On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored

By Jane Mendelsohn

The Guardian (UK), March 30, 1993

On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life

By Adam Phillips

(Harvard University Press, 1993)

Psychoanalytic theory has tended to focus on the darker, more vehement states of mind, not on the vaguer feelings, the hazy moods, that occupy most of our lives. Depression and mania have got a lot of attention, as opposed to, say, boredom or crushes. In his remarkable collection of essays, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, Adam Phillips combs the beaches of everyday life and picks up the mundane topics that others have overlooked. He marvels over things like kissing and worrying as if they were pearls, much the way Freud looked at dreams. (It’s important to remember that in Freud’s day, dreams were as unlikely a source of psychological revelation as tickling might be considered today.) Examining “the unexamined life”, Phillips finds new ways of thinking about old, familiar subjects — phobias, mothering, guilt, obstacles — and a new way of writing about psychoanalysis. He’s full of funny, startling insight, and his digressive, epigrammatic style is blissfully easy to read.

Phillips is Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He’s also written a book on Winnicott, the psychoanalyst, and edited collections of such diverse writers as Charles Lamb, Walter Pater, and Edmund Burke. A renaissance man, he punctuated his essays with quotations from Emerson, Beckett, and Wim Wenders. His writing feels loose and natural; ideas flow out from one another in waves, and after he leaves you hanging with a thought, not a resolution. This style reflects his central concern with spontaneity, with preserving and nurturing an essential, unknowable part of the self. If he has any over-arching thesis, it’s that the drive toward omniscience in psychoanalysis is an illusion. He believes in letting some things remain a mystery.

“The conflict between knowing what a life is and the sense that life contains within it something that makes such knowing impossible is at the heart of Freud’s enterprise,” he says. Phillips sees himself as a descendent of Freud, and not a hostile one, although he likes to temper Freud’s darker take on things with a dose of optimism. Where Freud saw in the child’s excess of desire an inevitable disappointment, Phillips sides with object-relations theorists such as Winnicott and sees a potential for satisfaction.

According to Winnicott, whether or not a child will be able to find satisfaction depends on his environment in infancy, on the kind of mothering he receives. The analytic relationship creates a place where the patient can experience the calm, predictable “holding” he never experiences as a child. Only in such an environment can a person take the time to find out what interests him. And as Phillips pus it, “Psychoanalysis as a conversation is worth having only is it makes our lives more interesting, or funnier, or sadder, or more tormented, or whatever it is about ourselves that we value and want to promote.”

Many of Phillips’s essays are spun out encounters he has had with patients. Since most of them are children, they don’t really know yet what it is about themselves that they value and want to promote, but they do know what they don’t like, which is a start.

One sad, preoccupied boy of 10 provides the fodder for an essay on worrying. Intending to ask the boy what his worries are, Phillips asks him instead: “What are worries?” Naturally puzzled by the question, the boy thinks for a moment, and then replies triumphantly, “Farts that don’t work.” When Phillips suggests that some farts are worth keeping, the boy responds with a grin and says, “Treasure.”

For this child, Phillips points out, worrying was a way of holding on to something, a form of storage. “He was, in short, as we both soon realized, very worried about loosing his worries.” Worries were like gifts he kept for his mother, and he was fearful of running out of them. What better gift to give one’s mother — especially if she is unsure of herself — that a worry she can resolve and so feel empowered as a good mother?

These thoughts spur Phillips on to thinking about worries as imaginative creations, “small epics of personal failure and anticipated catastrophe”, like inverted dreams. He heads to the OED for the history of the word and discovers, interestingly, that it was originally a hunting term, describing what dogs did to their prey. Initially a verb to describe an act of violence committed against someone or something else, worrying didn’t become an activity people could perform in their heads until the 19th century. In other words, at a certain point in history, we learned how to prey on ourselves.

The essay on worrying, like the rest in the book, shows Phillips to be a thoughtful, intuitive analyst who possesses a knack for asking good questions. He follows his hunches and allows himself to make fruitful mistakes. In another piece, he describes a precociously articulate 11-year-old patient whose mother had brought him to therapy because he was, in her words, “more miserable than re realized”.

“He was mostly in a state of what I can only describe as blank exuberance about how full his like was. As he was terrified of his own self-doubt, I asked him very few questions and they were always tactful. But at one point, more direct that I intended to be, I asked him if he was ever bored. He was surprised by the question and replied with a gloominess I hadn’t seen before in this relentlessly cheerful child, ‘I’m not allowed to be bored’.”

The boy’s answer prompts Phillips to think about the nature of boredom, about why parents are so concerned that children not be bored. It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults, he suggests, that children should be interested, rather than take the time to find what interests them. Boredom is integral to the process of taking one’s time, and the fear of boredom is a flight from uncertainty. As Phillips puts it, boredom protects the individual, “makes tolerable for him the impossible experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be”.

These musings on the subject lead him to Proust and to the boredoms of adulthood, and eventually to one of my favorite sentences in the book: “Adulthood, one could say, is when it begins to occur to you that you may not be leading a charmed life.” The collection contains many such sentences, lines that read as if they were lifted from a Chekhov story. Like Chekohov, Phillips writes as well as he doctors, and his fascination with the subtleties of human behavior makes him a good storyteller. He approaches life with a generous skepticism, “a visionary pragmatism”, as he calls it. He has a welcome openness to the essential strangeness of every person; this alone is reason enough to read him. It enables him to take about the darker side of human experience, the fears and frailties, without getting hopelessly bleak. As he puts it quite brilliantly, in his essay on phobias, “The aim of psychoanalysis is not to cure people but to show them that there is nothing wrong with them.”