In his analysands' chair, 2000.

Adam Phillips was born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1954. He was educated at Oxford, where he read English. Later he trained as a child psychotherapist and would become the principal at Charing Cross Hospital, in London. He also worked for seventeen years in the National Health Service; his one stated professional regret is leaving the public sector. His current private practice consists mainly of adults who see him at hourly intervals, mostly for fifty minutes each.

Phillips does not e-mail. He uses the phone to stay in touch, making calls between patients. The time constraints and tight schedule are deliberate calculations: for two and half decades, he has devoted every Wednesday to his writing. He is the author of nineteen books, among them: Winnicott (1988), On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (1993), Monogamy (1996), Houdini’s Box (2001), Missing Out (2012), One Way and Another (2013), and, with his partner, Judith Clark, The Concise Dictionary of Dress (2010). A regular contributor to the London Review of Books, Raritan, and The Threepenny Review, Phillips is also the general editor of new translations of Freud’s work published by the Penguin Press.

The following interview took place over several years and across two continents. Some sessions were conducted before large audiences at the New York Public Library; the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, in Idaho; Les Assises Internationales du Roman, in Lyon; and the Serpentine Gallery, in London. Private sessions were conducted at his offices in Notting Hill, a leisurely five-minute walk from his home. The space in which he sees patients is large and furnished with a couch and a straight-backed chair: Phillips sits at an angle across from his patients, looking mostly out the window, at a point in the distance, while he listens. It helps him focus, he says. At the far end of the office sits a CD player with rock-and-roll classics. Down the adjoining corridor is a much smaller study where he does all his writing; here, his desk looks over rooftops. Both rooms are book lined: British and American poetry, essays, and novels lie piled on shelves and floor, in some places three or four layers deep. On the days he sees patients, Phillips arrives at the office as early as six in the morning in order to read for an hour or two before his first appointment. (He claims to require very little sleep.) He also reads between consultations, whenever he can. As he puts it, “I need to hear other voices.”

During our conversations, in public and private, Phillips spoke in whole paragraphs, but did not hesitate to take pause or to digress. “Digression,” he has written, “is secular revelation.”

—Paul Holdengräber

INTERVIEWER

How did you choose to become a psychoanalyst?

PHILLIPS

When I was seventeen, I read Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and I thought it was an interesting, exciting life. And then I read D.W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality when it came out, and I had a tremendous feeling of affinity for the book. I don’t exactly know what I thought of it—I can’t remember exactly—but I felt that I completely understood it, and I knew then that I wanted to be a child psychotherapist. I don’t know what that knowing was a knowing about. It wasn’t a revelation, it was a conviction. I read the book and I knew what I wanted to do. It collected me.

Then I read Freud, who seemed to me a version of the Jewish family life that I knew. Here was a voice that felt very familiar to me—not that my parents spoke psychoanalysis at all. But there was something familiar about the voice. And so that bridged the gap, because Winnicott is chronically English, and obviously my family are not. 

INTERVIEWER

I want to ask what you mean by that, but already I’m struck by the centrality of books in this story. 

PHILLIPS

When I went to school as an adolescent, I had an English teacher who talked about literature with the same kind of passion that my family talked about each other. In other words, there was an intensity in this engagement that I’d never heard before. It was contagious and inspiring. My teacher had been taught by F.R. Leavis at Cambridge. Leavis was a literary critic who treated English literature as a secular religion, a kind of answer to what he thought was a post-Christian society. He had a fanatical assurance about literature that made you intrigued about the writers he didn’t like. And my teacher at school felt something comparably zealous. It wasn’t zealous in that we were told exactly what to read and what to think about the books, but it was conveyed to us that certain books really did matter and that you were involved in some rearguard action for the profound human values in these books. This was conveyed very powerfully—that the way to learn how to live and to live properly was to read English literature—and it worked for me. I was taught close, attentive reading, and to ironize the ambitions of grand theory. I was educated to believe that A.E. Housman was more interesting than Hegel, and I do. Marianne Moore, the philosopher J.L. Austin, and William Empson were key figures for me then.

INTERVIEWER

Do you still feel that?

PHILLIPS

Yes, but not in the same way. Fortunately, I never recovered from my education, I’ve just carried on with it. If you happen to like reading, it can have a very powerful effect on you, an evocative effect, at least on me. It’s not as though when I read I’m gathering information, or indeed can remember much of what I read. I know the books that grip me, as everybody does, but their effect is indiscernible. I don’t quite know what it is. The Leavisite position, more or less, is that reading certain sentences makes you more alive and a morally better person, and that those two things go together. It seems to me that that isn’t necessarily so, but what is clear is that there are powerful unconscious evocative effects in reading books that one loves. There’s something about these books that we want to go on thinking about, that matters to us. They’re not just fetishes that we use to fill gaps. They are like recurring dreams we can’t help thinking about. 

INTERVIEWER

When you said “the Jewish family life that I knew,” what did you mean? 

PHILLIPS

My parents were second-generation émigré Jews from Russian Poland. My father’s parents were given the Welsh name Phillips because no one could understand the name Pinkus-Levy. My grandfather was a tailor and a traveling salesman. I grew up in an extended family in Cardiff, and the extended family consisted of my parents, my sister, my father’s parents, my aunts and uncle, and my two girl cousins, from that side of the family. These were the people I saw three or four times a week.

INTERVIEWER

What did you talk about?

PHILLIPS

My parents were very left-wing, so there was a lot of talk about politics. There was a lot of talk among the men about sport. There was a lot of talk about sex and food and money and relationships. And there was a lot of ... just sort of hilarity. I don’t want to give too pastoral a view of this—everyone was anxious all the time—but there were a lot of laughs. And we were encouraged to do jobs that contributed something good to the culture, to be a doctor or lawyer, probably. This was a combination of acquiring social legitimacy and prestige— to be safe—and doing something that contributed to the common good.

INTERVIEWER

And you think that has something to do with being Jewish?

PHILLIPS

I think it has something to do with it, in the sense that my parents were keen to assimilate. They never remotely denied being Jewish, but they did want to be British. That was unequivocal. And, they were not religious. I did have a bar mitzvah, but it was for my grandparents. That was the story, anyway. So I didn’t grow up in a religious culture, but I did grow up in a very Jewish culture. And when I read Freud, I thought, Freud’s talking about the things they talked about in my family. Now, they didn’t talk about it like that, but the issues were the same. I think that Freudian psychoanalysis recycles something for me about a Jewish past and a Jewish sensibility. 

INTERVIEWER

Some things you knew and some things you were not really able to recognize.

PHILLIPS

Yes, because occasionally I would think it odd that my family had only properly been in England for one generation, and it was English literature I was learning about. I should be reading Dostoyevsky or Kafka, not Gawain and the Green Knight. So when I discovered Bellow and Roth and Mailer and Malamud, it seemed closer to my heart in some way. When I read Bellow and Roth, and heard the tones and phrases in Bob Dylan’s voice, I knew that was how I felt, even though I could not be more English. It was confusing but I wasn’t at all confused.