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Example research essay topic: Adam Phillips Mr Phillips Equals - 1,034 words

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Caring, but little sharingEqualsAdam Phillips 160 pp, Faber Adam Phillips, the psychotherapist and editor of writers including Lamb, Pater and Burke, is also considered by many to be a grand master of the essay form. One of the finest prose stylists at work in the language, according to John Banville. In a passage quoted on the jacket of Equals, his new book, the Observer critic Gaby Wood compares him to Kafka, Benjamin, and Kundera, and credits him with single-handedly continuing the tradition of the worlds best essayists. The American novelist Jane Mendelsohn has placed him in the line of Chekhov as a man who writes as well as he doctors.

In such books as Darwin's Worms and Terrors and Experts, Phillips has written about his discontents and quarrels with the business of orthodox psychoanalysis, and meditated on such conundrums as success, loss, monogamy, mourning and boredom. He is a frequent reviewer of contemporary fiction and poetry, and reprints those review-essays alongside his psychiatric ruminations. Indeed, as he has stated in On Flirtation, he believes that psychoanalysis has always been of a piece with the various languages of literature, a kind of practical poetry. His essays proceed through indirection, questions, repetitions, reversals, substitutions, and wordplay, rather than structured argument, and emphasise narrative and storytelling even when they address complex psychoanalytic problems. Phillips reputation as a supreme literary stylist and ingenious post-Freudian sage may have intimidated reviewers, many of whom admit that his arcane and aphoristic books are difficult to pr&execute; cis, summarise, or explain, while insisting none the less that they are brilliant. But although Phillips has many of the important gifts of the essayist intelligence, curiosity, fluency, originality, erudition he lacks others just as essential, especially humour, clarity, a personal voice and a sense of the concrete.

In Equals, ostensibly about the relationship between psychoanalysis and democracy, even his intellectual gifts have become ponderous and conventional, while his stylistic weaknesses, by constantly reminding us of his intellectual superiority, seem conspicuously to contradict his ideas. In a book that idealists equality and mutual openness, Phillips is far from lavish with information and self-revelation. Despite the vivid inequalities of wealth, prestige, history, talent and beauty, he writes in his preface, there are certain cultural goods that can be shared by everybody. Whatever these cultural goods may be, Equals does not make them very accessible. Although earlier books have had bibliographies, here there is none, and Phillips rarely bothers to gloss his many allusions even to the subjects of his analyses (the British psychoanalyst John Rickman is a helpful exception, although it comes 75 pages after the first mention of the name). The opening essay, Superiorities, comes as close as any to laying out an argument.

Phillips typically begins with a straightforward reference, anecdote, or text, which he uses as a launchpad for his thoughts. Here he cites Lacans account of group therapy for disturbed veterans in post-war England, and his admiration for the way that group leaders like Rickman forced people to become equals. Phillips asks what would psychoanalytic treatment be like, if the analyst considered himself to be on the same footing as the so-called patient? But this relatively clear question goes unanswered, as he segues into a series of grandiose riffs on the vague metaphorical connections between equality, democracy and psychoanalytic practice. By the end of the essay, democracy has come to be a purely verbal construct.

Phillips connects free association in psychoanalysis with internal democracy, and concludes with a call for something I want to call free listening, on the part of the therapist, as a counterpoint of the notion of free speech. That neither listening nor speech come for free in psychoanalysis, and that the analyst withholds while the patient reveals, gets lost in the web of mystification about equality, and Phillips offers no explanatory details about what free listening might offer in practice, or even what it might mean. Phillips is much better as a reviewer than as a freewheeling thinker, airily swinging from verbal limb to limb. When he has been given a subject that imposes boundaries and limits on his thought, he is acute, detailed, and convincing on the motives of various writers, although in reviews too he has difficulty resisting the leap from particulars to sweeping generalisations. His essay on Lionel Trilling, A Concentrated Rush, for example, proposes a cogent and persuasive explanation for Trilling's critical interest in EM Forster, who was not his favourite novelist, but, Phillips suggests, the way into a counter-life of respectable decadence that Trilling himself craved as an aspiring, but repressed, novelist himself.

Phillips oversteps the bounds of this plausible conjecture about Trilling, however, to extend his speculations to the necessary counter life of the Jew or any immigrant writer in modern culture. Does Phillips include himself in this generalisation? His impersonality prevents him from giving the reader a clue. Even when he is given the wonderful opportunity for particularity and wry self-reflection offered by a review of John Lanchesters novel Mr Phillips, Phillips dodges it.

He comments that the name is ordinary, and that Mr Phillips is really a book about its title and about what names entitle people to; he notes that to give a book a persons name inevitably makes you wonder what the book might be about. The novel, he concludes, is existential, or perhaps like a contemporary Tristram Shandy. Could it have a more immediate resonance? My point is not to demand that Phillips write about himself, nor to suggest that Lanchesters sad hero is in any sense Adam Phillips equal, or double; but rather to note that despite his advocacy of equality, Phillips will not risk putting himself on the same footing as his reader, even by commenting on the joke. In Equals, Phillips tends to be pithy rather than persuasive, to write for insiders rather than to share ideas. Without wanting to take the pith out of Phillips, or trying to show that this emperor has no clothes for if anything, he is overdressed I have to wonder about the value of an equality that depends so much on stylistic one-upmanship. &# 183; Elaine Showalter is author of The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture


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Research essay sample on Adam Phillips Mr Phillips Equals

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