SPEAKER 1: It's my
privilege to introduce
the essayist and
psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips.
Adam Phillips.
His talk will be entitled On
the Vacancies of Attention.
Adam Phillips was formerly
principal psychologist
at the Charing Cross
Hospital in London.
He's now an analyst
in private practice.
The New Yorker has
described him as Britain's
foremost psychoanalytic writer.
He's the author of many books.
And from his first sort
of classic really account
of Winnicott, which
I think is still
the best single
account of Winnicott
there is, to most
recently a book
entitled Unforbidden Pleasures.
Adam is a regular
contributor to London Review
of Books, New York Times, The
Observer Raritan, Salmagundi,
and Threepenny Review.
He's often to be
heard on the radio
too if you live in Britain.
I am going to keep this
introduction brief.
It has to be because I
admire Adam's essays so much
that it's really hard to
say anything about them.
But I'll try and
say something, which
is that there's a line in
Adam's essay "Narcissism, For
and Against," which
is a wonderful essay,
in which Adam points out
that the true fact that forms
of closure are
easier to describe
than forms of openness.
And in the context of
[INAUDIBLE] narcissism,
this is, of course,
about openness or closure
to the world, and
something that we've
been talking about
today, something
we're talking about broadly
under the rubric of attention.
But it strikes me
that's very true.
And Adam's essays are
in the Arnoldian term,
adequate to their form.
That is to say, as essays,
they really do what--
everything you'd ever
wanted an essay to do.
It does.
I mean, the essay
is an experiment.
And you do feel like, when
you've read one of his essays,
that your view on the
world has been changed.
And I think the greatest essays
in what we might call the essay
tradition, do this.
And I was reading
through again Adam's work
over the last few weeks.
And I was trying to think of a
clever or adequate formulation
for describing what
they're often about.
And I think one of the
things they're often about
is something very,
very important.
That is to say, they're
very often about openness
to the world, what we
might call facing reality.
And in a sense, they
are, in the sort
of Freudian line
of contribution,
a great resource for thinking
about that difficult question
in Freudian psychoanalysis
which Freud called the reality
principle.
And if it's more to
be just something
you kind of bash your
head up against--
if it's going to be
something richer,
if it's going to be something
we're all going to enjoy,
then there isn't really
a more important subject
to talk about.
And there's no one I know
who talks about it better.
So I'll pass the floor to him.
ADAM PHILLIPS: This
is the end of the day.
Can everybody hear?
This is the end of
the day, so I suggest
that you listen to this with
free floating attention, as in,
don't bother to concentrate.
This is called On
Vacancies of Attention
and the epigraph to
the first section
is from Adam Smith's
Theory of Moral Sentiments.
It's the end of a sentence.
"To be observed, to be
attended to, to be taken
notice of with sympathy,
complacency, and approbation."
In 1920, Freud added a
passage from Tristram Shandy
to the chapter "Symptomatic
and Chance Actions"
in The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life.
Quote, "In the field
of symptomatic acts,
too," he wrote, in one of
many such acknowledgements
in his work,
"psychoanalytic observation
must concede priority
to imaginative writers.
It can only repeat what
they've said long ago."
End of quote.
If psychoanalysis can only
repeat what imaginative writers
have said long ago,
it's as though lessons
haven't been learned, that
we've been insufficiently
attentive readers,
or that we're unduly
resistant to the provocations
of imaginative writers.
It's psychoanalytic observation
that must concede priority,
presumably, to the
observation of what
he calls imaginative writers.
It's the quality of attention
and the need for repetition
and the links between
attention and repetition
that exercises Freud here and
indeed in The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life.
The subtitle of his book,
On Forgetfulness, Slips
of the Tongue, Inadvertent
Actions, Superstitions,
and Mistakes, is a
catalog of inattention
and its discontents.
After his preamble, Freud quotes
something that he says, quote,
"was drawn to his attention
from Sterne's novel."
"I'm not at all surprised,"
Tristram's father
says in volume six, "that
Gregory of Nazianzum,
upon observing the hasty and
untoward gestures of Julian,
should foretell he would
one day become an apostate,
or that St. Ambrose should
turn his Amanuensis out
of doors because of an
indecent motion of his head,
which went backwards and
forwards like a flail.
"Or that Democritus
should conceive Protagoras
to be a scholar, from
seeing his bind up a faggot,
and thrusting it, as he did,
the small twigs inwards.
There are 1,000
unnoticed openings,
continued my father, which
let a penetrating eye at once
into a man's soul.
And I maintain it, added
he, that a man of sense
does not lay down his
hat on coming into a room
or take it up in
going out of it,
but something escapes
which discovers him."
End of quote.
What has been drawn
to Freud's attention,
that he is now drawing
to our attention,
is Sterne's account of paying
a certain kind of attention.
Attention to quote,
"the 1,000 openings,
which let a penetrating eye
at once into a man's soul."
And by the same token, to
what may be missed either
by inattention or by not
paying this kind of attention
to the consequences of not
noticings of everyday life.
But without the penetrating
eye, there are no openings.
It's the penetrating eye
that is the precondition
in Sterne's overtly sexual
image for such openings.
And Freud's book is an account
of the new penetrating eye
and penetrating ear
of the psychoanalyst.
In retrospect, we can say Freud
realized that his patients were
in search of a new
kind of attention,
a new kind of attention
for their inattentions.
If you believed, as Freud
was beginning to do,
in the value and efficacy
of psychoanalytic treatment,
you could say that their
symptoms were provocations that
had misfired, that they
were unconsciously addressed
or in search of a
different kind of doctor.
And this new doctor,
as we shall see,
was defined by the
quality of his attention
and of his inattention.
Freud is describing in
these early formative books,
Three Essays on Sexuality, the
Joke book, Interpreting Dreams
and Psychopathology of
Everyday Life, what he takes
to be a new kind of attention--
psychoanalytic attention
and interpretive
attention, that is
in the service of telling
and useful descriptions
of unconscious motivation.
But what is perhaps of interest
in Freud's use of Tristram
Shandy and that Freud
doesn't comment on,
is that Stern's examples are
about predicting the future,
whereas Freud's examples in
The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life are about
predicting the past.
They are conjectural
descriptions
of desires from the past
that are active in a person's
present life.
Slips are uncompleted
provocations.
In actuality, Freud's new
science makes very few, if any,
predictive claims about
a person's future.
Psychoanalytic
treatment was about
the unpredictable consequences
of certain evolving
acknowledgements.
All psychoanalysis
could reveal was
the nature, which was in part
the history, of the patient's
desire.
In and of itself, the
psychoanalytic attention
given to this could
not, by definition,
disclose anything about
the patient's future.
Tristram's father
suggests, not unlike Freud,
that there is virtually nothing
a person does that is not
remarkably revealing.
Quote, "A man of sense
does not lay down his hat
in coming into a room or take
it up in going out of it,
but something escapes
which discovers him."
A man of sense, because as 18th
century sensible creatures,
what people do make sense?
And even though by
implication, we may be guarded,
some something escapes
which discovers us
and which reveals us, as though
whether we want to or not,
we make something
of ourselves known.
We give ourselves away.
And this giving ourselves
away is a making sense.
Sense can be made of it
and it can make sense.
Our inattention
invites attention.
So we're more communal
and more communicative,
more potentially in
contact with each other
than we're always aware
of or want to know about--
as though what Freud called
symptomatic acts, many of which
are of course acts of
apparent inattention,
like slips and bungled acts,
are a kind of love test
to the world, a testing of
attention and engagement.
As though symptomatic
acts were like jokes,
something people either
get or they don't.
As though acts of inattention
are courting attention, and are
themselves provocations.
Or at least a question
is raised by Freud.
Are so-called symptomatic
acts an unconscious attempt
to provoke a certain
kind of attention,
or does a certain
kind of attention
make them symptomatic acts?
Are they provocations by
intention, as it were,
however unconscious, or does
a certain kind of attention
turn them into provocations?
When is provocation in
the eye of the beholder,
or does it expose the
eye of the beholder?
Freud is interested in
the mistakes people make
and of what can be made
of what people make.
Clearly, a slip of the tongue
made while buying a newspaper
is different from a slip
made to one's analyst.
And the phrase, "a man
of sense," of course,
meant something different
in the 18th century
than it does or could now.
One way of thinking
about this is
to wonder what happens to
all the symptomatic acts,
the huge majority that are
actually unattended to?
What happens in
Sterne's language
if something escapes which
discovers a person and nobody
notices, which
happens all the time?
The pragmatic answer
is they go on doing it
or find new ways of
doing it in the hope
that someone will notice it.
The dismaying answer
is they give up,
that a joke won't amuse
you unless it does.
In Freud's story,
it's worth noticing,
and we'll come back to
this, that the privileging
of recognition
doesn't always tell
us very much or enough about
where it is assumed recognition
might lead, this recognition
that, of course, depends
on a certain kind of attention.
It's been easy to believe
that underlying our instincts,
our putative needs
and wants, and indeed,
the precondition for
them, is, in fact,
a need for recognition.
Needs without anyone
able to acknowledge them
are torments,
provocations that misfire.
But what Freud adds,
and not only Freud,
is that we're
seeking recognition
of our inattentions, and
that attention is itself
a way of seeking recognition.
Inattention, as every
child and parent knows,
is its own kind of provocation.
If Freud was a
pragmatist, we could
say that he was interested
in the uses of inattention.
Western modernity
since the 19th century,
Jonathan Crary writes in
Suspensions of Perception,
quote, "has demanded that
individuals define and shape
themselves in terms of a
capacity for paying attention.
That is, for a
disengagement from a broader
field of attraction, where
the visual are auditory,
for the sake of
isolating or focusing
on a reduced number of stimuli."
End of quote.
Attention is
ineluctably selective.
It's made possible
by inattention.
As if by the same token
as Crary intimates,
individuals define and shape
themselves by what they fail
or refuse to pay attention to.
And indeed, it will
be this question
of the reasons for inattention,
the reasons being as much
of a provocation
as the intentions,
that Freud addresses.
The question of whether and to
what extent these intentions
are refusals or failures
or incapacities, or indeed,
provocations, and what
these inattentions might
be in the service of.
If as Crary writes,
quote, "The articulation
of a subject in terms
of attentive capacities
simultaneously disclose
the subject incapable
of conforming to such
disciplinary imperatives,"
we're left wondering why
impossible attentive capacities
might be demanded
and what attention
has to do with conformity.
What Crary calls attentive
capacities conforming
to disciplinary
imperatives always
involves the imposition
of an essentialism.
There is something to which,
because of who we supposedly
are, we should be attending.
Certainly, in Freud's
increasingly essentialist view,
there is civilization
and its discontents,
because civilization
makes us pay attention
to the wrong things.
And when we pay attention
to the right things,
our instinctual life, we
may increase our pleasure,
and by doing so,
increase our suffering.
But before the later and
abiding disillusionments
of civilization and
its discontents,
and while Freud was still
in the process of becoming
the committed essentialist
he turned out to be,
the younger Freud's
question was,
what are the preconditions
for inattention?
And then, to what can
inattention lead us?
One thing inattention
could lead to, of course,
was psychoanalysis.
It was the provocations
of inattention, what kind
of attention the
inattentions of his patients
called up in him, that
Freud would elaborate on.
Psychoanalysis, as
we shall see, was
to be a language that
cultivated an interest in
and a commitment to inattention,
and the kind of attention
and inattention we
can bring to it.
So put it in another
kind of language,
to talk about attention
is also to talk
about the two familiar
foundations of liberalism--
the supposedly autonomous,
independent individual
and the supposedly free market.
Psychoanalysis asks, what
does attention depend upon?
And what is the exchange
that is attention?
What is the exchange that is
attention possibly be free of?
But I want first, to talk about
and return to Tristram Shandy
by way of Johnson's
contemporary fable,
Rasselas, for earlier and
instructive ways of describing
the uses of inattention,
ways that surface, I think,
unwittingly or wittingly, in
the work of Marion Milner,
a member of what became known as
the middle or independent group
in British psychoanalysis.
And we should,
perhaps, bear in mind
that it was famously
Johnson's view
that Sterne's provocation
would never hold our attention.
Quote, "Nothing odd
will do for long,"
Johnson remarked in 1776.
"Tristram Shandy did not last."
The epigraph to
the second section
is Johnson's definition of the
word "odd" in his dictionary.
"Odd, not noticed, not taken
into the common account,
unheeded, strange,
unaccountable, fantastical,
particular, unlucky, unlikely,
in appearance, improper."
Samuel Johnson's The
History of Rasselas,
Prince of Abyssinia
of 1759 begins
with a description of a palace
in a wide and fruitful valley,
where the Emperor's
children live
until the order of succession
calls them to the throne.
It's described as
an idyll, in which,
quote, "the blessings
of nature were collected
and its evils extracted
and excluded."
A kind of 18th century
orientalist gated community.
It's a place of peace,
serenity, and beauty,
without challenge or threat.
Once a year, the emperor
would visit his children,
and during the eight
days of his visit, quote,
"Everyone that
resided in the valley
was required to propose
whatever might contribute
to make seclusion
pleasant, to fill up
the vacancies of attention and
lessen the tediousness of time.
Every desire was
immediately granted.
All the artifices of
pleasure were called
to gladden the festivity."
End of quote.
It is clear that all is not well
in the valley, that something
must be lacking
if there is a need
to lessen the
tediousness of time,
if there are vacancies
of attention.
There is some lesson in this
lessening that seems so urgent.
The hope is that the artifices
of pleasure will do the trick
and yet, each year
the emperor returns,
the malady is once
again addressed,
but it never goes away.
It is, of course, the
danger of living apparently
satisfied in an over-organized
environment, that Johnson is so
pointedly alerting us to at the
very beginning of the story.
The terror is of some
version of pastoral,
or some version of social
engineering, in which we
are entombed in our supposed
preferences and ideals.
What is absent in what
is called notably,
"the happy valley"
is the tension
of desiring, the freedom to
think about what is missing
and what might be missed.
Or as Johnson
suggests, in what we
might think of wrongly as a
more contemporary vocabulary,
enjoyment can be used
to preempt desire.
Quote, this is from Rasselas.
"I've already enjoyed too much.
Give me something to
desire," the Prince Rasselas
declares in a chapter entitled,
"The Wants of Him That
Wants Nothing."
It is the ways in
which satisfaction
can sabotage desire that
Johnson wants us to think about
in his moral tale.
And he connects this, as we
do in the modern vocabulary
of psychoanalysis, with
attention and its vacancies.
So much depends on
where our attention is.
If acculturation is,
among other things,
the organizing of attention,
or the organizing of desire
as the organizing of
attention, then there
is a tension, as
Johnson intimates,
between what we are
supposed to attend to
and what we find ourselves
wanting to attend to.
We have an emperor's sages
and artifices of pleasure
to help us with our
vacancies of attention.
Johnson, the only great
writer who wrote a dictionary
and so provokes a unique
attention to his words,
defines vacant as empty,
void, but also as free,
unencumbered, as quote,
"thoughtless, empty
of thought," but also
as being at leisure.
Rasselas the Prince has
to leave the happy valley.
Quote, "He resolved to
obtain some knowledge
of the ways of men, the one
thing he couldn't find or find
out about in the happy valley."
It was, Johnson writes,
Rasselas' curiosity,
a source of inexhaustible
inquiry, that got him out--
a desire for a certain
kind of knowledge,
a knowledge of other people,
strangers to the happy valley.
And a question then, about
why such knowledge was wanted.
Freedom, or rather
change, is described
as a shift in attention.
And vacancies of attention are
the preconditions for change.
And so we need to be
alert, Johnson intimates,
to the ways in which systems
or regimes or vocabularies
try to preempt
vacancies of attention,
and to what kind of vacancies of
attention they tend to incite.
Vacancies of attention is a
phrase worth attending to,
not least because it
suggests that leisure,
with all its economic
associations--
that at leisure,
unencumbered, we
are in a different
kind of elsewhere.
In such vacancies, significant
realizations may occur.
Gaps in knowledge may be
revelatory or inspiring or
confounding.
Other desires may
float into view.
And because it
makes us wonder what
we are doing when
we are filling up
the vacancies of our attention
and what attention might
be or be like, how we picture
it, if it requires filling
or can be empty.
And if filling as is Johnson
defines it in his dictionary,
quote, "to make full,
to engage, to employ, "
what then is empty or unengaged
or unemployed attention?
What are we doing, if
anything, in the vacancies
of our attention?
These are, of course, also the
questions that will eventually
inspire psychoanalytic inquiry.
But it's almost as though
Johnson is wondering here what
or where attention is
when it isn't there.
Or more pragmatically,
what happens
to attention, to
what he calls desire
when there is nothing
to organize it,
nothing sufficient
for it to focus on?
Once we're invited to imagine
the absence of attention,
attention as something that
can be absent or absent itself,
attention itself
becomes more perplexing.
The vacancies of
attention suggest
that there is, as it were,
more than one of them.
And indeed, that our attention
may be also beyond our control,
or that control might be the
wrong word, as it often is,
to use about our attention.
The faux optimism at the
beginning of Rasselas
is that, with the
arrival of the emperor,
these vacancies of
attention can be filled.
As it turns out, it is
only Rasselas' curiosity
that can do the trick.
An act of curiosity, Johnson
defines in his dictionary, as,
quote, "a nice experiment."
To be curious,
Johnson writes, is,
quote, "to be attentive
to, exact, nice, subtle."
There are vacancies
of attention and there
is the nice experiment
of curiosity
to which they can lead.
To attend, Johnson
writes, is, quote,
"to fix the mind upon," with
both meanings of it in play.
The mind is repaired
and organized, calmed,
or stilled by concentrating
on something external.
And then there is
the other meaning
of attend, which is
somehow complementary.
Quote, "to wait on, to a company
as an inferior or a servant."
The mind that always runs the
risk, for Johnson, of becoming
unfixed, unmoored,
depends like a servant
on his master, the external
world, that he serves,
a world created by God and
to which he must attend.
The external world
keeps us sane.
The internal world, for
Johnson, is a potential fall
into madness.
Johnson's terror is the
tyrannies of the secluded mind.
So attention, for
Johnson, is something
he must always keep his eye on.
An attender, Johnson
writes in his dictionary,
is, quote, "a companion,
an associate."
The critic Christian
Thorne instructively
links Johnson's filling up
of the vacancies of attention
to lessen the
tediousness of time
in Rasselas with Sterne's
contemporary notion
of the hobby horse
in Tristram Shandy.
It's a useful link because
Sterne is as preoccupied with
states of attention as his
contemporary Johnson was,
preoccupied by the ways in
which we can and cannot,
in some new sense, choose both
the object and the quality
of our attention, and this being
both a modern and a provoking
preoccupation.
Digression as Matt
Bevis has written,
being Tristram's signature
tune and the life
of the book, another name for
inattention and distraction.
Sterne's Uncle Toby and his
absurd and absorbing obsession
with the war he fought in
and the wound he suffered--
quote, "The wound in my Uncle
Toby's groin, which he received
at the Siege of Namur, made
famous the traditional notion
of the hobby horse and
its provoking history.
It's not incidental here
that a hobby horse is once
a self cure and a consequence
of a wound and a war.
And a hobby horse,
by definition,
organizes and absorbs the
attention of its rider
and itself provokes attention.
A hobby horse, like a
symptom, is a rule by which
other people must abide.
Clearly, for Sterne, the whole
notion of the hobby horse
raises the question about
the paying of attention.
And, of course, about
our being able to tell
the difference between what may
and may not be a hobby horse.
In a letter of
January 1760, Sterne
pursues the divided and dividing
question about hobby horses,
and so about how a
man might be defined
by the nature of his attention.
Quote, "The ruling passions
and the wonderings of the heart
are the very things which
mark and distinguish
a man's character, in which
I would as soon leave out
a man's head as his
hobby horse," quote.
Tell me what attracts or absorbs
a person's attention and I will
tell you who they are, would
be one way of saying this,
though not quite Sterne's.
Sterne's modern
editor, Melvyn New,
glosses Sterne's hobby
horse of a man's character
with an excerpt from
one of Sterne's sermons.
To understand character, Sterne
writes about Herod, we must,
quote, "distinguish the
principle and ruling
passion which leads
the character,
and separate that from
the other parts of it.
We often think of ourselves
inconsistent creatures
when we are the
furthest from it.
And all the variety of shapes
and contradictory appearances
we put on are, in truth, but
so many different attempts
to gratify the same
governing appetite."
End of quote.
The consistency of
character Sterne
proposes here is all to do
with consistency and abiding
forms of attention.
The same governing appetite,
the same object of desire.
We're not distracted, we
just look as though we are,
Sterne suggests.
There is a pattern even
in our inattentions.
Vacancies of attention
are absorptions
elsewhere as intent and
intense as lusts and pastimes.
We're not divided
against ourselves,
but far more of a piece than
we can let ourselves know.
We're not in any
sense decensored
but just in states of repeating
and repeated displacement.
Our attention is only
for more of the same.
The idea of being
decentered defends us
against the tyranny
of our focus.
Sterne suggests we are
always already filled
with attention to what he calls
the same governing appetite,
whether or not it's
deemed to be of value.
So in what sense can we or do we
choose, in the telling phrase,
to pay attention?
Johnson's question in Rasselas,
like Sterne's question
in Tristram Shandy is, to what
should we give our attention
and to what do we
give our attention?
But Sterne's other
question in Tristram Shandy
is how seriously should we and
can we take such questions?
Tristram Shandy,
a parody of sages
and a skeptical celebration
of the artifices of pleasure,
is itself, as Tristram tells us,
the story of a cock and a bull.
"Lord, said my mother,"
Tristram Shandy
famously ends, "What is
all this story about?
A cock and a bull, said Yorick,
and one of the best of its kind
I ever heard."
The kind being, in
Sterne's editor's words,
a story without direction,
rambling, idle, often
incredible, like
free association.
Sterne is making us
wonder which stories
and perhaps, particularly,
essentialist stories
about character are not
cock and bull stories, i.e.
lacking a certain coherence
and plausibility and point.
Cock and bull stories
like Tristram Shandy
absorb our attention,
and Sterne wants
us to wonder whether that
is the point or the problem.
What are we doing
when we pay attention
to the attention people
pay to their hobby horses?
Hobby horses that
are, in all but name,
a species of conversion.
The hobby horse,
akin in some ways
to certain
psychoanalytic accounts
of so-called perverse states of
mind, is absorption with a view
to the stopping of time,
as though a hobby horse was
a form of arrested development
as arrested attention,
a refuge from the future.
And it is indeed this
link between deprivation
and attention that Johnson
refers to as vacancies
of attention that Sterne also
picks up on, as though it is
deprivation itself
that stimulates--
that both forces and fixes
our attention and can make us
attend to our attention--
attention being the form
and the medium of our desire
prompted by the felt
lack of something.
Attention is given
to felt absences.
In chapter 17 of book
six of Tristram Shandy,
Sterne has a passage about
writing and attention.
And once again, as
with Johnson, it's
interestingly the language
of fullness and emptiness,
appetite and deprivation,
that Sterne has recourse to.
Tristram writes, he tells
us, quote, "one half full
and the other fasting,
or writes it all full
and corrects it fasting,
or writes it fasting
and corrects it full.
When I write full,"
he tells us, "I
write free from the
cares as well as
the terrors of the world.
I count not the
number of my scars,
nor does my fancy go forth
into dark entries and byways
to antedate my stabs.
But when I compose fasting,
tis a different history.
I pay the world all
possible attention
and respect and have as
great a share while it
lasts of that under-strapping
virtue of discretion
as the best of you."
End of quote.
When he is full, he is
carefree and unfrightened.
When he is fasting,
it is and perhaps he
has a different history.
He does count his scars,
go forth into dark entries
and bycorners to antedate,
i.e. explain his wounds.
And this is what he
calls paying the world
all possible
attention and respect.
When he writes full, he is
not paying this attention
and respect.
Fasting, deprivation creates
this attention and respect
for the world.
And what is then attended to--
his wounds and
cares and terrors.
But what is notable
about Sterne is
that he doesn't privilege
either kind of writing,
but needs both.
It is the combination of the
carefree and the terrorized
that works for him.
Quote, "Betwixt both,
I write a careless,
kind of a civil, nonsensical,
good humored Shandian book,
which will do all your hearts
good and all your heads too,
provided you understand it."
What is required in
the writing, though,
is paying the world all possible
attention and respect and also
not doing so--
the inattention prized
alongside the attention--
whereas with the
hobby horse there's
very little paying the world all
possible attention and respect.
And in the all too familiar
phrase, paying attention,
Sterne reminds us that
attention costs us something.
And we are likely and
prone in a culture of money
to liken attention
to money, and so
to be thinking of investments
and returns, profit
and loss, gains and drawbacks.
And by the same token,
as it were, to wonder
what attention might be like
if it was not like paying--
paying for something,
paying with something,
if it was not a
kind of investment.
If, say, attention was more like
affection or desire or love.
The attentive,
terrified, wounded,
and explaining self is not
realer or most significant
for Sterne than the inattentive,
carefree, even careless,
and fanciful,
unintimidated self.
Sterne wants us to pay
attention to both, whatever may
be disrespected in the process.
One without the
other, he suggests,
would make for a careworn,
uncivil, sensible, humorless,
un-Shandian book
or a hobby horse.
Neither the fasting
nor the full self
are a diversion or
refuge from each other.
They are inextricable
and mutually enlivening.
Attention and its
diversions and distraction,
Sterne wants to persuade us,
are inextricable-- in fact,
mutually enlivening.
But as Thorne reminds us,
hobbies and hobby horses
are described
conventionally as what
he calls [? divertisimal, ?]
diversions
of leisured, of the
affluent, of the inhabitants
of the happy valley.
And this is, of course,
the traditional topos
of sacred and secular moralists.
There is what we
should be attending to
and what we should not be.
And we know from Sterne that
the wound and the hobby horse
also somehow go together, as do
the full and the fasting self.
And we know from Johnson
that vacancies of attention
are signs of unease.
All morality
depends upon knowing
where and how to pay attention.
And to pay attention to
morality is also always
to pay attention to attention.
So for example, we're
familiar, in one
of our contemporary languages,
with the idea that it is trauma
that organizes and
narrows, that organizes
by narrowing attention.
Wounds and hobby
horses go together,
as do wounds and
vacancies of attention.
And that morality, like
hobbies and hobby horses
and so-called
sexual perversions,
can be described as, among other
things, a self cure for trauma,
even if that could
also just mean
the trauma of being
desiring creatures.
Johnson says in Rasselas,
when we are distracted,
we are oppressed and impressed
by the tediousness of time.
When we fob ourselves
off with distractions,
when we're just keeping
busy, we are, in fact, bored.
Attention nourishes us,
distraction depletes us.
Attention redeems the time.
It makes it feel worth
living and living out.
Good attention
makes a good life.
With its appeal to
so-called experience,
this has the reassuring
clarity that Sterne,
in his more contemporary
and perhaps salutory way,
warns us away from.
To define is to distrust,
Sterne says in Tristram Shandy,
and we can tell the
difference between attention
and distraction, between
fasting and fullness,
but the difference only matters
because of the combinations
that then become possible.
To define may be to
distrust, but it also
is to make combination possible.
It's not the conversion of
distraction into good attention
that we should seek,
in Sterne's view,
but the affinities between them.
Sterne promotes
only the attention
that cooperates
with inattention,
and that's why the difference
between them matters.
So when and if you
promote inattention,
what are you promoting?
The vacancies of attention
in the happy valley
were for Rasselas
the sign of need,
the preconditions for change.
The vacancies of attention
and the tediousness of time
to which they lead
inspired his curiosity
and his necessary escape
from the happy valley.
The preconditions for
Tristram's writing
are paying the world all the
possible attention and respect
and also not doing so, as though
attention without inattention
disables.
Johnson and Sterne, that is to
say, in their very different
ways, are promoting
loss of attention
and are paying attention to it.
They want us to
see the provocation
of our vacancies of attention.
The third, and fortunately,
final section of this paper
has an epigraph from Henry
Adams' The Education of Henry
Adams, and it's a sentence--
"Some great generalization
which would finish one's
clamor to be educated."
I've used Rasselas
and Tristram Shandy
as a way of talking about
the uses of inattention,
but I'm not here, in the
words of David [INAUDIBLE],
quote, "setting out to
write intellectual history
or tell a story of influence."
I want, rather, to trace
a set of common concerns,
concerns carried by an
odd, deep, and persistent
vocabulary.
I want to use Johnson
and Sterne here
to show that a line can be
drawn, though not, as I say,
necessarily one of direct
and acknowledged influence,
from Sterne and Johnson
through to Freud
and what became
known as the Middle
Group in British psychoanalysis.
And particularly, then
Marion Milner's interest
in what she calls narrow
and wide angled attention.
One way of saying
this is that Freud
had described psychoanalysis
as a new kind of treatment
based for both the doctor and
the patient on inattention--
a treatment founded on the idea
of not in the traditional way
concentrating, a treatment
in which inattention
was the instrument not
the obstacle and for both
the doctor and the patient.
The psychoanalyst
was a physician
who listened with
so-called free floating
or evenly suspended attention.
Quote, "He must give no
special of a priori importance
to any aspect of the
patient discourse,"
and who listened in this way
to an unprecedented freely
associating patient,
who was invited
to speak without
attending to his words--
to speak without needing
either to tell a story
or to mean what he says,
without, in so far as
it was possible,
choosing his words.
Quote, "selecting nothing
and emitting nothing
from what comes into his mind"--
as through Freud is saying,
only in states of inattention,
can certain provocations work--
the provocations, that
is, of unconscious desire.
In Recommendations to Physicians
Practicing Psychoanalysis
in 1912, Freud writes,
quote, "Just as the patient
must relate everything that
his self-observation can detect
and keep back all the logical
and affective objections that
seek to induce him to make
a selection from among them,
so the doctor must put himself
in a position to make use
of everything he is told for
the purposes of interpretation,
and recognizing the concealed
unconscious material
without substituting a
censorship of his own
for the selection the
patient has foregone."
End of quote.
The wrong kind of
attention here,
the attention that both analyst
and patient must suspend,
is censored attention.
Freud is suggesting here
that attention is primarily,
if not essentially, always
already thoroughly censored,
or selective, as we
say more blandly.
That looking is
a way of stopping
us seeing, that talking as
a way of stopping speaking,
that listening can be a way of
stopping ourselves hearing--
that what we call
attending can be
a process of motivated
exclusion, that we concentrate
and focus in order to occlude
and temper what we might see,
that attention evaluates,
prohibits, and preempts,
but often unconsciously without
our, as yet, being aware of it.
Psychoanalysis tracks
what attention wants
and doesn't want to admit.
Freud is wondering
what we might attend to
and how we might attend when
and if the censorship is
in abeyance.
And this means
paradoxically what
we might be attending to if
we stopped paying attention.
What we call our attention
has been tampered with,
so we must avoid, Freud suggests
in the same paper, quote,
"a danger which it
is inseparable from,
the exercise of
deliberate attention."
For as soon as any
one deliberately
concentrates his attention
to a certain degree,
he begins to select from
the material before him.
One point will be fixed in his
mind with particular clearness
and some other will be
correspondingly disregarded.
And in making this
selection, he will
be following his
expectations or inclinations.
This, however, is precisely
what must not be done.
In making the selection, if
he follows his expectations,
he is in danger of never finding
anything but what he already
knows.
And if he follows
his inclinations,
he will certainly falsify
what he may perceive.
It must not be forgotten
that the things one hears
are, for the most part,
things whose meaning is only
recognized later on.
This is Freud's version
of the Sufi proverb--
don't learn, listen.
If we deliberately concentrate
our attention, all we discover
is our expectations and
assumptions and presumptions.
These are what we already know.
When we concentrate,
we can be concentrating
on our prejudices.
Our so-called knowledge,
in this version,
is all assumption,
presumption, and preference.
Freud offers two prescriptions.
Suspend deliberate
concentration and attention,
and allow meaning to
take time to emerge.
Don't, that is to say,
jump to conclusions
or think that you know anything
other than your assumptions.
A certain kind of inattention
leads to the right kind
of attentiveness.
Our all too selective attention
feels like second nature.
And our selective
attention, in this version,
is a protection
racket, protecting us
from too disturbing a sense of
our and other people's desire.
Selective attention, we might
call the will to define.
And the will to define, we
can call the will to exclude.
When Sterne writes
in Tristram Shandy,
"to define us to
distrust," he's asking
us what or who should we
put our trust in, and so
what we should be attending to.
To define, Johnson writes in his
albeit definitive dictionary,
is quote, "to circumscribe,
to mark the limit,
to bound, to determine,
to decide, to decree."
Attention, circumscribed,
bounded, determined, decided,
decreed with limits
marked, is, of course,
the project of Freud's
ego as it contends
with a concerted disarray
of instinctual life.
In Freud's story,
this is what the ego
strives more ore less
forlornly to do with
and to unconscious desire.
And this is what makes
the ego essentially
an author of cock
and bull stories.
And the ego does this by
contriving apparent vacancies
and narrownesses of attention.
In Freud's story,
where there is desire,
there's always attention
and vacancies of attention.
Where there is
desire, definition
does the work of distrust and
containment and re-assurance.
Attention, in the psychoanalytic
account, is a compromise,
and is therefore compromising.
But the psychoanalyst's
problem is always
to do with the sense in which
the analyst already always
knows what he's looking for.
That is to say
that it's possible
that Freud knows, though he
wouldn't of course put it
like this, that psychoanalysis,
as an essentialism,
becomes part of the problem
that psychoanalytic method is
intending to solve.
Freud believes he knows what
man and to some extent woman is,
and therefore to what we
should be paying attention.
After all, the psychoanalyst
as psychoanalyst
also has his expectations
and inclinations.
The Freudian analyst expects to
find primary process thinking,
instinctual drive
representations,
incestuous desire,
ambivalence, and conflicts
around dependence.
He is, as Freud says, quote,
"in danger of never finding
anything but what
he already knows,"
which is why the analyst
is so easy to caricature.
The analyst, as Freud
knows, already knows a lot
and knows a lot about
already knowing a lot.
How much, given the
essentialism he starts from,
can his work be, as it
were, full of surprises?
And if, for the most
part, meaning is only
recognized later
on, is it recognized
once and for all or in an
ongoing and developing way?
Or how much later will it
be before meaning supposedly
emerges?
The analyst has to
stop deliberately
concentrating when
the patient speaks
and he has to wait
an indeterminate time
for meaning to emerge, meaning,
which by his own lights
will always be evolving
under the aegis
of unpredictable
current experience.
What Freud is describing
is the difference
between the kind of attention
paid when we know what we want,
what we're looking for,
and the kind of attention
paid when we're finding
out what we want,
when we don't know
beforehand what we want
or what we are
looking for, but only
that we are in a state
of wanting and seeking.
Attention as instrument
and attention as medium--
the first kind of
attention is intent,
determined, and more
or less sure of itself,
and can be called
in psychoanalysis
a perverse state of mind.
The second kind of
attention is more at a loss
and uncertain, tentative,
and provisional.
So we can read Freud as
he invents psychoanalysis,
knowing that he wants to
suspend instrumental attention,
but without quite
being able to bear
or being unable to formulate,
in the terms available,
not really knowing what
he might be looking for--
not being able to
acknowledge desiring
without a discernible
object of desire.
We could describe
Freud, in other words,
as wanting to find a
new way of attending
to a newish object of attention,
instinctual life in language.
But also and more
radically, wanting
to find a new way of attending
to an indefinable object
of attention and with no
definitive or defining purpose
in mind.
A Freud who wanted
to cure his patients,
and a Freud who
wanted to inquire
about something with them.
A Freud who both knew
the aim and the objects
of his attention, and
a Freud who did not.
A Freud for whom
psychoanalysis was
akin to a sexual
perversion and a Freud
for whom it was whatever the
alternatives to perversion
might be.
And for both revisions
and re-descriptions--
And for both, revisions and
re-descriptions of attention
were acquired.
There was a Freud who knew what
he should be paying attention
to and a Freud who
knew that knowing
what he should be
paying attention to it
was a way of not
paying attention.
Freud, as essentialist, wants
to effectively convert us
to what, in his view, man is.
Freud, the
anti-essentialist, has,
like all anti-essentialists,
nothing to convert us
to except anti-essentialism.
And those who wish
to convert us always
know what we should
pay attention to,
and often exactly how we should
be paying that attention.
So when Marion Milner wrote
of narrow and wide attention
before she became
a psychoanalyst,
in her first book, A Life of
One's Own, she was, in a sense,
picking up where Freud left off,
whether she knew this or not--
or picking up where
Freud started.
As part of her experiment
in finding and making
what she calls "a
life of her own,"
she realized that
she needed what
she refers to as two kinds
of attention-- wide attention
and narrow attention.
We should perhaps bear in
mind here that wide, in slang,
means wiley and immoral.
Narrow also means bigoted.
Narrow attention, which as
a first way of perceiving,
Milner writes, quote, "seemed to
be the automatic one, the kind
of attention, which my mind
gave to everyday affairs
when it was left to itself.
You attend automatically
to whatever interests
you, whatever seems likely to
serve your personal desires.
But I could not find
anywhere mentioned
what seemed to me the most
important fact about it--
that this kind of attention
has a narrow focus.
By this means, it selects what
serves its immediate interests
and ignores the rest.
As far as I could see,
it was a questing beast.
This attitude was probably
essential for practical life,
so I suppose that from the
biological point of view,
it had to be one which came
naturally to the mind."
End of quote.
As a questing beast, that, from
the biological point of view,
came naturally,
narrow attention has,
in Milner's Darwinian
account, adaptive advantages.
It serves immediate
interests, apparently knowing
what these are.
But because it ignores
everything else,
it has a narrow focus, like the
expectations and inclinations
Freud warns the
analyst away from.
And it is the wider focus,
which may or may not
be in the service
of our adaptation,
that Milner is
now interested in.
Wide attention, what she calls
her second way of perceiving,
is to do with wanting nothing.
And with wanting
nothing as the way
she discovers that wanting
preempts experience.
This wanting forecloses
the discovery
of what you might want.
And two kinds of attention
bring two kinds of provocation--
the provocations we
know we're looking
for and the unsuspected
provocations.
The aim of psychoanalysis,
Winnicott once remarked,
is to enable the patient
to surprise themselves.
In this sense, narrow
attention is for essentialists,
for the people who, because
they know who they are,
know what they want.
It gradually occurred to me, she
writes, quote, "that expectancy
might be an obstruction
to one's power of seeing,
particularly active in
the sphere of emotion."
Wide attention,
she writes, quote,
"seemed to occur when the
questing purposes were
held in leash.
Then, since one
wanted nothing, there
was no need to select one item
to look at rather than another.
So it became possible
to look at the whole
at once, to attend to something
yet want nothing from it.
These seemed to be the
essentials of the second way
of perceiving.
I thought that, in the ordinary
way, when we want nothing
from any object or
situation, we ignore it.
But if, by chance we
should have discovered
the knack of holding
wide our attention,
then the magic thing happens."
End of quote.
The magic thing that happens
is the shock of the new.
Wide attention is, in the best
sense, amenable to distraction.
When at last I did recognize
this obstruction to my view,
she writes--
the obstruction
being the wanting,
the knowing what you want--
then I was able,
at least sometimes,
to sweep all ideas
away from my mind
so that immediately
real experience,
new and indescribable,
flooded in.
It is in apparently ridding
yourself of preconceptions--
preconceptions that are an
omniscience about wanting,
that immediately what she
calls real experiences become
possible--
indescribable because new and
not previously formulated.
The questing beast is
converted into a kind of mystic
through a change of attention.
Something is released and comes
flooding in like an orgasm,
but unlike because unexpected,
unsuspected, uncalculated.
A change of attention is
a change of experience,
but everything depends,
for Johnson and Sterne,
for Freud and Milner,
on the relationship
between wanting and attention.
It is Milner's project to also
try and disentangle attention
from desire, and to
see where it leaves us.
And this frees her to ask the
question that psychoanalysis
was previously unable to ask--
what happens to
attention when we take
wanting out of the picture?
And what happens to the picture?
Thank you.
If anybody would like
to ask a question
do, but the answers
will be jet lagged.
AUDIENCE: Hi, thank you so much.
This is the dreaded not a
question, but a comment.
But it truly just is a comment.
You said in your
paper that Johnson
was the only great writer to
produce a dictionary, yes?
I would just add and maybe
this was the qualification
you intended,
Wittgenstein, who we
talked about so much earlier,
also wrote a dictionary.
That may not make him
a great writer for you,
but so much of the talk was
I thought in conversation
with what we had
earlier, and Wittgenstein
wrote for his
students in Austria
a spelling dictionary
that is still in print.
Just for curiosity.
AUDIENCE: Thanks so
much for your talk.
I have two questions.
I'm not sure if they're related.
So attention, for Freud--
so my understanding is
that he uses several words
in German for attention.
And I would be really
curious to know
whether you can
differentiate them,
because I think they have
very different meanings.
And the other is about hobby
horse and I'm not sure that
I've--
I thought that was it was really
fascinating-- so I was thinking
about the multiple
levels of meaning
or possible meaning
around hobby horse, one
being the sort of historical,
the other being sort
of theatricality, and the
other being around play,
the hobbyhorse, like you
can buy at the toy store.
I'm just curious whether
you intended a kind of play
with those multiple registers?
ADAM PHILLIPS: The first
version of the paper
had quite a long passage about
the history of the word hobby
horse, which it sounds
like you know is very
interesting and extraordinary.
Because certainly, for
example, in the 18th century,
a hobby horse was a prostitute.
But also hobby horse
was one of the things
that maypole dancers
did in the 15th century.
And we know this has an
extraordinary history
of being to do with a
combination of pagan ritual,
elicit sexuality
in a certain sense,
and a certain kind of
play, unofficial play.
So when Sterne picks
up the word and uses it
in a very specific
way, which I think
tends to be the way we,
whoever we are, now use it,
I think he's delimiting
it very much.
I think the history
of the word is very
interesting in this regard.
I think you, unlike I,
don't read or speak German.
So I'm sure you're right that
it has many different uses,
but I'm using the
English translations.
And so I imagine
that attention must
take many forms in the
original German text,
but I'm free not to know that.
AUDIENCE: Thanks so much.
I was wondering in
this framework of wide
versus narrow attention
that you were talking about
at the end of the paper--
the broad, free floating open
attention characterized--
but the wide
versus the narrow attention
that knows what it wants,
I think you said.
What would we do with
monomaniacal attention?
So I'm thinking of the sort
of attention that is not--
it doesn't know what
it wants necessarily,
but when it finds something,
laser focus is on it.
I'm thinking of the
protagonists of Poe's Berenice
and The Tell-Tale Heart
as good examples of this.
But what do we do with
that kind of attention?
Is it wide, is it narrow,
is it something else?
ADAM PHILLIPS: I think--
I can only answer this in a
kind of psychoanalytic way,
but the kind of story
that I would tell
would be something like this--
that initially,
whenever that is,
there is unorganized desire.
They sort of want, let's say.
And the question becomes
whether and to what extent
and in what ways any individual
can bear their frustration.
Because if there's an extreme
intolerance to frustration,
one will be very quick to
locate an object of desire
and, as it were, have it.
And in a way, what I
think one of things
that psychoanalysis probably
promotes one way or another,
is the idea that
actually it's only
through patient
frustration, as it were,
that an object of desire
can really emerge,
whatever really might
mean in that sentence.
So that an anxiety state would
generate either a grasping
after objects of
desire that are kind
of ersatz objects or a
compulsive addictive desiring.
In other words,
the project would
be to narrow the
mind in relation
to desire, for fear of
either multiplicity of desire
or the doubts about desire,
the guilts about desire.
But I think the reason I use
perversion in this is not,
as it were,
moralistically, but so much
as to describe-- because for
me, I think a perversion could
be simply-- a
perverse state of mind
would be one in which one
knew exactly what one wanted.
So it would be absolutely
non-experimental
and, in that sense,
non-experiential as well.
So I think somebody, and
it could be [? Lam, ?] but
anyway, somebody says that
the reason that Hamlet clearly
isn't mad is that he's got
lots of ideas rather than one.
And, in a way, you could
think that the extreme fixity
of mind or extreme
fixity of attention
would be one of the
ways in which people
are prone to diagnose
some kind of something
being very wrong with someone.
I'm sorry, just briefly--
Marion Milner says
in On Not Being
Able to Paint, if you want
to paint a tree in a field,
look everywhere but at
the tree, because once you
start looking at the tree,
all you'll see is the tree.
Whereas if you look at
everything else, the sort
of environ around
it, you will then
get a sense of what
the tree could be.
And it's a very interesting
other way of looking at things
and clearly it's kind
of psychoanalytic.
AUDIENCE: So I think, am I?
So thank you.
I have a question.
I heard you speaking
about the vacancy
and/or the relationship between
attention and inattention
was in terms of a
kind of simultaneity.
And I'm wondering
how time would fit
into this or a
certain temporality,
and the state I
thought of was boredom.
And I mean, what does
one do with being bored?
And I know you
wrote about this--
but being bored as a form
of inattention or attention.
ADAM PHILLIPS: Winnicott
describes depression
as the fog over the battlefield.
In other words, it's
an attempt to suppress
what is felt to be an
unbearable conflict
in a kind of vagueness.
I think that you could imagine
boredom as something similar,
that when a certain
conflict about desire
becomes unbearable,
boredom takes over.
That would be one way
of describing this.
So either boredom
is not knowing what
one wants and the vagaries
of that, or boredom
is actually the terror
of knowing what one wants
and what that will
then involve one in.
I think that it must be--
there must be a sense
in which, I assume,
that in states of boredom, it's
not as though desire can ever
really be absent--
so I think the
question is always
what's being done with the
appetite at any given moment.
So when I'm bored, I'm
either, in this version,
determinedly
withdrawing attention
from the nature of
my desire and/or I'm
trying not to know what
it is I might want,
because the consequence of
the wanting is so problematic.
So I think boredom would be
like a holding pattern, would
be one way of describing it.
And it would be an attempt to
be inattentive in a stultifying
way.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I mean the
reason I'm relating this
to temporality is because in
German, boredom is [GERMAN]
and it means a long time.
So it's the perception
of time being eternal.
ADAM PHILLIPS: I
don't know if this
does right to what
you said, but it's
a very strange thing, which
is that people that often
say in psychoanalysis and
not only in psychoanalysis,
but nothing ever is changing.
Nothing's changing.
When in fact,
everything is changing
at every second
psychobiologically.
So presumably, there's
an unwillingness
to perceive change,
not its absence.
So the temporality, this
does kind of matter.
AUDIENCE: So just
a quick question.
This is on, right?
The essay, The
Recommendations for Physicians
that you quoted from Freud--
ADAM PHILLIPS: Do you mean
Remembering, Repeating,
and Working Through?
AUDIENCE: The one where
he describes evenly
suspended attention
and the dangers
of a form of
psychoanalytic attention
that is going to
presume, already
know what it's looking for.
So I just wonder if you
could say a little bit more
about that, because ultimately,
the feeling, I suppose,
that it left me with was this
anxiety about inattention.
A sense that one has to
be ever vigilant that one
hasn't fallen into attention.
So this sort of paradox and
just the difficulty of something
that seems like you are
supposed to be mindless about
and yet you have to be kind
of ever vigilant about.
ADAM PHILLIPS:
Winnicott wrote a paper
that you may know called "In
the Capacity to be Alone."
And in that, he says that
the child's capacity to learn
depends upon having been alone
in the presence of the mother.
And the supposition here
is that if the child knows
that the mother is
in some way present,
the child doesn't have
to hold him or herself,
so that vigilant
self holding turns up
when there's an anxiety
about an absence of care.
And it makes some logical
sense that it would.
So in a way, I think
one of the things that--
in a way, psychoanalysis
starts with what
is in fact the problem.
You know that Ferenczi said
the patient isn't cured
by free associating,
the patient is cured
when he can free associate.
So that instead of sort
of mothering oneself
with one's mind, i.e. being in
a state of vigilant, whatever
it is, conscious
attention, one might
be able to relinquish that
and then see whatever else
it is that one might feel.
But to do that, you'd have
to feel that it was contained
by some body somewhere.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much
for that fascinating talk.
I actually also have a question
about the Recommendations essay
and I was just hoping you could
elaborate a little bit more
on the distinction
between attention
as medium and attention as
instrument, because I guess
I was paying attention to
the vacancy in the quote
that you read out because my
favorite part of that essay
is when Freud says that the
analyst has to essentially
become like a telephone
receiver to the patient who
is the microphone.
I mean, it's like really bumbled
metaphor, but it's wonderful.
And the telephone
is an instrument
that can also function as a
medium, or is it a machine?
And I was just wondering if
you could elaborate on that.
ADAM PHILLIPS: In a
way, your question--
the example answered
the question,
because in the image of the
phone, Freud's talking about
unconscious communication.
Now when attention
is an instrument,
it is as though one is
attending with a view to finding
something that one
already knows about.
When it's a medium,
it is something
in which something can happen.
So when Freud is--
when I'm talking about Freud
talking about attention being
a medium, it's as though the
quality of the mutual attention
going on allows
for or facilitates
people feeling and
thinking differently
or otherwise or surprisingly.
So it's the difference
between something being found
and something being discovered,
in a certain sense--
or something being
found as opposed
to something being invented.
So that when
attention is a medium,
you have no idea what
might turn up-- well,
not literally no idea, but you
have a limited idea of what
might turn up in it--
whereas when it's instrument,
you do sort of know.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Yes, thanks
very much for the talk.
I just had a question about
the pretty brief invocation
of trauma in the talk.
And I was just wondering
if the emphasis
on knowing what to pay attention
and what not to pay attention
in that case requires
something less than wide--
or if it's not necessarily the
form of selective instrumental
attention, that it somehow
requires an attentiveness
that you would
articulate differently
than the wide attention.
ADAM PHILLIPS: The thing about--
I mean, I'm sure you know this,
but the thing about attention
is that--
in relation to trauma
is that trauma incites
the attention that
then obliterates.
So trauma is the experience you
can't attend to effectively.
And in the psychoanalytic
story, trauma
is something you only ever
have after you've had it,
because there isn't
an it to begin with.
There's just, as it were,
the absence of something.
I mean, it's a bit like--
there's a thing in
child development
which used to be called
stranger anxiety.
At eight month old, children
begin to experience strangers.
Now the original idea was they
are experiencing strangers.
It looks as though actually
what they're experiencing
at eight month is not mother.
So in other words,
they're experiencing
an absence of something, not
the presence of something else.
Well, I think that's
one kind of analogy
for traumatic experience,
which is you're experiencing
the absence of something.
And it might take a lot of
time and a lot of, I think,
probably the kind of attention
that comes through conversation
probably, in order
for this to be
conjured or reconjured or
rethought or reconstructed.
But to begin with, it's
as though trauma would
be narrow attention
and recovery, if we
can talk in this
sort of language,
would be wide angled attention.
Because once you can allow
yourself wide angled attention,
it's as though you
are sufficiently
unfrightened not to be worried
about what you might see.
Whereas the point about narrow
attention, it regulates fear.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I
actually had in mind
from the perspective of the
analyst or the therapist.
ADAM PHILLIPS: Just say another
sentence about that then.
AUDIENCE: Well, is the attention
required by the analyst being
treated in trauma--
what I said before, narrower
than wide, not narrow.
ADAM PHILLIPS: Well,
I think, in a way,
it may be the same point,
which is it depends on what
you, the analyst, can bear.
Because the thing is that
your analysis depends
on your analyst's past, if
you see what I mean obviously.
And you can never
know beforehand
what you're walking
into in an analysis
because you're both walking
into your analyst's past, which
is only partly known
to them, and you're
walking into a whole series of
presuppositions and theories
about what people are and so on.
But I think, ultimately,
it comes down
to what the analyst
can bear to hear
or to experience, not only
hearing but to experience.
And that will set
implicit limits
to what can be said as in
ordinary relationships.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
I just want to elicit a comment
from you on this, more than a--
I don't have a
well-formed question.
But one of the things
I was wondering
was around this issue of dawning
of an aspect in Wittgenstein.
ADAM PHILLIPS: Of what?
AUDIENCE: Dawning of--
ADAM PHILLIPS: Yeah, oh yeah.
AUDIENCE: And I'm
kind of all this talk
is very interesting when
in one of the sessions,
Bion describes how, as
the patient is talking,
he can see the words
moving to the wall
and making patterns
on that wall.
And I'm wondering whether, in
a way then, the kind of knowing
is really not the knowing
of what these words are,
but what this person is in
relation to these words.
And whether that,
in a certain sense,
plays with this
dawning of an aspect
because I precisely
can't make it appear,
it can only appear out of
some grace or something.
AUDIENCE: Yeah I mean, Bion
says this in the tradition he
writes in, which is that--
certainly in Kleinian
psychoanalysis,
the question would be,
what is the patient doing
to you with their words--
that the words are not
simply objects of meaning,
so to speak, they're
also objects.
They could be
missiles, they could
be all sorts of weapons or
gifts or seductions or whatever.
But the idea being
that, in a way,
the patient's
language is not simply
to be decoded in
terms of meaning.
And so, in a way, I mean this
is why those analysts are
interested in
countertransference,
because really, they
are listening for what
the patient's words
evoke in them,
not what the
patient's words mean.
So Leo's example today with
the [? Lacan ?] thing is very
interesting in that regard
because you could think at that
moment, something was evoked
in [? Lacan. ?] Now after
the fact, it can be explained in
a certain sense, but of course,
no psychoanalytic training
suggests that whenever
there's a verbal ambiguity, the
analyst enacts it, obviously.
I mean, if that film
was used as a training
vehicle in trainings,
the question
would be what was
it teaching anybody,
which seems to be a genuinely
interesting question.
I don't mean this
entirely facetiously.
Because I think that when
you're thinking about what's
nonverbal in analysis, and a
awful lot of it, of course,
is nonverbal or
pre-verbal or whatever,
you're talking
about evoked states
of mind, which have about them
a great deal of uncertainty.
Because on the one hand,
you could think everything
you think and feel in the
presence of another person
is a function of
that relationship.
Or you can think,
no actually, it's
much more separate than
that, that people are having
their separate
thoughts and feelings,
which every so often overlap.
Whereas in a kind
of field theory,
it doesn't matter who says
what, because there's just
a group of two.
SPEAKER 1: Hi.
You made me think about
something I hadn't really
thought about a lot
before, which was,
it sort of explains why one
thing the sort of Middle Group
never really do is
diagnose anybody.
I mean, Freud did a
bit, but they never do.
And yet a patient
coming for therapy
or just people
who are in trouble
that you meet, one thing they
really want is a diagnosis.
And it's a kind of knowledge
that people think will help.
So just this is sort of
practical question about what
does the Middle Group do
instead of diagnose which
still gives people something?
ADAM PHILLIPS: Well,
the short, glib answer
would be they hold their
patients, not physically.
But I mean, the patients
feel sufficiently held.
But I think that what
would be analyzed
would be the wish
for a diagnosis,
if you see what I mean,
because that in itself
would be revealing
of a lot of things
about a certain kind
of-- well, on the one
hand, verbal fixity and the
magic of words and so on,
and the belief in the
authority of the other person.
I mean, certainly
my experience is,
and I'm sure not only me,
is that the longer you speak
to somebody, the more the
diagnostic categories dissolve,
obviously.
Now the diagnosis
category can be useful.
They can be indicative.
The problem is it's a
very instrumental view
because the idea is the
reason your diagnosis is
so there is a treatment.
So on the base of
the medical model,
if you do a
psychological diagnosis,
you then know what you
then do with the patient.
Well, of course
in psychoanalysis,
nobody can tell you
what to say when.
It isn't like that.
And I think that my
sense of the Middle Group
is that we/they are interested
in these fictions as allegory.
They're like allegorical
characters-- obsessionals,
hysterics, and so on.
And they are useful
to that extent.
But that were to
you abide by them,
you'd be abiding
by them because you
were so frightened of the
patient you'd need to invest
in your own authority.
SPEAKER 2: Well, it might
be time for a reception.
OK, well, let's thank Adam.
ADAM PHILLIPS: Thank you.
