father, sleeps with the mother, and so on. So what does he think he's saying? Is he saying, this is a drama? This will stir, my viewers, this will call up the incantations that I believe are sacred.

you don't think he's speaking to a condition deeply basic in human life that Freud later described in other terms? Well, he may be, but I think there's a risk of appropriating the past to make it too contemporary in a way, that in order to understand, it's as though there's two things we could do. On the one hand, we could psychoanalyze early works of literature. And the risk is then the past is not a foreign country. It becomes simply seamless with the present.

On the other hand, we would need to reconstruct the culture that this play came out of. And then we'd be imaginatively trying to work out exactly how this was being received and where it was coming from. Now, for people like us, it's as though we're assuming that everybody in some sense is recognizing they've got an Oedipus Complex. And therefore, the drama is sort of integral to their lives. I imagine that differently, that is to say, the original audiences for this particular play, were experiencing something, as it were, cosmological. We're experiencing something about their place in the universe. They were not exactly thinking about mothers and fathers.

They were thinking about mothers and fathers in the context of a whole cosmology. Let's turn Mark and Bauer to another pillar of literature. Shakespeare, do you think in his use of the soliloquy, he's exposing the unconsciousness of the individual? Do we see the unconscious in any Freudian sense being used then? And do you think Shakespeare himself, the same question as I asked?

Santa Phillips. I think Shakespeare himself was aware of the unconscious in that way. Shakespeare, certainly in Hamlet's a letter quiz and in numerous places elsewhere, is riddling and quibbling and playing on ambiguities, multiple meanings. And to that extent, begins to sound like a fairly orthodox practitioner of a certain sort of psychoanalysis. One of the golden rules of psychoanalysis, as we know, is, say, the first thing that comes into your head, and let's see where that takes us. and the dialogue between clinician and patient is constructed often in terms of what look like adventitious discoveries, merely chance things that occur at the turning of a sentence between this syllable and the next. And Freud is certainly of the view that this reveals such slips, such incongruities within language reveal something of the unconscious.

And Shakespeare certainly seems to have been there before him, as do numerous other poets who, who riddle and quibble and play with words. But do you think when Shakespeare was writing those soliloquies, do you think that he had an idea that he was mining a part of his intelligence, which was not available in other ways? I'm just over-elaborating saying, do you think that he thought that there was an unconscious there, that he was revealing through soliloquy?

I don't know that he needed the concept of the unconscious. Writing like that, as multidimensionally as that, playing on so many different linguistic keyboards at once, in a sense the unconscious comes free as part of that investment in language and that sense of imaginative adventure as one explores the powers of language. So the concept of the unconscious seems a latter-day affair, something that Western culture needs when it gets into a certain condition of crisis or a certain condition of anxious self-reflection. But at a time of tremendous linguistic and dramatic confidence, and one might point also to the period of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Dundas, shall we say. The concept of the unconscious, although it's a modern fad for us, seems strangely irrelevant to the business of putting literary works together.

Lisa Pinoza, what's your take on that? Well, I think Shakespeare was certainly aware that there were many things he wasn't aware of, and possibly not even aware of them as he was writing them. A lot of the work is about, you know, there are more things in man and the universe and so on than we are aware of. So in that sense, one could say, yes, you know, Shakespeare was aware that there were things around and working through him that he wasn't always in complete control of. Certainly his characters are like that, and I don't think we have to do a lot of work,

and I don't think we have to use the word unconscious, to see unawareness in them, moments of darkness, moments that are close to them, dreams. So yes, why not? Although, you know, I think it's very, very hard for us as late 20th and early 21st century beings to think ourselves out of the Freudian carapace, really, or, you know, take off Freudian spectacles

because they're so permeated, so many of our ways of thinking, so many of our inflections about the way in which we grow and develop and become who we are, that even if we're not aware of it, I think we end up in some ways, perhaps, being 20th century beings

and therefore Freudian. But is there a sense in which, following what from Malcolm said, if Shakespeare and Sophocles delivered everything that they could deliver and delivered what we can now call the unconscious, Is the unconscious a late invention for particular purposes of a particular time? And everything that we talk about coming from the unconscious was there,

but they didn't call it by that name, and they didn't need that, and it throws into question whether we need it. Well, we certainly need some way of speaking about that which we do not know. And I think we're always aware of that which we do not know, whether we think it's something that we might eventually learn, or it's something that we've forgotten that we might remember. The word unconscious was used before Freud. What Freud tried to do, I guess, in a way,

was to systematize the way in which it plays a part in our lives. But I should count out to Adam, the analyst here, to tell us whether indeed that was what he was doing. Certainly, when I read Freud, I didn't think the unconscious was a new concept because I'd read a great deal of literature before I had read Freud. And it was clear that characters weren't always in full control or in full awareness of their capacities.

In a way, the question is what the Freudian concept of the unconscious adds to the conversation. I don't think Freud was showing us that we're irrational. I think he was showing us how irrational our rationality is. And I think that in a way, the concept of the unconscious was, as it were, invented or described, to give a sort of formal or formulatable account of the fact that we, as it were, suffer from, motivated irrationality. that when we're at our most plausible, at our most logical, at our most coherent, something else is coming through to disrupt this. So it's as though we're self-disrupting creatures.

And it's as though Freud gives an elaborate description of both what is being disrupted and the nature of the disruption, the repercussions of the disruption. The fact of Freud, though, and the fact of his followers has, as has been said, influence the way we look at literature before, Let's take one example that's already coming to the conversation. Ernest Jones, Freud's biographer, wrote a very influential study of Hamlet as O'EDP as Edipus and influenced a various people. We totally influenced Olivia's version of Hamlet, Hamlet, being jealous of Claudius and wants to take his place in many ways.

Do you see that, Markenbao, as a useful or a reductive view of Hamlet? I think it's profoundly useful in that it suggests one way in which meaning operates inside the texture of that extraordinary play, one source of energy, one pattern of zigzagging cross-hatched meanings, spreading across the surface of the thing as we read it or as we watch it. But it doesn't do the whole job. There are all manner of other things going on in Hamlet. I mean, there's the revenger's tragedy, I suppose. There's a revenges tragedy. It's a, it's to do with politics. It's to do with a variety of philosophical questions. It's to do with a particular renaissance sense of opportunity and of human limitation. And to have those things,

suddenly collapsed back into a mere retelling of the family romance, the Edipal story, is unfortunate. On the other hand, if one takes the Edipal story as some sort of main spring, some sort of central dynamic pulse in the play, one can see all manner of other things suddenly beginning to be catalyzed lit up by that central power source. So I would want the, as it were, the Freudian content of Hamlet to be part of the dialogue, the conversation that's taking place in the play between a huge variety of themes. The play is inexhaustible because of all that other stuff that's going on in it. Nisa. Well, I know it's rather infashionable, but I still like talking about characters of characters existed outside the text in which they were given birth in. And in that sense, I rather enjoy the Freudian and the Ernest Jonesian take on Hamlet.

because it does give us a drama of jealousy and passion. And when you leave the jealousy and the passion out of the play now, it's quite interesting that it seems to go slightly flat. It's as if we want it there. We've got Juestrade perhaps because of that extraordinary performance on film by our favourite actor, who say I've momentarily forgotten. This is a terrible slip by Olivier.

I mean, when hesitates it, Freudian. Well, you know, Olivier did go and see her in his Jones to talk to him about this tradition. And it's not simply that it was about Hamlet being jealous of Claudius. It's rather more complicated than that. It's that Claudius enacted the repressed wishes that Hamlet had of overtaking his father's place. It's interesting balance in it because in the tradition at the time, it's seen as a revengeous tragedy.

And do you get, if Hamlet is just out for revenge and bought by revenge for many, many things, one thing is the idea of God and eternal life and murder and so and so forth, If that is the main heft, don't the other things come through anyway? I'm trying to see what is to be gained by emphasising, favouring that interpretation. Well, as I say, I don't think it's the only thing that's going on in the play, as Malcolm said, but I think the fact that this interpretation gives it a certain passion. It also makes sense of Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia, which otherwise is really rather difficult. It's pure sort of, you know, why not be misogynist, why not be nasty to Ophelia?

But as soon as you put sex into the play in one way or another, those things become resonant. But let's imagine somebody reading Jones' book without having seen or read Hamlet. I think there would be no reason to read Hamlet or to see it having read Jones' book. Oh, that's not true. Because, hold on a second,

because it's as though, in one sense, Jones makes you wonder, in a sense, whether Shakespeare needs to write this play. Because in one version of this, Freud has told us what this play is about. Once we know what it's about, what exactly is the function of the poetry? Is it merely illustrative of the main theme? What the poetry is doing is extending the main theme in a variety of different directions, creating improbable resonances for it all over the human landscape.

And the so-called reductionist move back to the basic Freudian paradigm may just be a way of reminding us of one of those power sources to do. It's an anthropological power source, if you like, to do with the incest motif. the Oedipus play, other plays from antiquity, Hamlet, Tom Jones, numerous other things, manipulate the edipus, the incest motif in a variety of ways. And because this is to do with prohibition and transgression or the threat, the imminence of possible transgression and so forth, gives an extraordinary quality of tension and precariousness

to the philosophical and poetic and literary questions that are also in play. But I think Adam Philip's question is absolutely central and hasn't been quite addressed. What is the point? If you read Jones and say, this is what Hamlet's about, I think, well, I know what Hamlet's about. It's about this, supposedly. And I think it's a very good, it's a very,

it's a very sharp way into the whole discussion. But, you know, you could equally say, reading any critic who isn't as good as the original that he or she is talking about. No, he doesn't talk about not as good. It's talking about the explanation element. But we don't, I don't think we read literature for explanation. or messages or abouts.

I mean, you know, to say that Hamlet is about... Jones is explaining. I know. Well, I mean, I don't think that the Oedipus book by Ernest Jones is a particularly interesting book. I think what it did do was to pinpoint something in Shakespeare

that actors and directors have wanted to use. As a book, it in itself has a couple of interesting things to say, but it's certainly not as interesting as Hamlet. That's why we don't replace one with the other. That's why still, you know, we don't... I think there are more... copies of Hamlet sold and red than there are of Renus Jones.

It's as easy as that. And it's true of most kinds of criticism. It's not just true of Freudian criticism, which can in that way be reductionists. Let's take another work. Before we move on to literature after Freud, let's take Jane Eyne, which I remember reading very, let's say, whenever it was, 12 or 13, knowing nothing whatsoever about Freud and being very moved, frightened, all the things that I still am. Now, if I'd had been, if I'd read it at 14 and a smart school teacher, said, well, what this is about the Earth, and then, Bertha in the Arctic is X, Y, and said,

I'd have read it with those fraudulent spectacles. I'm not sure I'd have enjoyed it anything like as much, and I think I'd got a lot less out of it. Now, that's just a proposition. I think the problem is living in a culture that's hypnotised by explanation, and that the risk is that these things become formulated, and in a way, this is the risk of psychoanalysis, that formulations are made as though they replace the original text. Now, in terms of what everybody else is saying, of course,

as an ingredient, this seem to be very, very interesting things. But the risk is we believe that plays are about something and that there are people around who can tell us what they're about. Whereas in fact, the play is in the words. It's in the emotional impact of the words. It's in whatever comes through. And I think that the danger of a book like Jones is is that it implies that literature has a function

that is quite clear-cut and self-evident. As long as you've got the key or you can use the method, you can find out what things are about. And aboutness is what everything is about. And that's very reductive. But just to finish Janeer, Lisa, do you think that young, people of the age where they generally encounter Janehair,

told that it represents X-I and said, told that both are in the attic in psychological terms or in colonial terms, whatever, do you think that is going to be a bar? Do you think there is something to be said against over-explanation before you read the work? I think there is something to be said against uni explanation, so that, you know, Jane Eyre is about colonialism,

or Jane Eyre is about Rochester's castration. I mean, all those are, they're not very useful statements about Janeair. But I can only talk about my daughter when she read Janeair. She hated Rochester. Now, I didn't, growing up when I did, when I read Jane Eyre, I thought Rochester was the great romantic hero. I thought he was absolutely wonderful. My daughter, who is 14 and who, you know, certainly not a feminist,

it's not a word that she would ever use, thinks Rochester is completely useless, wants to know more about the mad woman in the attic. Now, there is something about, if you like, the feminist or post-Froid in explanation of that or the writings about it, which does say that, look, you know, that mad woman in the attic

is the part of Jane that doesn't exist in Jane. We've all done this kind of literary criticism before. It's not new to Freud or to feminism, but, you know, there is that force in the attic, which is, if you like, Jane's sexuality. It's been split off from her. My daughter is interested in it. I'd like to talk about literature after Freud

and starting with Proust, whose work is massively concerned with memory. Adam, do you think Freud was an influence on Proust and, in a sense, if not, how not? Well, there's an interesting, I think, relationship between them because they didn't, as far as we know, read each other. But clearly there were ideas in the air. And the way I see it is that it's very much to do with the relationship between voluntary and involuntary memory.

Because I think there's a kind of symmetry. Proust is saying that quite great, or accidentally, you can have an experience like the Madeleine, in which you will do something unwittingly and it will open up the past. Suddenly the past will be prolific in front of you. Freud creates a treatment in which it's as though you might be able to arrange an epiphany. He creates a kind of treatment in which if you speak long enough or speak in a certain way with a certain kind of person, it's as though you will have access to these memories. And this can be actually arranged, if not engineered. So it seems to me they're both preoccupied

by the ways in which we might get access to ourselves, and they both believe that the essential part of ourselves is our histories. But Proust seems to believe something like we spend a lot of our lives treading water, and contingently we come across things, we hear things, we smell things, and they awaken the past in us. Freud seems to be saying, if you speak long enough to an analyst, a similar thing will happen,

but it can actually be arranged. Mark and by. I don't think that, yeah, I think that's right, but it doesn't take account of the fact that Proust produced a 3,000-page book, becoming longer by the day as the editors dredge up new material to add to footnotes and so forth, and Freud produced, as you were saying, a working method, a clinical format in which various fortunate events, possibly epithanic events, might occur. Now, how do we account for this great 3,000-page proliferation of Proustian textual material?

Where is that vis-a-vis psychoanalysis? The involuntary memory moment is instantaneous. It happens in a second. One has a wonderful, instantaneous sense of recall of one's own past. Where does that leave one as a creative writer or as the narrator of a long and elaborate autobiographical fiction? It leaves one with all the work still to be done, it seems to me. And the miracle, the miraculous coincidence between Freud and Proust is that something in Proust's writing seems to resemble the method of free association that Freud himself pioneered as a clinical.

device. It is extraordinary, this coincidence in time. It just make one believe in historical moments and, you know, sight geist and forces in the air that allow Proust and for it not to read each other and yet to co-exist and explore so much similar material. I think one of the areas that they do explore, which I find particularly interesting laterally, is this whole notion of repetition.

I mean, the entire middle section of Valécherichitae of Berdu is, of course, about this extraordinary repetitious vigilance of jealousy and of wanting to know this passion to know the other and the kind of passion to know is something that informs Freud's writing as well and I find that almost that kind of

intensive curiosity which is in itself visceral extraordinary I don't think you find it in very many other writers outside that historical moment and for me it's one of the things that makes fiction and indeed Freud's writing move

coming trying to find one or two examples where Freud may have had a direct effect on artists, writers and other artists. Adam Philip, if Virginia Woolf's The Hogarth Press published Freud over here, and obviously published her as well, do you think he had a direct effect on her writing, on Virginia Woolf's writing? Well, there are very interesting accounts of these translations piling up in their house, Freud. And there are, of course, a few references that Wolf makes to Freud. And clearly she was a reader to some extent of Freud, and James Strait.

She was the translator. it was very much in her world. But I think it would be misleading to think that she was in any sense writing something akin to a Freudian novel. Although you can see the ways in which she's very interested in discontinuities and consciousness. She's very interested in the way in which,

if you let yourself think or speak or write, relatively unscensored, or you simply pay attention to the ways in which you're tempted to interrupt yourself, that you will find yourself writing and saying all sorts of things. So in reading, say, to the lighthouse, you begin to feel what it's like to be in a mind. And this is a very curious thing because, of course, you're not in a mind, you're in a text.

It's been transcribed. It's as though somebody really has done something like representing thinking on paper. And when you've represented on paper, it looks weirdly continuous and discontinuous at the same time. It's both entirely coherent and entirely disparate. Can we look at the surrealist with you, Lisa, opinion, is? the claim is that Freud allowed them to unlock the unconscious. Now, looking at the paintings, for instance, often seem to me that how do we know,

were they just not making it up? I mean, Dali, for instance, seems to me to be an old fraud from a young age. And how can we believe? What do they bring to the table that allows us to believe that they're dealing with their unconscious? Are they not sort of catching significance by saying Freud did this for us? Well, they say it and one has to take it at face very.

I mean, they did carry out various experiments in automatic writing. You could say that Yeats did the same, but they did attempt to a free associate on the page. They also interpreted Freud in their own particular ways, and Malcolm probably knows more about this. But, I mean, for example, Andre Prouet-on was very interested in the workings of chance, and chance itself as some kind of unconscious event. So in Nadia, for example, he follows this young woman through the streets,

and she becomes the ultimate object of ever-escaping desire. and chance is constantly there at play and that chance is in a sense, if you like, a form of free association, a form of, you know, the unconscious interrupting life. So, I mean, you know... Except what's tedious about lots of surrealist writing is that the automatic writing they set so much store by

is the work of a soloist rather than the work of a dialogue partner, psychoanalysis and a variety of other works of fiction, including Proust, insist on the dialogical principle, that's to say, setting subjectivity, against subjectivity and seeing what happens in the interference zone between those, rather than allowing any one subjectivity to have a field day and to go on tedious. I think that's right. I don't think the surrealist writings are that interesting.

But I think there have been works that have been later on quite directly influenced by the existence of Freud and psychoanalysis. I mean, one has only to think of D.H. Lawrence. A lot of D.H. Lawrence's work through various kind of intermediate channels like Otto Gross and his wife and so on. did indeed take on the impact of psychoanalysis, not only in its exploration of sexuality, but in the kinds of tensions that work between in the family, for example, in sons and lovers, and in the tensions between men and women, if you like.

Now, we may say, no, no, no, this is nothing to do with Freud in psychoanalysis, but I think it's quite clearly there. I think a writer like Nabokov, who's always calling Freud this Viennese witch doctor and who loathes Freud because of the kind of categorizing diagnoses that bad psychoanalysis can lead you to. In fact, writes Lolita as a kind of case history, an anti-case history,

where his hero, his pedophiliac hero, is saying up the psychoanalysts. So there have been a lot of works through the century which have played around with Freud and Freudianism. But the striking thing about Freud is that people couldn't ignore him any more than they can now. Just as people are forever killing him now, and he keeps coming back to life,

the writers that were reading Freud at the time Freud is being translated, all cannot help but do something to him or with him. So even a writer like T.S. Eliot, for example, there are these nagging bits and pieces and jibes and snippets of criticisms, attacks, doubts, skepticism. But Freud is somewhere very powerfully there in the picture. So you get a sense of people, in some sense, organizing themselves around Freud as somebody who's producing texts that people can't just be indifferent to. Sure. I think that's right. And what we haven't perhaps put enough emphasis on so far in this discussion is the sheer seductive power of Freud's own texts. Another of Harold Bloom's statements

about the man is that he is our Montaigne. He is the Montaigne for the 20th and 21st centuries, and it seems to me that's about right. He's a writer of extraordinary cunning and complexity and has he holds his readers in thrall. I come back to that in a second, but just to take this a little bit further, would you, or just to continue it, do you, all three of you believe that the writings of Freud have percolated through the 20th century. They don't have to percolate much to Deid's Lawrence. They were quite near in period. They've hit a great number of 20th century writers

and changed the way they look at the world they write about or they write in. Would you say that is a general proposition that he, as a thinker, in what seemed at the start that comes there, to be a completely other discipline, has had such power to inform significant writers to change the way, and certainly has had the power to inform a great number of critics and readers.

How do you have? I think it's very difficult to assess the significance of Freud, as it is of Marx, because we're inevitably retrospectively reading things through an assumed knowledge of Freud. My impression certainly is that Freud, for the reasons that Malcolm has said, that Freud's text, Freud is such a powerfully persuasive,

intriguing writer himself, that anybody interested in writing couldn't help, I think, but be interested in what he's on about. And of course he does, there's something very, in a way, glamorous and intriguing and exciting and thrilling about the kinds of things he's talking at. Even though he's talking about suffering, actually, he's also talking about sex and bodies and jokes and errors. In other words, he's talking about the slapstick of everyday life and the thrills and spills of everyday life as well as the terrors and the torments. And this is a very extraordinary body of work because it's like a tragic comedy.

He keeps telling us that life is tragic, but he keeps showing us how absurd it is. I think that's very powerful. Lisa, can I just come back finally to say, are you convinced that we're now it is almost impossible to write books of value or interest without having consciously or unconsciously soaked up Freud? Well, no, I mean, I think it's quite possible to be completely ignorant in the terms of consciously

having read Freud's text. But I think in a sense, you know, he's the shadow of the 20th century or kind of second nature. And I think people do live in a kind of atmosphere where Freud's ideas are. I mean, you know, our entire emphasis on childhood and its formative effects. You go through popular fiction, which, as you know, I write as well. And, you know, it's full of the importance of childhood.

It's full of that kind of moment in the past which one needs to remember, which will unlock all kinds of secrets. That's a Freudian notion. And we don't necessarily need to know that that's what we're doing. But we're talking. You're talking very much about a mood, a feeling, Do you see any influence in terms of narrative structures, the way people deal with motivations? Do you see, is there a harder evidence that you can bring to the table?

Well, I do. I see it all the time. For example, in thriller writing, you know, if you think of the importance of fear and the way in which fear works on the individual and what it is that we fear, quite often the exploration of what it is that we fear, is inflected in some way by some kind of psychoanalytical understanding. So the bogeymen, the pedophiliac bogey men

that are now front of stage, one can only think of that by thinking in, you know, what is it that this expresses about our society? That very question, it seems to me, is a kind of Freudian question. Or the current fashion

for autobiography and for biography, that if you look at contemporary biographies, they are preoccupied by the childhood of the subject, as though it provides some kind of key. and this is obviously a relatively new thing. They're also preoccupied by the subject's sexuality as being a key to some, as a kind of explanatory key to their lives. Well, these could be described as Freudian,

not exclusively Freudian, but partly Freudian ideas. And Roman historians and Roman biographers would have been interested in power and family. And you look at Tudor portraits and the children are dressed as little adults. And then suddenly, or not so suddenly, there's something called childhood. And then later there's something called Freud.

and Freud links sexuality and childhood very explicitly. I'd like to move on to psychoanalysis as literature, and in your final essay in the book Promises, Promises, Adam, you write, I think of Freud as a late romantic writer. Can you develop that little? I think romanticism, insofar as it can be generalized. One of the most striking things about it, on the one hand is a disillusionment with

and questions about the power of rationality and the Enlightenment. So this means there begins to be a preoccupation with what are the alternative? to enlightenment thought. And so this is, in other words, an interesting, irrationality. There's also, I think, a new kind of preoccupation

about childhood. So that suddenly there's something about a person's history and the way in which a person's history is not predictive of who they are but integral to who they are. Not only the continuity, it's not as though you can explain

the adult from the child, but that there are links and they're often very odd links and strange links. And Freud talks, for example, about deferred action. It's as though the part past is continually being reinterpreted, re-described on the basis of present experience.

So the past becomes something that you're always revising to make a future. Now it seems to me if, say, you read the prelude, this is something that clearly words with is preoccupied by. But if we're talking about Freud as a late romantic writer, where does that leave psychoanalysis as a talking cure as a way of people making themselves better when they're in trouble. Where does that leave that? I'll come back to you out of, Malcolm By. I think that's one of the worrying aspects of the Freud as literature thesis or proposition. It seems to favor a certain sort of literate patient within psychoanalysis, somebody who has, broadly speaking, the same range

of cultural reference as the practitioner himself, somebody who is prepared to play the quoting and the punning, the word-playing games with the baster figure present in the room, I worry about people who come with a restricted code rather than a psychoanalytically elaborated code into the consulting room can barely articulate the source of their distress, barely even begin to gesture towards it. How does psychoanalysis as literature help those people to move in the direction of a richer sense of themselves and a richer sense of their own possible futures. Well, I think Adam's situating of Freud as a great romantic poet is right, and I would

certainly buy into it. But I think the reason for his doing this, because he himself as a practicing psychoanalyst, is probably not as devoid of the motive as we in this room might think. I mean, I think it's a corrective to the uses of psychotherapy that have become extremely popular in many ways, perhaps not extremely useful. in the English-speaking world. I don't want to put words in your mouth. And I would say that, you know, him having launched this particular claim,

I would want to then say, well, of course Freud is a great writer, but he's also somebody who set up a very important therapeutic system, which may or may not work in certain instances, but one would like to see it work better. And if analysts were perhaps more literary, they would be more attuned to their patients and would have less simple explanations about what is wrong or right with their lives. So I think it's that kind of claim.

Well, I suppose crudely, it could come down to if Freud is best seen as a late romantic writer, why does one go to Freud for cures for illnesses rather than to Wordsworth? Well, it's partly for what Malcolm said earlier, I think, which is to do with the dialogue with a person. I mean, clearly there is an overlap between what people have used literature for, what people have used religion for, and what people are using psychoanalysis for. I think what's useful about fraud and thinking about Freud as a writer is that he's preoccupied with the struggle to articulate.

However literate or unliterate one is, everybody somewhere is embroiled in a question of the extent to which they're able to make themselves known. This fundamentally means make their needs known, be able to engage with others to have the kind of lives they want to have. So I think that it's not that I want to say that, in fact, I hate the idea, that to be interested in psychoanalysis is to be in an elaborate seminar on literature because it certainly hasn't been my experience. That indeed my experience is it's striking to me

how many different kinds of people can use psychoanalytic dialogue really can use it. You don't have to have read anything. You certainly don't have to have read Shakespeare, as any child will tell you, to be able to engage in something that makes a difference. And in a way it's simple, which is that to some extent we change ourselves by re-describing ourselves,

and we redescribe ourselves in dialogue with somebody. else. And I think Freud is very idealistic in his belief in words, in his belief in conversation. Nevertheless, I think we've all had an ordinary experience of which psychoanalysis is an elaboration, which is that talking to people actually makes

a difference to one state of mind. Lisa? I absolutely agree with that. You know, I would add on the other side that sometimes reading makes a difference as well, but you do read effectively or quite often in isolation. You're in communication with other voices, but they don't really talk back to you directly.

But just to move on a little, I mean, Freud, I think, is a great modernist writer, and I sometimes think that the interpretation of dreams is one great kind of autobiography, by an unreliable narrator who takes us into all kinds of places, and one can certainly use them that way. But I don't think that puts to one side the psychoanalytic project. I mean, I think that is equally and differently important. I think it's still worth prodding away at the distinction. The overlap has been very well made,

and Wordsworth can't speak back to me whereas if I came to you for analysis you can speak back to me and fine but it's still where is the line then Bloom said Harold Broom I quoted earlier he said Freud is right who will survive

the death of psychoanalysis implicit is the death of psychoanalysis but Freud marches on and he's making a clear distinction this discipline or this effort will fall away like a stage of a rocket but the essence of Freud

will continue Where do you stand on that, Mark and by? I think you're right, or Bloom is right, that the text will go marching on when lots of the theory building, the modeling, the theorem production that Freud went in for will have been seen as a transient conventionate. It helped to get us from here to there,

but now we're heading into a future that it didn't anticipate. I think that's right. But we've perhaps been understating in the course of this conversation, the extent to which Freud himself was invested in science and in provability and expected certain of his propositions to be falsified in due course and indeed certain of them to join forces with a reinvigorated biology as a sort of super science of humankind. Well, that is like Susan Greenfield who believe that that is happening.

That's right, that the moment of redocking between that's right between different systems of thought or different styles of thought is on the horizon

and that's very encouraging to that extent one has got to allow certain elements of Freud simply to disappear not to be discredited not to be exorcised

as the witch find a general self-appointed seem to want but simply to disappear as early scientific paradigms have not because something

better has come along but because something more efficacious in terms of future research has come along. What of Freud's structures, what of the structures which he very much hoped he thought were scientific, structures of examination of curing? We are talking about a doctor who was seeking to cure. We're talking about a man who's trying to relieve pains and distress that came into his surgery. What of that do you think will remain, Lisa? Well, I think the talking cure will probably remain.

I mean, you know, with all the kind of new emphasis on pharmacological interventions and, you know, drugs for depression and so on, there is a sense from people who have undergone treatments and people who have given treatments that it's very, very useful to have the talking cure work side by side with the drugs. People like Damasio, the neuroscientists, will say that in fact, you know, there are aspects in Freud's thinking about the mind, the brain, dreams. so on, which fit in with the new mapping of the brain that's going on. So, you know, I think the talking cure will remain. I think perhaps some of Freud's great speculative leaps may indeed prove to be as right as perhaps they were as wrong. I mean, you know, there'll be elements of that, but I think the talking cure is going to stay.

Well, in the meantime, before science cures us, the question is, what are people going to do when they're radically unhappy or troubled? And the culture offers a variety of options here. Psychonalysis isn't only a talking cure, it's actually a listening cure. And what psychonic trainings teach people to do at best is listen to each other. Now, I can't imagine a world in which listening is redundant. And I don't want to sentimentalize it or idealize it, but the power of being listened to is extraordinary.

I think that's right. We perhaps should have mentioned at an earlier stage, Orden's great elegy for Freud written in 1939, in which one of the things that he praises is the simple humanity of the man, He wasn't clever at all, he says. He just knew how to listen. He knew how to take each patient on his or her individual terms and help them towards a possible future.

Future is a word that occurs often in that poem. And psychoanalysis is built upon, if you like, the fundamental humanity and decency of its originator. And he's on then the last word, Adam Phillips. I do think that with all the attacks on Freud and the attacks on psychoanalysis, there is probably something very humane in this listening.

and speaking form of interaction between somebody who knows how to contain and hold pain and the person who has come for help. I think also that we will carry on reading Freud because he's such a wonderful writer and he invented this great genre of the case history which we all like to use now and again.

Yes, exactly. And I think that Freud did something very paradoxical. He invented a science of idiosyncratic meaning. In other words, he really was trying to attend to the very specific way each individual makes something of what they've inherited and what they experience. And that seems to me to be indelibly important. One of the most important passages in this book of essays

for me of your book of essays was where you brought the two together, literature analysis, and you talked about people going to analysis in terms of seeing the true narrative of their lives, given that we all have narratives in our lives, we all think we are this, that the other, we do this. And I thought that was a very good congruence now. Yes, I think the pursuit of narrative

and what people are actually doing with narratives both defensively and progressively in their lives is in the sense what psychoanalysis is about. It's partly about storytelling, selves constituted and interrupted through storytelling. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Malcolm Bowie. Thanks to Adam Phillips and thanks to Lisa Upinunezzi.

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