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    On Getting Better
    On Getting Better
    On Getting Better
    Ebook157 pages2 hours

    On Getting Better

    By Adam Phillips

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    About this ebook

    On Getting Better is a thoughtful and compact book about self-improvement from Britain’s leading psychoanalyst, author of Missing Out and On Kindness.

    To talk about getting better—about wanting to change in ways that we might choose and prefer—is to talk about pursuing the life we want, in the full knowledge that our pictures of the life we want, of our version of a good life, come from what we have already experienced. (We write the sentences we write because of the sentences we have read.)

    How can we talk differently about how we might want to change, knowing that all change precipitates us into an uncertain future? In this companion book to On Wanting to Change, Adam Phillips explores how we might get better at talking about what it is to get better.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 4, 2022
    ISBN9781250838889
    On Getting Better
    Author

    Adam Phillips

    Adam Phillips is one of the foremost psychoanalysts practicing in the world today, and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of many books, including On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored; and On Balance. He is also coauthor, with the historian Barbara Taylor, of On Kindness.

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      Book preview

      On Getting Better - Adam Phillips

      Preface

      Clearly any politics not bent on improving society would not be politics, but would a personal life not bent on self-improvement not be a life, or at least not a life worth taking seriously? We can’t imagine our lives without the wish to improve them, without the progress myths that inform so much of what we do, and of what we want (we don’t tend to think of ourselves as wanting to be what we are already). Whether we call it ambition, or aspiration, or just desire, what we want and what we want to be is always our primary preoccupation, but it is always set in the future, as though what could be – our better life, our better selves – lures us on. As though it is the better future that makes our lives worth living; as though it is hope that we most want.

      Getting better always starts in fantasy, in our imagining better lives for ourselves; it is the private utopianism of everyday life, the way we formulate our wishes, the way we picture our potential. A future that brings out the best in us; we have to seduce ourselves, that is to say, into believing in the future. And whether or not we describe human development as a ‘cumulative trauma’ – which does at least do justice to the ordinary catastrophes of childhood and adolescence – we are prone now to think of traumatic experiences as the saboteurs and the facilitators of who we might be; the material that we are made out of. So getting better, in this story, always involves overcoming or supposedly mastering something that is impeding us. As though getting better is about getting better at mastery; as though getting better is a form of revenge, revenge on life as it is. Getting better is, fundamentally, to change one’s relationship to oneself.

      ‘Trauma’ has become the word we use now for whatever stops us in our tracks, for whatever we believe we need to recover from; for whatever, as they say, challenges us. The malign traumatic experiences inhibit us; they can feel like the saboteurs of our development, the saboteurs of our real enjoyment. When we are traumatized – in some kind of shock – we are, at least to begin with, timid, anxious, more vulnerable, more aggressively self-protective (more arrogant). We seek reassurance in repetition, familiarity and reassurance itself. To be traumatized is to be unable to innovate, or improvise, or surprise oneself; it makes us averse to risk, to the new, to the foreign. When traumas don’t prompt us to compulsively seek out further traumas to master – to find out if we can survive them – they make change an ordeal, development intimidating, and defeatedness (or cynicism) a temptation. Unless or until, that is, we can make something of them.

      When traumatic experiences are not actually paralysing, they are the raw material of development. There is, after all, no life without trauma; indeed, the word misleadingly makes us think of something being interrupted, rather than of something integral, something essential to our lives. So much depends on what we can make of what happens to us, and on what we make of what we do; on our being able to metabolize or digest our experience; on our capacity or willingness to transform our experience rather than be merely victimized by it. When getting better doesn’t only mean getting safer, it means being able to risk feeling more alive, to risk taking risks, to risk learning and not learning from experience. And the conversion experiences discussed in my earlier book On Wanting to Change – in the form of addictions or renovations – tend to be our preferred self-cures when our future seems in jeopardy, when our conflicts become insupportable.

      And yet there is another kind of common experience that we might call benign trauma, or even wished-for trauma; experiences akin to both trauma and conversion experiences, experiences that, like traumas, can lead to repetition and a certain stuckness, and that, also like traumas, we resist getting over; like conversion experiences they feel positively transformative, and we can’t imagine ourselves without them. But unlike traumas and conversions, we don’t experience them as either. And even though we don’t tend to think of them as part of a process of getting better, these experiences feel as though they get us the lives we want. They are experiences known to every fan, follower and disciple. And, indeed, to everyone with a passion or a vocation or a hobby: to anyone who has been inspired by something or someone, to anyone who has fallen in love, to anyone who has seen, or read, or heard or overheard something, or someone, and been gripped. And as with any trauma or conversion, the risk is that I may end up trapped in a regime, trapped in a vocabulary, simply repeating (imitating) the words of Jesus, or Freud, or Marx, or whoever I am enlivened and fascinated and enamoured by. That I may not be able to use their words to recover my own; that I may finally have resolved the problem of having to go on making choices. I may to all intents and purposes delegate the intelligence that is my imagination to them. ‘All hero-worship,’ the belle-lettrist Geoffrey Madan wrote in his notebook, ‘is the pooling of self-esteem.’ We can of course have (and enjoy) what were once called heroes and heroines without sacrifice, but there is always the temptation of disowning or delegating parts of ourselves to others. All hero-worship is a division of labour.

      I offer this example by way of suggesting that we may be as much entranced and disarmed as inspired by our opportunities, by our fantasies of getting and being better; that the whole notion of getting better at whatever it might be is at once inevitable and necessary, but can also be a way of narrowing our minds, and deferring our desires. Clearly the best thing we can do is get better at the things we most value; but the desire to get better at something can all too easily usurp the question of what we do actually value, and why we value it (when we are hypnotized by self-improvement, it is easy for us to forget Wilde’s quip that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly). There may sometimes be other things we can do than get better; something that by definition the convert can never imagine. Were we to be less impressed by what was once called ‘the perfectibility of man’ – by the original sin of never being good enough – we may not have to see who we are, both politically and personally, always and only in the light of who we might be. We may not only need an ambition to be ambitious. The choice may not be between the twin impossibilities of ‘living in the moment’ and living for the future. Wanting to make a future better than the present and the past is a good project but a bad obsession.

      ‘As a whole,’ the philosopher Terry Pinkard writes in Hegel’s Naturalism,

      nature aims at nothing, even if there are some creatures in the natural order that do aim at some things … It is only when human mindful agency arrives on the planet that the issue arises about what it means for that kind of creature to be the best it can be … we, as self-interpreting animals have a historically developing conception of what it is to be the best exemplifications of the agents we are and thus where we are in the position of actually aiming at realizing such conceptions in our lives … The world was not designed for us, nor is there necessarily any larger purpose in nature that we fulfil. We are our own purpose …

      If, as Pinkard suggests, unlike anything else in nature we make our own purposes, and by the same token we make up what it is to be better at our purposes, then, as self-interpreting creatures, we can consider and reconsider our artefacts, these aims and ambitions and intentions we have made: we can to some extent choose what we want to do with our time, limited as it must always be. We cannot float free of nature but we can go on working out what we take our nature to be, and what we might want it to be. And this involves acknowledging that there are things we cannot as yet get round – most parents now, for example, cannot bear their love for their children, and all children grow up in the light of this – and things we don’t yet know whether we can get round – love between parents and children has changed, and will change over time. (At the moment, for example, in many cultures, children and parents are absolutely dependent on each other, but this may one day be looked back upon as an aberration.) The most rudimentary knowledge of history – not to mention our present predicaments – shows us how extraordinary and inadvertent change can be.

      But purpose as an invention – rather than a God-given or natural fact – radically revises the ways in which we can talk about change, and the getting better that our preferred changes always entail. Preferred forms of change are always unrealistic unless or until they happen. We know now from what Pinkard calls our historically developing concepts of change that we have all too often been asked to choose between cruelly exorbitant conceptions – redemption, the ‘new people’ of communism and fascism, genetic engineering, and cruelly diminishing conceptions – original sin, innate malevolence, transgenerational haunting, unhappy childhoods. These polarized alternatives inevitably restrict the repertoire. As though we are either capable of magical and almost total transformation, or are marooned in our ineluctable ‘natural’ limitations. It is worth noting, though, that while both options are prophecies, ways of predicting the future, the idea of ineluctable natural limitations may be the more pre-emptive. Omniscience may be the enemy of change, but notions of magical transformation perhaps keep the future a little more open. To be ambitious about change is more often than not to believe in change. Or rather, to believe in forms of change that we have some kind of say

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