Every Third Thought Page 12

  When he talks, he is onto your thoughts very fast, speaking low and urgently, but with great composure, as if he has reflected long, hard and deeply about whatever it is that he decides to vouchsafe. But it’s not a sombre dialogue. Irruptions of hilarity are typical, though less so, presumably, during psycho-therapeutic encounters. That remains his private world, which he hugs to himself. If he should ever refer to his many patients, he does so in such an abstract and remote way that there’s no loss of privacy.

  *

  Phillips has been conducting the intimate exploration of unconscious desires for as long as I’ve known him. He first came to prominence in 1993 with the publication of an essay collection entitled On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored. Since then he has continued his routine of writing on one, and seeing patients on four, days a week, has published some twenty books, including a short life of Freud, Darwin’s Worms, Missing Out and Going Sane, and become both vanishingly elusive, and discreetly celebrated. There was an appetite for Phillips’ ironic detachment, and provocative paradoxes. He was taken up by the pragmatic English as a servant of the dark arts who could somehow translate the mysteries of analysis into readable and seductive prose.

  As a psychoanalytic writer with practical experience of human beings in extremis, Phillips resists categories. He really doesn’t want to be pigeonholed. ‘I’m more interested in sentences than ideas,’ he says. ‘I don’t like theories.’ He also loves to spin dazzling and epigrammatic lines, for example, ‘The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?’ One way to look at what’s really going on in the pages of his books, some of which have been ‘in praise of the unlived life’, might be to consider Phillips’s own career and background.

  He was born in 1954, the son of second-generation British Jews of ambiguous Polish extraction who possibly hailed from Omsk. In the Second World War, his father served in a tank regiment in North Africa, and won a medal. My own father served with the Royal Navy in the Pacific; if he ever spoke of this experience, it was to joke about his mundane service medals. Reflecting on this, Phillips and I turn to talking about the aftermath of two world wars, a subject of great mutual interest, which he describes, poetically, as ‘a kind of haunting’.

  In my quest into the mystery of life, death, and the endgame, this seems like a good place to start. Phillips observes that ‘this haunting takes many forms. In the immediate aftermath of conflict, there’s an extraordinary transition from states of fear and exhilaration to the routines of civilian life. Having a family and raising children in peacetime took place in a highly disturbed emotional atmosphere.’

  Phillips goes on: ‘For those who survived, the war was incredibly exciting and really unrecoverable from. There’s a radical incompatibility between wartime and peacetime existence. Coming home from the war meant adjusting to the fact that the rest of your life was going to be incredibly boring.’ At the same time, the wartime generation had learnt to adjust to separation, isolation, and loss, and – something they would try to pass on to their children – to not feeling hurt when you were hurt. Our parents had equipped themselves for conflict, according to Phillips, by ‘self-anaesthesia’.

  This, a dominant motif in post-war British life, only added intensity to the project of rekindling the Self that began in the Sixties and reached its full flowering in the Nineties. The traumatic dividend of the Second World War, Phillips concludes, left demobbed veterans of both sexes obsessed by varieties of loss or grief. They were, he suggests, ‘either envious of people who had fought in the war; or no longer found life worth living, and identified with the dead; or felt they were living a kind of “death-in-life”; or would ask obsessively, “Where’s the excitement?” ’ On this analysis, he contends that the British fixation on symbols of loss and grief translates into the national sponsorship of ‘third thoughts’.

  Phillips, swerving away from the aftermath of war, describes a happy career at the cathedral school in Cardiff, spending, he says, ‘more of my childhood than I would have liked sitting under Epstein’s Christ.’ He admits that he ‘wasn’t a reader until I was thirteen or fourteen’. In place of books, Phillips says he was chiefly interested in ‘my friends, sport, and Nature’. The young Phillips was obsessed with birds. ‘I don’t know why,’ he adds, in a rare moment of personal bafflement, ‘but the National Geographic was my pornography.’ With an aviary in the garden, he kept humming birds, parrots, sunbirds, quail, tanagers, and bananaquits. He begins to laugh at the memory. ‘It was a hell of a lot of birds. I really learned to read because I wanted to read about birds.’

  English literature, meanwhile, was becoming the other passion of his adolescence. He read everything: D. H. Lawrence, the Metaphysicals, Donne, Pope, Conrad, Blake, the Romantics . . . So where did the psychoanalysis come from? Here, Phillips describes something like the experience of a vocation. ‘I can remember being in Bristol – aged sixteen or seventeen,’ he replies, ‘and I bought a copy of Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections. I read this, and I thought, “This is what I want to be.” ’

  And so he was. Phillips trained as a psychotherapist under Masud Khan, a Freudian course of instruction. ‘Khan was wonderful for me,’ he says. He breaks off to recall an occasion when he missed the start of a session, and Khan mischievously observed, ‘I’m not going to say the obvious things about being late, except that you won’t be late for your own death.’

  Timing is everything. He had started his analysis at the end of a period, the 1960s and 70s, dominated by R. D. Laing, when psychoanalysis was prestigious, but by the mid-1980s psychoanalytic writing had become academic and turgid. Speaking to Paul Holdengräber in the Paris Review (2014), Phillips remarked:

  When I started in psychoanalysis—in British psychoanalysis—it was a very earnest and sentimental profession. There was a kind of vale-of-tears attitude to life, with the implication that life was almost certainly unbearable, that the really deep people were virtually suicidal, and it was a real struggle to believe that love was stronger than hate. I hardly ever came across an analyst, when I was training, who made me feel that they really loved sex. So it was very difficult to be a relatively happy person training to become a psychoanalyst.

  It’s time to talk about what Freud, in a famous essay on King Lear, once called ‘the necessity of dying’, and to explore what this might mean in relation to the experience of getting on in life. When, I ask, did Phillips first have an apprehension of death?

  ‘As a boy, I can remember driving up to see my grandparents,’ he replies, ‘when a magpie smashed into the windscreen. I was absolutely devastated, and I can remember saying, “The magpie will never be alive again.” ’

  Phillips seems to hold the memory up to the light. ‘It was as if I had an idea of extinction,’ he goes on. ‘At that moment, my childhood fantasy was “There’ll never be another magpie”, and that felt absolutely devastating. As I look back on it now, it feels as if it was about something being absolutely irretrievable and beyond my control. I felt totally helpless, as though something had gone for ever.’

  I wonder: was he frightened? ‘In memory,’ he replies, ‘it feels like a devastation but – thinking about it now – it must have been extremely frightening.’

  As a boy who kept tropical birds, Phillips was certainly aware of death in relation to the creatures he kept, but the shock of the magpie’s death was unprecedented. ‘No one I knew, or in our family circle, died until I was in my adolescence.’ Since then, at home and at work, he has learned to negotiate the experiences of loss and grief.

  His father died fourteen years ago, having been diagnosed with bowel cancer and given three weeks to live. Now the ‘nameless dread’ had morphed into a mood that was more philosophical. ‘On one occasion,’ he reports, ‘after my mother had told me he was not expected to survive the night, I went down to Cardiff, and found my father sitting up in bed, reading the newspaper.’ His father told him, ‘Last night, I dreamed I was dying, an
d it was an incredibly voluptuous pleasure.’ Phillips repeats the phrase, savouring its resonance.

  There were some more false alarms and then, he says, ‘When I wasn’t there, he did die.’ He adds, ‘I didn’t think of saying goodbye because I felt – and feel – that our relationship is ongoing. He’s still very present to me,’ he concludes.

  Something of the father’s serenity seems to have been passed on to the son. Phillips volunteers another, more recent memory – of his own near-death experience. He describes driving down the motorway with his partner, the professor of fashion Judith Clark. ‘The car starts going like this – ’ he gestures with a rolling movement of his hands ‘ – and then, quite suddenly, it became clear to both of us that the car was out of control, and we were going to die.’

  He pauses to let this information sink in. ‘And it was just fabulous.’ A smile. ‘It was one of the most ecstatic, intense experiences either of us has ever had.’ Phillips goes on, ‘What actually happened was that the car turned over six times, landed on its wheels, and we lived.’ Another ironic smile. ‘So: a miracle. But then there was a helicopter, and we were taken to Swindon hospital, where we were put in this room with very low light. And we both thought we were dead. We had this genuine experience that we’d actually died and were in an afterlife. Because of the dim lighting it was all rather filmic. We were just lying there and it was extraordinary. I suppose we were in shock.’ He stops in mid-flow to reflect on the memory. ‘As we talk about it now, I think of death as a relief and a release, or as an experience that is not an experience.’

  For a moment, Phillips the psychoanalyst places this fragment of autobiography in a professional context. None of his patients cease fretting about The End, he explains, but now wonders, ‘Why can’t we be Eastern about this, and just stop worrying about letting go . . . ?’

  Out of nowhere, I find myself recalling Lisa Jardine, a mutual friend, who died recently from breast cancer. There’s a pause in the conversation. ‘She was seventy-two,’ observes Phillips. We both look at each other, with the same thought. Yes, maybe we’ve only got ten years. After sixty, the passage of time gets easier to calibrate: a half-century is a comprehensible unit of time. We, who have been friends for more than thirty years now, know what ten years might feel like.

  ‘Loss and mourning is integral to our development,’ Phillips says. ‘Death is at the heart of psychoanalysis because the psychoanalytic life-story is plotted in terms of loss, which is often described as “a kind of death”. In my work, after my training as a child psychotherapist, I have seen so many people who have been profoundly disturbed by deaths in the family.’

  We return to Freud. Making friends with ‘the necessity of dying’, says Phillips, is a very optimistic statement, for Freud. ‘If we’re going to love realistically,’ he goes on, ‘we have to acknowledge transience – the full spectrum from pleasurable experiences to people actually dying.’ Here he quotes Henry James: ‘“The real is that which it is impossible not to know.”’ Among his patients, Phillips believes that the death is always hovering offstage in every conversation.

  ‘At each stage of the life cycle,’ he says, ‘everyone is preoccupied by it, even if they don’t always speak about it.’ He notes that there’s a great fear of oblivion with patients who have ‘a feeling of not having lived. Some people want to mourn the death of a life that never happened.’ This is one of Phillips’ favourite themes. I remember, on another occasion, his observation to me that ‘life is the lives one doesn’t have’. He also likes to quote the poet Randall Jarrell’s remark that ‘the ways we miss our lives are life’.

  As a stroke survivor, occasionally I can find myself mourning the life I’ve lost. Like any survivor, I have had to practise functioning from day to day free from the bitter taste of regret. One benefit of the ageing process, and the onset of the endgame, is that we acquire some forward-looking preoccupations, possibly unwelcome, but nonetheless replete with anticipation.

  I ask Phillips if he has a private, internal age, to which he replies, ‘If we’d had this conversation when we were forty – and perhaps we did – I’d have said thirty. But now, for the first time, I do feel my age. And I like it because I find it genuinely interesting.’

  *

  Phillips is fully engaged with the world. For himself, there is the daily routine of seeing private patients, and writing every Wednesday. He has three children, two girls and a boy; and his partner is a curator of dress at the London College of Fashion. ‘Like everyone else,’ he says, ‘I just have to live from day to day, taking one step at a time.’

  I’m not surprised that he disputes the cliché summary of advancing years. ‘I don’t think ageing is the loss of youth. Ageing is ageing. Every stage of the life cycle is potentially interesting. And it’s particularly interesting if you don’t think of it elegiacally, if you don’t think, “What have I lost?” but instead, “What can I do now?” There will be more possibilities when we are seventy.’

  This is a response echoed by the American playwright Wallace Shawn, who observed in a recent interview that ‘one of the nice things about the life of writing is that as you get older, you’re suddenly different and you make use of that in your work. And that’s quite nice because, for a lot of people, getting older and changing can be a sad experience that doesn’t provide that many benefits.’

  Phillips agrees that the changes associated with age sharpen his focus on life. ‘Choices become more imperative, and the question of what we are going to do with our time becomes more urgent now that we know it’s not infinite. Being much older means that you are again dependent – but now you’re an adult. No one has ever been that dependent, except as a baby. But as a baby you’re not that sentient. Old age gives us the first conscious experience of being dependent.’

  In the twenty-first century, modern medicine will resist the tide of almost any disease with antibiotics. Yet this does not always satisfy the needs of the elderly. Atul Gawande has addressed the discontent felt by those undergoing life-saving treatment towards a medical profession that treats the human frame while neglecting its mind and consciousness. ‘We’ve begun rejecting the institutionalized version of ageing and death,’ writes Gawande, ‘but we’ve not yet established our new norm. We’re caught in a transitional phase.’

  For many people, this ‘transitional’ aspect of old age becomes a struggle. Unreconciled to ageing, they conduct an undignified masquerade of youth that never fails to be ridiculous. This, inevitably, is an operatic rendering of the cognitive dissonance we bring to the endgame. But, of course, making friends with the ‘necessity of dying’ is sometimes little short of a miracle. ‘It’s amazing,’ says Phillips, ‘how much people will put up with. We say that life is sacred, but life can also be hell.’ In his long essay Darwin’s Worms, he expresses this resilience more eloquently: ‘People’s capacity to survive loss and even devastation is at once a banal and remarkable fact. We can’t help but be amazed by what people live through.’

  I observe that Hell is a literary and imaginative convention, to which he replies, ‘Books are one of the ways we think about death and dying.’ Phillips and I talk for a moment about the literature of death and dying. We both share a love of Death In Venice. Thanks to Visconti’s film, Thomas Mann’s short novel comes, as it were, with its own soundtrack, the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. The movie has a simplicity the novella resists, but Mann’s long story, which is set against an epidemic of cholera, is haunting and profound. The moment at which Gustave von Aschenbach crosses the lagoon to la Serenissima subtly evokes the transportation of the dead to the underworld:

  He had a feeling that something not quite usual was beginning to happen, that the world was undergoing a dreamlike alienation, becoming increasingly deranged and bizarre . . .

  Mann’s story, like all stories surrounding the imminent deathbed, strikes both of us as consoling. In summary, Phillips draws his own conclusion: ‘Conversations and literature: that’s how w
e acquire the language appropriate for dying. Once you have fallen out of a religious sensibility,’ he goes on, ‘you are a bit marooned. We’ve got medical language for the physiology of dying, and religious language for the meaning of dying. But in the middle there’s a void.’ Reflecting on that ‘void’, I wonder: ‘Do people who are dying, in your experience, think about a “good death”?’

  Matter-of-fact, he replies: ‘I think we all fear a degraded, painful end. Most people would probably describe it as hopefully pain-free, surrounded by a loving family.’

  At this reference to hospices, Phillips becomes quite animated. ‘Hospices are really interesting places,’ he observes. He recalls one of his former patients who wrote to say he was dying in a hospice. ‘Could I come and see him? So for six weeks I saw him once a week, and it was an extraordinary experience.’

  ‘How extraordinary?’

  ‘Well, in the first place you are with a group of people who are definitely dying. And in the second place, people in hospices are often left to themselves. So they are, as it were, alone in their own delirium. I found I was having a different kind of conversation. It was as though I was interrupting this man’s dream. He was certainly talking to me, but he was very much in his own world.’

  ‘Was it therefore pointless?’

  ‘No, it was the exact opposite. It was very definitely worth it for me, and it was imperative for him. He really wanted to talk about his relationships with two women in his life. Things that he felt ashamed of, regretful about, and enraged by. Things he had never been able to articulate before.’ Phillips, who has now been in conversation for more than an hour, pauses to add, ‘He didn’t want to die with things unsaid about personal matters that had, as it were, been set aside.’ This patient had been, it turned out, a man in love with two women. ‘He wanted an internal resolution.’