Adam Phillips tells Sylvia Thompson we have got ourselves into a spin and we are too frightened to dmit we may be getting dizzy
London-based psychoanalyst, child psychotherapist and social commentator Adam Phillips believes that the current economic conditions in places like Britain and Ireland are "making people frantic".
Phillips is coming to Dublin this week to take part in the Arts Council Critical Voices programme of public debate about art, culture and ideas. His books and essays on literature, philosophy, child psychology and psychoanalysis (including the recently published Penguin Freud Reader) have brought him critical acclaim.
According to author John Banville, he is one of the most exciting writers around, in any genre.
Unlike many of those writing from a psychological perspective who tend to focus on individual needs, Phillips instead looks to society at large for answers.
"The way capitalist economies work depends on people not stopping to feel and think," he says. "They increase competitiveness between people, create a culture of fear and envy and people will suffer as a consequence."
His most recent book, Going Sane (Penguin, 2006), asks why so little attention is paid to the idea of sanity.
"It is worth wondering why, given the sheer scale of contemporary unhappiness, there are no accounts of what a sane life would look like," he writes.
He argues that although there has been a tremendous fear of madness, there is also a kind of fascination with it - in literature, drama, artistic works and the creative genius. "No one is famous for their sanity," he writes.
Controversially, he says that he is surprised more people are not depressed, given the lives they lead. "There has been a lot of cultural change in a short space of time. Within two to three generations, people have become affluent but they can't catch up with themselves. People's histories are extremely important and you can't 'make yourself over' so quickly."
He also believes that this frantic lifestyle propels us towards a narrow-minded view of what we want for ourselves. He suggests we should expect and desire more from ourselves.
"Imagining possibilities for ourselves involves telling stories about what we think we are like, what we think we want and what we think we are capable of," he writes.
He suggests psychotherapy should be offered free to those who need it, rather than "merely to be a preoccupation of the middle classes and becoming the problem rather than the solution".
An advocate of political action, Phillips suggests we need to take more communal responsibility for the direction our society is taking and focus on social change rather than personal failings.
In Going Sane, he offers suggestions for what might constitute a sane person, distinguishing between a "superficially sane person" and a "deeply sane person".
A superficially sane person, according to Phillips, is someone who adapts to survive and helps us forget about madness.
His definition of a deeply sane person is someone who is mindful of madness but unwillingly adapts to the world for survival.
Phillips also offers interesting perspectives on adolescence and childhood.
He suggests that teenagers have keen insight into life and can embrace some of the contradictions and uncertainties that adults often refuse to do.
"Adolescence - one of the greatest sociological inventions of the post-war period - is the first time the individual has the passion and the intelligence available to consider what life is worth to him," he writes.
Phillips also believes that the contemporary idealisation of childhood denies the "emotional turbulence of children".
"Our obsession with child development and with so-called 'parenting skills' - the religion of contemporary middle-class child-rearing - has become a code for our forlorn attempt to find a sanity for ourselves," he writes.
In a nutshell, he says, all the modern prescriptive child-rearing literature is about how not to drive the child mad or not be driven mad by the child.
Children, he says, would be very surprised to discover just how mad we think they are. Many adults too will find themselves jolted into a more profound dialogue with themselves and others after reading Adam Phillips. And, that is exactly what he wants from his writing.
• Adam Phillips will be in conversation with Prof Ciarán Benson, School of Psychology, University College Dublin, on Friday at 6.30pm in Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Foster Place, Dublin. Admission is free but advance booking is required. Contact: criticalvoices@artscouncil.ie or 01 618 0230 for more information.