Review: Unforbidden Pleasures, by Adam Phillips

Unforbidden Pleasures

Author: Adam Phillips

ISBN-13: 978-0241145791

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton

Guideline Price: £14.99

It’s the forbidden pleasures that are the interesting ones – traditionally at least. They are the intense, the profound, the passionate ones. The “horrifyingly exciting” ones, in Adam Phillips’s phrase. Transgressors are perceived to have a better – though perhaps briefer – time. What these pleasures are precisely, though, Phillips doesn’t articulate, and we must imagine them for ourselves. Being a psychoanalyst who is a devotee of Freud, he does refer occasionally to incest. But as, to most of us, Oedipal desires are academic, or unreachably buried in the unconscious, this is not particularly relevant.

Still, it’s not difficult to imagine the forbidden. We have all grown up, in so far as we have grown up – and growing up is largely to grow into “knowledge of the forbidden” – to know the catastrophic consequences that can follow for us if we allow ourselves to taste those pleasures. This in itself gives them implicit power over us, which Adam Phillips regards as a bad thing. Our culture is obsessed with them. But his not naming them does not diminish their power. They remain in that mysterious and murky hinterland that can encourage obsession.

However, this book isn’t meant to be about the forbidden. The forbidden has already got too much attention, in Phillips’s view. He is exploring our unforbidden pleasures. These are the pleasures sanctioned in our culture and therefore considered to be anodyne and hardly worth talking about.

On the more obvious level, they are the mild pleasures of those who have subsided, gratefully or otherwise, into middle age. About these he is rather more specific, though not entirely satisfactorily specific either. An unforbidden pleasure might be one’s morning cup of coffee. It might be to take pleasure in kindness, or friendship or political activism. Pleasures that are often regarded as bland, or sublimations of more heady, and generally forbidden, desires.

Significantly, sublimation is a psychoanalyst’s term. And, in what is quite a fundamental critique of psychoanalytic practice, Phillips argues that the purpose of psychoanalysis has been, possibly mistakenly, to privilege the forbidden. It is interested only in what is transgressive. It too is obsessed. It too, like some adolescent, follows the siren-song. Psychoanalysts “always know where the real action is” and tend to underestimate the great pleasures to be had from what is not forbidden.

Seductive but contorted prose

It can come across as a contorted argument. And meeting it in Adam Phililips’s famously contorted if seductive prose makes it hardly less so. You could even say the argument is, on a fundamental level, unnecessary. Why should what is unquestioned be questioned?

And yet, nothing is simple in human psychology, and he has some subtle and illuminating things to say. Some unforbidden pleasures are in fact more suspect than we recognise – and we’re not talking about that cup of caffeine-ridden coffee. We may hardly even recognise them as pleasures in the accepted meaning of the world, but pleasures they undeniably are.

Take obedience for example, obedience to the “authorities” or “the laws” in the most general sense. Obedience is a major unforbidden pleasure, even if it’s reluctantly assumed as a means to deny deep but forbidden desires. And from it comes our habit of self-criticism.

It may seem paradoxical but self-criticism is another of our keenest unforbidden pleasures. Having denied ourselves a “certain freedom of thought and feeling and desire and speech” we indulge in a sanctioned “ferocious, unrelenting” self-criticism.

Phillips describes the pleasure we take in this habit of self-laceration as “obscene and inordinate”. Perhaps as a psychoanalyst he meets it more often and more intimately than we who are not psychoanalysts do. But an even greater pleasure, he says, would be to argue with the forbidders, not least among them being ourselves.

Which brings us to the pleasure, majorly unforbidden, of conformity. The pleasure the herd instinct offers is that of not thinking, of being mesmerised by the “magic of rules”. Conformity may look like morality, but there is a great difference between them.

Morality is about engaging with the rules; about arguing with them. The great pleasure morality offers is that it requires one to discover who one is. And knowing, and becoming who one is, is “the most necessary and the most life-justifying thing”, and therefore the greatest pleasure of them all.

Condensing a Phillips argument or conclusion is not easy, since his discourse arrives onto the page already condensed. For once, slenderness in a book seems a handicap. The pace can be dizzying and you rather wish he might take the time to expand and relax an argument and allow his ideas and erudition to breathe. He picks up a theme as if he has just walked into the middle of a conversation with some fellow psychoanalysts. And in a way that can be frustrating for the general reader, this is what he is doing, these essays having been written up from a series of lectures he gave at various institutions.

His method is to worry, very elegantly, at an idea, informed and inspired by an array of formidable thinkers and writers; Wilde rubs shoulders with Nietzche, Emerson with Beckett, Lacan with Shakespeare. Freud, as is to be expected, is omnipresent.

Then he will produce an inventive and often beautiful statement to sum it up. He is a master of the aphorism – in fact one of his previous books, Monogamy, consists solely of aphorisms.

"All tragedies are tragedies of obedience," he remarks in connection with Hamlet.

“Our sense of injustice” is based on the sense that “we are being refused possible pleasures”.

“Is life a forbidden pleasure?” he asks aphoristically.

One of his most intriguing remarks appears in the spirit and manner of an aside, enclosed in brackets – he has a stylistic tic of enclosing complex ideas in brackets. “In the history of capitalism,” he writes, “the forbidden has been a remarkably flexible concept.”

This is begging to be developed. What sins of yesteryear are now approved pleasures? Is food for example moving into the territory of the “horrifically exciting” that transgressive sex used to occupy? And when something is unforbidden does it lose something of its allure?

As much philosopher and critic as he is psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips might profitably add sociologist to his bow.

Anne Haverty's novels include The Far Side of a Kiss and The Free and Easy