Steady as he goes

PSYCHOLOGY: On Balance,By Adam Phillips, Hamish Hamilton, 313pp £20

THEODOR ADORNO once asked, apropos of what today we call the work-life balance, whether one could imagine Nietzsche working set hours or knocking off early for a refreshing round of golf. Certain artists and philosophers seem shackled to the oeuvre night and day; others leave it alone only to pursue equally maniacal ends, from the erotics of revolution to a studied derangement of the senses. Such people are excessive even as they claim to balance one aspect of self with another – think of the comforting machismo of Hemingway or Mailer. But what about the rest of us, with our workday routines (imposed or improvised), our compensating pleasures and commitments, our fantasies or fear about losing the logical run of ourselves? What are the uses of excess, or the idea of excess? Adam Phillips’s fascinating, digressive and slightly flimsy book essays some audacious answers but seems itself to settle for a disappointing kind of equilibrium.

“Nothing makes us more disapproving, disgusted, punitive,” writes Phillips, than the perceived excesses of others. When it comes to sex, food, drink, violence or risk, we talk (but rarely act) as though we know what a happy mean would be and what too much, or too little, looks like. Excess involves us in all manner of emotional paradoxes and logical perplexities: we know that excess is bad for us, but a life lived entirely within limits is no life at all. So far so obvious, except that the notion of a “balance” between, for example, virtue and rapacity in our sex lives denotes an unattainable fantasy. We might well manage a balanced diet or an accommodation between work and play, but a perfect compromise between security and passion is another matter. We don’t have to be puritans or sybarites to get the balance wrong, to get balance itself wrong, because sometimes balance is precisely the problem. Often in life we end up envying the limited ones who are able to let go.

One of the things that Freud clarified for us is that it’s possible to be too good, too well adjusted, too rounded a person. As Phillips puts it, “there is nothing more unbalanced than the demand for a balanced view.” It’s a measure of how far Freud’s original ideas have been traduced and banalised that we now speak routinely of “healthy” relationships and “appropriate” behaviour, forgetting that excess is sometimes exactly what life requires of us. Balance is frequently the last thing we want from a lover or a parent, from an adolescent or an artist.

Extremity is also essential to the whole psychoanalytic adventure. If it sometimes seems that Freud’s sexual explanations and convoluted readings of verbal lapses simply “go too far”, that is actually the point: our motivations are so well hidden that only a delirious science, ever ready to embrace unlikely conclusions, can discover them.

As an analyst and essayist, Phillips uses a version of Freud's extremism that takes the form of a long-standing commitment (maybe an excessive commitment) to paradoxes. In earlier books, such as On Flirtationand Houdini's Box, he reflected on our need to keep alive the possibility of life being otherwise: flirting and escapology are necessary reminders that we might at any moment fling off our commitments or ambitions and lose ourselves to the unpredictable. (That we mostly don't is not proof either way that we are constrained or out of control.) In On BalancePhillips once more proves adept at summing up what it's like to have conflicting desires, which is to say what it's like to be human. "If other people's excesses reveal the bigot in us," he writes, "they also reveal how intriguing and subtle the bigot is." And equally tellingly: "Excesses of appetite are the ways we conceal from ourselves what we hunger for." Or this, on psychoanalysis: "The talking cure turned up to show us what talking cannot cure."

Such formulations have an admirable flair at the level of style and often seem just right in terms of insight. But it’s worth asking if they’re not too pleasingly weighted, if they don’t replicate the very balance that is the book’s (fantastical) subject, and if that’s not a drawback when it comes to writing about the endlessly turbulent psyche.

As a writer Phillips proceeds with unnerving calm in the face of the most excessive tendencies of our time: greed, addiction, political violence and religious fundamentalism. His is invariably a pragmatic voice, asking “What kind of thing is a belief?” as if murderous conviction were a grammatical form or rhetorical trope to be coolly described. “What kind of x is y?” is just the first of Phillips’s own signature prose turns, along with his persistent use of a very vague “we” and the lofty elision that comes with a statement such as “The rules, whatever else they might be, are an invitation to find out what rules are.” (I immediately want to know what he thinks about the “whatever else” that has seemingly escaped this neat manoeuvre.)

Phillips is often praised for the counterintuitive poise of his prose, as if he were as truly great an aphorist or essayist as Pascal or Wilde or Freud himself. (John Banville has called him “an Emerson of our time”, which seems, well, excessive.) He is actually at his best, and least balanced, when he leaves off the ex-cathedra pronouncements and submits his style to the work of somebody else. There are excellent essays here on the likes of Diane Arbus and WG Sebald, and a short but intriguing piece on returning to one’s adolescent enthusiasms in literature. In Phillips’s case it is Dylan Thomas who now “annoys and bores” him, but the essay is over before he expands very much on this example of his own imbalance, his excessive love, aspiration and regret. On Balance is frequently smart and persuasive on the subject of such instructive splits in the self, but one wishes its author would now and again let himself get carried away.

Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinetmagazine and the author of Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives(Penguin, 2009) and In the Dark Room(Penguin, 2005)