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PARTISAN REVIEW
The good mother would be one who could absorb and process the
infant's air raids-who would be undestroyed by his bombs; she
would never mastermind an implacable invasion. In other words,
by looking at the many experiences of the war that dominated peo–
ple's lives-the air raids of London-we can glimpse something of
the inevitable contingency-and historical occasioning of the theo–
rizing of unconscious fantasy, the sense in which psychoanalytic
theory is always local history, and the way it attempted to privilege
its descriptions by apparently exempting them from the specificities
of history.
For anyone familiar with the Winnicottian rhetoric of the "good
enough mother," Phillips's argument is truly a mind-bender. His inten–
tion isn't to invalidate this view of mothering but to claim that psycho–
analysis-either in the consulting room or in the realm of theory-needs
to own up to its historical context and make its values or preferences
more transparent.
There are times when Phillips might benefit from more transparency
himself. The experience of reading
Promises, Promises
is an odd mix–
ture of pleasure and unfulfilled longing (perhaps Phillips's intention). A
reader is left wanting more-sometimes from individual essays, but
more often in the way of a unifying theme to tie things together. To
some degree this is inevitable in any collection that relies on a mix of
book reviews, lectures, and longer essays. Phillips tries to deal with this
problem by sandwiching the pieces between an instructive preface and
a mildly explanatory essay at the book's end . (In his past collections, the
book reviews have often had their own ghetto at the back.) While
Promises, Promises
partially succeeds in its theme of the uneasy rela–
tionship between psychoanalysis and literature, it still reads a little like
"the greatest hits of Adam Phillips ." This criticism is not to deny the
great fun of turning the page and coming upon yet another topic to
which a supple and creative mind applies itself. The essays here are con–
sistently top-notch, whether the subject is the fiction of Martin Amis,
the scapegoating of parents in biography, or the diaries of Vaslav Nijin–
sky. But finally a reader of this talented writer begins to hope that,
whatever his misgivings about sustained theory, Phillips might choose in
his next work to thoroughly investigate one topic at length. The results
of such an exercise would be impressive-even more so than
Promises,
Promises.
Daniel Hayes
