Equals is a collection
of essays, made up of three distinct parts: "Equals", "Under
Psychoanalysis" and "Characters". As such it suffers from an
unevenness in the quality of each part and its relevance to the overall idea of
the book, a problem far from alien to this format. The first part of the book
comprises [p2] a very good set
of essays examining the notion of equality, or rather the sources of
inequality, exploring the different attitudes we could take towards equality, a
notion central to human life on both a personal and political level. The
perambulation through various themes within this topic: political equality,
equality as democracy, equality in psychoanalysis, equality between various
kinds of partners: parent-child, lovers, patient-analyst etc. are all explored
in Phillips’s usual astute style. The question of superiority in its relation
to power, and of care in relation to inequality is particularly important
within a psychoanalytic or therapeutic context. Patients enter psychoanalysis
with a democratic egalitarian ethos, but all of a sudden renounce that ethos by
endowing the analyst with unreasonable power based on their expectations and a
belief in the analyst’s omnipotence and omniscience. How should the analyst
respond to this demand? What, then, is the basis for arguing that there is
equality in psychoanalytic relations, where one side pays and talks and the
other side is paid to listen? The idea of equality as "the legitimation,
if not celebration, of conflict" (p.11) is then explored in the last
chapter of the first part, "Against Inhibition". In this chapter
Phillips describes inhibition as the authoritarian suppression of the conflict
enabled by equality, a suppression expressed as an incapacity or lack of
permission (p. 65). As a result, we are distracted from the only freedom we
have, "the freedom to choose an unpredictable future for ourselves"
(p.73, grammar modified).

The second part of the book
is based on the more general theme of "Under Psychoanalysis", and
contains seven chapters of varying length, examining madness, the notions of
narrative and coherence in psychoanalysis, need and neediness, childhood and
memory, and the recognition/ misrecognition ambivalence. Several questions
arise while reading this part: firstly, Phillips argues that "it is not
our suffering we need to understand, it is our happiness" (pp.110-111),
but shortly afterwards argues that "there is nothing more essential to, or
about a person than his needs" (p.119). How do these two claims relate to
one another? If the frustration of needs creates suffering, then surely it is
suffering we should focus on rather than happiness. Secondly, Phillips argues
for an anti-essentialist position with respect to needs: needs have no known
essence, a need is something that is created in response to an initial stimulus
(p.122). But are needs not, at least initially, a fundamental force operating
universally? Are not nourishment, love and nurturing a condition for any form
of human development and well-being? And finally, Phillips sides with Ghent in
arguing that the unknown change is the optimal consequence of analytic
treatment. But this could, arguably, also be a change for the worse. If one
does not know what change they aspire to, and accept the openness of the
unknown, they must also accept the potential negative change: regression,
return to inhibition and suicide are all changes – but are they necessarily
desirable?

The third and final part of
the book is a collection of book reviews[p3] . This part lacks
a theme, its main problem being one of context: a book is not a collection of
essays, it must be something more in order to justify its format. And it is
this format that emphasises the trivial or the fragmented aspect of these
reviews, each of which surely had a respectable place within the pages of the London Review of Books. Within Equals, these reviews read as disjointed
pieces, and the psychoanalytic perspective from which Phillips is writing and
reading seems to narrow down to a commentary on whether the protagonists, real
or fictional, are ‘gay’, ‘Jewish’, or [p4] both. There is
little to be gleaned from reading this part of the book, which comes across as
somewhat trivial in the sense that it lacks a unifying theme or a question and
hence is disappointing. However[p5] , the first two
parts afford a valuable insight into the world of the analyst, exploring issues
in a non-trivial way. The book, therefore, has much to offer its readers, but
remains of uneven quality, and its end leaves the reader somewhat disappointed
and unmoved.

© Havi Carel 2002

Havi
Carel received her Ph.D. from at the Department of Philosophy, University
of Essex; her thesis was on the concept of death in Heidegger and Freud. She
teaches philosophy at Oxford Brookes University and at the University of Essex.

Categories: Psychoanalysis