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PARTISAN REVIEW
ence between 'implicit' and 'explicit' is exactly the difference upon
which the entire world of moral behavior is based."
If
at times Kimball lapses into gruffness or oversimplifies a theory, his
willingness to defend aesthetic ideals, champion neglected intellects, and
eschew humanities dogma scores its points. What is lost in subtlety and
detail is gained in wit and tenacity. In a media milieu polarized into the
commercial ramblings of arts reviewers and the cliquish, clotted
rehearsals of academic theorists, Kimball marks a compromise that
improves upon both, and sustains the hope that high culture and public
address might survive together.
Mark Bauerlein
The Historical Unconscious
PROMISES, PROMISES. By Adam Phillips. Basic Books.
$27.50 .
"BEFORE THE PROBLEM OF THE CREATIVE ARTIST," Freud wrote in 1928,
"analysis must, alas, lay down its arms." What was it about the creative
artist that prompted this moment of theoretical doubt? And why was
the artist so obviously a problem?
Promises, Promises,
Adam Phillips's
dazzling new book of essays, is an inquiry into the meaning of Freud's
comment. Was Freud laying down arms as an act of worship ("like not
going into church with your machine-gun"), or was he acknowledging
defeat? According to Phillips, psychoanalysis has a lways had trouble
making up its mind about the role and value of literature. Are artists
megalomaniacs or midwives? Are they narcissists who contemptuously
make the world out of nothing or visionaries who cherish the world
enough to illuminate it?
As his previous seven books attest, Phillips doesn't answer questions
as much as he poses them to tease out the psychoanalytic perils of
understanding, explanation, and the fetish of answers. Discomforted by
the literary nature of its own project, psychoanalysis is too often
"impressed by the lucidity it promotes without acknowledging that this
supposed lucidity is itself an effect of language." From Phillips's view–
point, psychoanalysis bows to literature when it grows weary of its
efforts at scientific pretension. "More a grab-bag of its culture and his–
tory than a vision or a system," psychoanalysis often views literature as
an ahistorical "hoard of verbal wisdom," a kind of secu lar religion for
