Adam Philips:

– Psychoanalysis is about the unacceptable and about love, two things we may prefer to keep apart but which Freud found to be inextricable. .. one way to talk about psychoanalysis is to say that Freud found love was compatible though often furtively with all that it was meant to exclude. There are no experts on love. And love whatever else it is, is terror.

– psychoanalysis starts with the story of how we are unable to bear the fruits of our passions; terrorised by an excess of feeling and by the impossibility of desire (see early dev. Oedipus; frustrated passion drives us out of the family to seek satisfaction elsewhere)

– terror drives us to seek experts (meaning making; containment, domination, flight from terror – parental arms?)

– psychoanalysis aims to make fear bearable; to make it ordinary, through conversation with another. Which raises the question ‘What are people for?’ and what are analysts for, which immediately raises the question of experts, our relation to them, and psychoanalysis’s relationship to experts and expertise (their own included)

– Our relationship to experts is a picture of the way we need (me: think how relates to the Gove world of ‘enough of experts’). Raises questions of why and when and how we crave experts, and what these experts may look like (e.g. we don’t prize our polititians on their ability to see an opponents view or tolerate two competing views of the world, or have doubts or say they were wrong)

-So (a) what are psychoanalysts for? (b) What does Freud’s idea of the unconscious do to the idea of experts and expertise i.e. being a skilled, able practitioner of anything at all? The idea of the unconscious provides a new collaborator for thinking and being, but it is also a new source of terror. Brings a contradiction to the analyst – how can they be an expert that is skilled in shining light on a realm that is the opposite of what makes expertise? The concept of the unconscious means we are not the masters of our own house. We cannot know ourselves completely. We are not driven only by conscious thought. But expertise is mastery.

– Analyst is a figure for the ironies of expertise. How to be skilled but not dominate or assert superiority to quell doubt (the doubt that must exist if one is doing something novel or unusual, as psychoanalysis does)

– He critiques current psychoanalysis for falling for its own importance, taking itself and it’s professionalisation too seriously. The very idea of training almost makes no sense if what an analyst has to do is learn how not do to what is doing and carry on doing it anyway. Tolerate not knowing, not making sense, not having firm pathways down which to funnel meaning.

– Non-compliant versions of psychoanalysis: He notes the conflicts between of different schools of thought within PA. Splitting of groups is very ‘psychoanalytic’ i.e. about dissenting voices which an analyst is trained to hear. But can the analyst hear them or is he at risk of patronising them? How to keep an openness and not become compliant? To sustain competence he must resist his own authority.

-should be interested in keeping itself interesting not keeping itself important.

-is about not knowing; ambiguity, learning about our ignorance. Spend too much time together and they start to speak knowingly as if they have understand something, rather than that they are only telling stories about stories all of which are open to many interpretations. They can’t be the experts on plausible interpretations.

-Analysis has unusual capacity to unsettle and to comfort. And we cannot have one without the other. There is no comfort to be experienced without a preceding state of discomfort.

– Analyst should ask when practicing, not are they any good or getting it right but much more terrorising question of ‘what kind of person do I want to be?’ This question leads to terror, and for this question there are no experts.