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those who feel anxious about the untidiness of their own profession.
The crisis today in psychoanalysis-the one that the so-called Freud
wars reflect-is not a development that seems to worry Phillips. In fact,
it's "the uncertain status of psychoanalysis"-akin to the crisis in liter–
ature and its canonic equivocations-that raises the most interesting
questions about who knows what and why words pass for knowledge
in the first place.
Writing since the 1980s, Phillips has gained a reputation as part psy–
choanalytic maverick, part psychoanalytic gadfly. He writes adroitly and
with aphoristic flair on just about anything-kissing, flirting, boredom,
cross-dressing, the significance of worms in Darwinian theory. At times
he seems like the proficient juggler who impressively incorporates knives,
hatchets, torches, and the occasional apple. Here again, in
Promises,
Promises,
it's a pleasure to watch Phillips apply his pen to such diverse
topics as grief, cloning, adolescents' bedrooms, and the vogue of eating
disorders. He also includes a slew of incisive reviews of novels, poetry,
biography, and autobiography that display his substantial literary range.
(Particularly good are his celebration of the poetry of Frederick Seidel
and his damning assessment of Leon Wiesel tier's
Kaddish.)
But in the
process, Phillips is also slowly painting his own quirky and original pic–
ture of psychoanalysis by asking difficult questions and ferreting out
what he sees as "weak morality masquerading as strong epistemology."
And Phillips is at his best when he brings to our attention "the culture's
apparently untranslatable messages"-which, in this case, include diag–
nostic categories, the developmental idea of "emotional growth," and
the eerily omniscient language of pathology. "I think it is good, not to
mention inevitable, that psychoanalytic theorists should each have their
own good life stories," Phillips writes, "but not always good that we
have to infer them from their theories of pathology."
For Phillips the strength of the literary approach is to realize the dan–
gers of pat interpretation-"premature or pre-emptive knowing."
If
psychoanalysis has historically been interested in revering poetry at
arm's length, Phillips suggests, that's because it wishes to distance itself
from its own interpretive arbitrariness . Twice in this book Phillips
quotes
J.
v.
Cunningham'S opinion that the study of literature isn't to
"further the understanding of ourselves" but to "enable us to see how
we could think and feel otherwise than as we do." By this definition,
Phillips suggests that psychoanalysis and literature are up to the same
thing-a broadening of horizons that doubles as a form of skepticism
about the way things are. In perhaps the best essay in the book, "Win–
nicott's Hamlet," about the pitfalls of knowingness, there's an unex-
