Adam Philips on excesses, VPRO-boeken, 30 oktober 2011

Interesting thoughts about modern life.

Wim Brands shows us the new book with essays On balance (2010), in Dutch called: In onbalans (2011), and mentions that Adam Philips also wrote poetry. He made his debute twenty-five years ago with a poem in the London Review of Books. He studied literature but he didn’t recognize the proof when his poem was sent back to his house. He likes poems more than essays, because they are more condensed and musical than essays. Unfortunately they disappeared out of his mind.

Brands asks him about his career as a childtherapist.

Philips worked in that field for eighteen years but stopped because of his own children. He got much more disturbed by the sad stories. Also the National Health Service in Great Britain fell apart. Therapy became a business with statistics in stead of a job with care. Now he works as a psycho-analist and sees eight or ten persons a day, usually during 45 minutes.

Adult patients are more defensive than children, Philips says. Children want to have a good time and are more ruthless, free and less polite than adults, who are more afraid because they know more about all dangers around them. As a therapist Philips wants to concentrate more on sentences than on theories with their generalisations. He is reading the sentences of the patient, not so much for the story, which can be very defensive. A coherent story of ones own life could mean that it contains a lot of self-defence since one leaves out a lot. A therapist wants to hear what one leaves out.

Brands asks him about the story of the father of Thomas Mann, who took his children to a patisserie to eat as many cakes as they wanted. Philips says that was fascistic, because he knew the outcome. He wanted to proof that greed was not good, because it makes you want more than you need.

If an excess is good or bad, depends on the quality. It becomes dangerous when it is self destructive. We live in an age of desparate excess, like between the rich and the poor. It is generally accepted that profit is the result of exploiting. In communism politics was not a question of economics. He doesn’t know why it is in our society. Capitalism has exploited our appetite on the level of a child, who always wants to have the next best thing. One has to learn to have enough. As Neil Diamond said: one cannot have two lunches.

Brands says thirty years ago he didn’t have a cellphone and he didn’t miss it.

If you are able to have access to someone, you can also feel excluded by it, Philips answers. It’s like familarization. A child feels it when the parents leave. These are echoos from history.  

The internet provides the illusion of continuous contact. One feels abonded, separated.

What can we do about it?

Live with it, philips says. It can be freeing to read a book.

His next book is about frustration, which is important, since it is one of the worst things you can deprive people of. Without frustration no satisfaction. These days people are afraid of frustration, instead of thinking of it as a necessary exponent for satisfaction.

Brands would still have liked to ask Philips about our obsession with happiness and he also mentioned in his introduction the pornofication of our society, so the best thing would be to ask Adam Philips back another time. The second best thing is to read the book.