Wanting isn't so simple

Charlotte Dworshak

 

In recent New Yorker book review about a recent book by psychologist Adam Phillips by Katy Waldman

What do we want from the lives that we secretly imagine for ourselves? “A difficult mixture of the all too familiar and the experimental, the mostly reassuring and the partly disinhibited,” Phillips contends in “The Life You Want” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), his latest book. When we were children, he continues, our parents recognized some parts of us and not others (athleticism but not musicality, for instance, or cheerfulness but not guile); now we go around both upholding and rebelling against those received regimes. We alternately display and downplay our encouraged aspects, hide and flaunt our uncountenanced ones. “Haunted by the versions of ourselves” that remain unembodied, Phillips writes, we wish to be who we are and also who we aren’t, splitting the difference even in fantasy.

Admen and bad romance novelists would like us to think that wanting is straightforward—indivisible, intuitive, and perhaps best remedied by credit card. For Phillips, however, wanting isn’t so simple; it has byways and switchbacks, weight and depth. What if we want something forbidden? What if the objects of our longing are socially acceptable but undermine who we’d like to be? What if we try to attain our aims and fail? What if we succeed and are disappointed, or the intensity of our delectation causes us to lose ourselves? And then, Phillips warns, there is the scandalous origin of our wanting: “our helplessness, our abjection . . . and our dependence.” We cannot satisfy ourselves; we must make demands on others; worse, others make demands on us. Interacting with one’s peers “is never exactly what one was hoping for,” Phillips observes wryly in “Missing Out,” a book from 2012 “in praise of the unlived life.” Socializing involves no fewer than “three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of the fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized satisfaction.” And that, he adds, is when everything goes well.

Yet “it is only in states of frustration that we can begin to imagine—to elaborate, to envision—our desire,” Phillips writes. He’s articulating the traditional Freudian account of fantasy guiding us toward our best-case scenario: the “ordinary unhappiness” of reality, or what Phillips calls “the possibility of a more realistic satisfaction.” But one also feels his work pulling in a less orthodox direction, toward the pleasure of longing itself. For Freud, wishful thinking was an abandonment of reality. For Phillips, it’s an information source, one we jettison too quickly in our quest to be cured. “The Life You Want” finds Phillips chafing at his field’s prescriptiveness and dismayed by our inclination to submit to other people’s preëmptive conclusions about what we want. “Old-fashioned psychoanalysis always had a known destination,” he observes. There’s a risk that the patient gets up from the couch having discovered not her druthers but what Melanie Klein or Jacques Lacan or Sigmund Freud thought her druthers should be. “Describing the life we want,” Phillips cautions, “can sometimes be the most compliant—i.e., defensive—thing we ever do.”