This is a collection of essays that sets out to make and break the links between psychoanalysis and literature. It gives insights into anorexia and cloning, the work of Tom Stoppard and A.E. Housman, the effect of the Blitz on Londoners, Nijinsky's diary and Martin Amis' "Night Train".

2002-03-04 The Promise of Reading

First off, I've read most of Phillips' books, and I'm a fan. He's sometimes almost incoherent (I think deliberately) but there's always a massive pay off if you're willing to fight through his prose. It comes usually in the form of a transformation in the way you understand and see simple, day-to-day anxieties and problems.
Second, this book looks and sounds like self therapy because undeniably it is, but Phillips is so pragmatic and has his tongue in his cheek often enough to make a fairly skeptical, anti-touchy-feely guy like me read on most of the time. It's never preachy, and he only ever asks the reader to question tired and unimaginative answers.
Third, dismiss this particular Phillips (but never all of them) if you're put off by, and can't ignore literary and psychoanalytic references. Reading the book is like taking a peak into the insular world of youngish, hip psychotherapists and artists and their entourage of admirers -- themselves! There's an insular feel to some of the prose -- like you're listening to an injoke among the erudite. But at least you're invited to the party on this occasion. Many of the unconnected essays in Promises Promises were read to crowds that Phillips was invited to speak in front of.
Phillips describes in one essay how he and his patient, a painter, tackle the patient's mild case of agoraphobia, or fear of open spaces. He makes the un-agoraphobic reader see the painters' dilemma through a familiar problem: clutter. "Clutter: A Case History" reveals that as a boy the painter had been left pretty much to his own devices. After much prodding, Phillips reveals that the way that painter cluttered his teenage room, and later on jammed his paintings to the brim, became a way almost to make company. And at the very least a way to avoid that he felt uncared for by what he had described as Bohemian parents. If clutter was comforting for the patient, then surely open spaces would do the opposite for him.
Phillips then takes aim at what might be a typical reading or easy answer to the patient/painters' problem. Phillips' solution would never be to describe the ideal nurturing family, nor to encourage order over disorder, cleanliness over clutter, or the other way round. Instead the reader is left to ask what he does when he clutters his life, or when he dismisses other people's messiness or tries to impose order pattern that might best be left to settle itself.
If there's a thesis to this assortment of unconnected essays, it might come in "Narcissism For and Against." In this piece one of the most recognizable of personality disorders - the one that reads today like an insult - becomes emblematic for a fundamental question about psychoanalysis and therapy in general. We're reminded of Narcissus, enamoured with his own reflection, casting relationships to the side because they can never live up to his true love, himself. According to Phillips, psychoanalysis sets its self up as an opposite to that condition and in doing so has loaded the questions and the answers. After all, where would therapy be if we were all happy narcissists? And the converse to that question is "Would narcissists all be happy if it weren't for the therapists?"
As always with Phillips, if you can answer the question satisfactorily either way then you may have missed the point. Good for you, you'll get to enjoy a second reading.
In fact, much of Promises Promises is about reading. Reading a person, reading a book, reading your own personal history. Phillips begins the book by dedicating it to two English teachers who taught him how to read and finishes it by begging: why anyone would want a therapy when they could read a book?