ON FIRST meeting Adam Phillips, you might not think that he was a psychoanalyst. His office in Notting Hill is filled with books on every wall and in stacks on the floor. But instead of therapeutic manuals, you will find volumes of poetry by J.H. Prynne, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Geoffrey Hill. The complete “À la recherche du temps perdu” nestles into the wall. He would not be out of place as a tutor in an Oxford quad—where he studied English before training as a child psychotherapist in London.



This eclectic mix of influences is evident in his psychoanalytical work. His books include “On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored” (1993), “On Flirtation” (1995) and “On Balance” (2010). Approaching psychoanalytical ideas through the more oblique lens of literature, they may not cure your neuroses, but they make for an interesting read. He has been running a series at the Lutyens & Rubinstein bookshop, where he speaks with poets about their lives before they read aloud their work. Philip Gross, John Fuller, Adam O'Riordan, Bernard O'Donoghue, John Burnside, Christopher Reid and Jo Shapcott have all taken part.

We spoke to Mr Phillips about poetry as a form of therapy and the perils of reading psychoanalytical criticism.



What do you see as the relationship between psychoanalysis and poetry?



The most obvious link is that they are both linguistic arts. Freud suggests not exactly that we speak in poetry, because poetry has line-endings, but that we potentially speak with the type of incisiveness and ambiguity that we're most used to finding in poetry. So, to put it slightly differently: the reading of poetry would be a very good training for a psychoanalyst.



In the preface to “On Flirtation” you call psychoanalysis a “kind of practical poetry”—can you elaborate on this?



On the one hand, psychoanalysis is practical in the sense that there is an attempt to solve a problem, or to cure somebody, or at least to address their suffering. But the other thing that psychoanalysis does is that the project is to enable somebody to speak. It's the attempt to create the conditions in which somebody can speak themselves as fully as possible.



It is as though Freud invented a setting or a treatment in which people could not exactly speak the poetry that they are, but that they could articulate themselves as fully as they are able. [A session] lasts 50 minutes, and it's always at the same time each week, just like a sonnet is always 14 lines. It's a similar thing. The form makes possible the articulation.



So it's the constraint of poetry that connects it to forms of therapy?



Exactly.



Is it possible to draw an analogy between the bad reputation psychoanalysis can have and the bad reputation poetry can have—that poetry is obscure, that it's difficult?



On the one hand it is a question of taste. If people don't like something, they just don't. But when it isn't simply a matter of taste or sensibility I think it is a resistance and a fearfulness. That poetry, rather like music, might move them in ways they would rather not be moved. Or believe they'd rather not be moved. The people who hate psychoanalysis often go on hating it. And I think the reason is that there is something about it they want to keep in touch with. Because it holds something, just as poetry does.



When you speak of poetry making people feel something that they don't necessarily want to feel, like music—are you implying that poetry has a therapeutic use?



I do, I really think it has a use. There is a thing Kafka says in his diaries which is something like “literature is an axe to break the sea frozen inside us”. I think that we are very frightened of the intensity and the excesses of our emotional lives. And that the arts—and if you happen to like poetry, then poetry, but it could also be music—enable you to both bear and get pleasure from your feelings. And also to discover the things that matter most to you. If they engage you, they really engage you, you're not indifferent to them.



One critic has said that he had to reread your books in order to fully understand them. Do you see your prose as something akin to poetry—as an art form that demands close reading?



I think it's true, and it's partially by osmosis—in the sense that people write because they have read, and most of the writers I like have been poets. Though how one writes is a bit of a mystery to oneself. You just do it. My experience is that I sit down and write and I make it sound right to me, or sound good or interesting. And that's it.



Is psychoanalysis stronger as a literary rather than medical pursuit?



I think it's only strong as a literary form, really. I think that the medicalisation of it has sort of killed it.



Can you analyse a poem in the same way that you may analyse a patient?



No, but there are overlaps. The big difference, which is the obvious one, is that the poem can't answer back. You can use things gleaned from psychoanalysis to interpret the poem. But, as you know, loads of psychoanalytical criticism is the most boring thing on earth. You think, why did they write it?