The Life You Want

These scattershot essays from psychoanalyst Phillips (Unforbidden Pleasures) explore the interplay between psychoanalysis—which studies how unconscious drives determine behaviors—and an optimistic pragmatism, outlined by American philosopher Richard Rorty, that argues people can mine their unconscious to achieve their goals. Pairing the two, Phillips contends, can yield a realistic but hopeful outlook. The essays explore such topics as the Freudian “death instinct,” or the wish that one had never been born, which pragmatism can turn in a useful direction, according to Phillips; and psychoanalytic resistance—the patient’s stubborn evasion of painful truths—which, the author writes, is not an obstacle to therapy but the key to its success, since such blocks reveal core desires to the psychoanalyst while allowing the patient to “test” and buy into the therapeutic process. Phillips connects Freudian themes to mind-expanding questions and broader intellectual discourse, but his analysis too often lapses into academese (“I want to wonder, among other things, how we became interested, and what it was that we thought we were interested in; and what psychoanalysis is, for us now, a way of being interested in?”). Devoted Freudians will appreciate this, but casual readers will likely find it too esoteric to make an impact.