Side Effects

Adam Phillips

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780007155385
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061873430
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychoanalysis works by attending to the patient's side effects, "what falls out of his pockets once he starts speaking." Undergoing psychoanalytic therapy is always a leap into the dark—like dedicating our hearts and intellect to a powerful work of literature, it's impossible to know beforehand its ultimate effect and consequences. One must remain open to where the "side effects" will lead.

Erudite, eloquent, and enthrallingly observant, Adam Phillips is one of the world's most respected psychoanalysts and a boldly original writer and thinker—and the ideal guide to exploring the provocative connections between psychoanalytic treatment and enduring, transformative literature. His fascinating and thoughtful Side Effects offers a valuable intellectual blueprint for the construction of a life beholden to no ideology other than the fulfillment of personal promise.

Two Lectures on Expectations

I Great Expectations and First Impressions

All this, I saw in the first glance after I crossed the threshold–child-like, according to my theory…

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Writing enthusiastically to John Forster in September 1860 Dickens mentions that ‘a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon [him]’ such that he wonders whether ‘he had not better cancel’ the short piece he is supposed to be writing for the Uncommercial Traveller. By October he is writing to Forster to tell him that he has planned the new book, and has ‘made the opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me to be very funny.’ The book, which will be Great Expectations, begins well, in the author’s view, but he has one reservation: ‘to be quite sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read David Copperfield again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe’. Dickens’s initial impression of his new work–and, he hopes, the reader’s–is good; but that very first impression makes him fear a fall. His very first impressions of this ‘very fine, new, and grotesque idea’ remind him that they may not be first impressions at all; the book may not be a new idea at all, it may be an unconscious repetition. And this haunting suspicion leads Dickens back into rereading David Copperfield and being profoundly affected by it.

Great Expectations, as it turns out, is a book that is to a remarkable degree about first impressions. Just as Dickens believes that the book works because of the reader’s first impressions of it–‘Pray read Great Expectations,’ he writes to Mary Boyle in December 1860, ‘it is a very great success and seems universally liked–I suppose because it opens funnily and with an interest too’–so, in the same force-field of preoccupations, Dickens seems fascinated in the book by how first impressions work; by what first sight portends for the future and can do to the past; by what it is about a first moment that makes us think of it as the first moment. ‘All this I saw in a moment,’ Pip says coming upon Magwitch for the second time, ‘for I had only a moment to see it in,’ as though there could have been something else he could have seen it in. Having described his first impression of Miss Havisham Pip remarks, ‘It was not in the first moments that I saw all these things, though I saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed.’ The first moment is shocking because it betrays an uncanny competence; a taking in all of something when there is seemingly no time to take anything in. When Pip says ‘I saw more of them in the first moments’ he intimates in the ambiguity of the phrase that, at least for some things, the first moment is the best moment, even though you may not know it at the time. Being caught off guard is an opening: powers of memory and perception and anticipation are summoned in a death-defying second. Repetition, the self-cure for the trauma of first moments, is a great deadener. You lose sight of what you saw, because repetition is the consumer of shock. Asked by Jaggers, two thirds of the way through the book, ‘What do you suppose you are living at the rate of?’ the now jaded Pip is flawed. ‘I had looked into my affairs so often, that I had thoroughly destroyed any slight notion I might ever have had of their bearings. Reluctantly I confessed myself quite unable to answer the question.’ Dickens feared at the outset of Great Expectations that he might be looking into his affairs again, and so too often; that he might be unconsciously repeating David Copperfield in repeating the story of a boy growing up. There is a way of looking too often–call it habit, call it a mechanism of defence, call it a repetition compulsion–that can destroy even the slightest notion one has ever had of the bearings of one’s affairs. Bearings meaning both what one has borne and had to bear; and also in the sense of losing one’s bearings, of losing ballast and direction; the necessary tropisms of desire and assurance. The fall into unconscious repetition can be a fall from, a fall away from, the plenitude of first impressions, that first moment in which we see more of things than might be supposed. Even if what we see we see in fear. It is because an appetite of sorts has been stirred in that moment that we call it a first moment; even if what it is an appetite for is, of necessity, obscure.

I want to note that a novel Dickens called Great Expectations is full of first impressions; is indeed packed with firstnesses of all kinds, and so much occupied and preoccupied by what repetition is for, or does to what we are tempted to describe as firstness (‘Joe felt, as I did, that he had made a point there, and he pulled hard at his pipe to keep himself from weakening it by repetition’). How is it–and what is it–that repetition weakens? Or, to put it in Pip’s terms: if Joe’s point would be weakened by repetition, what would serve to strengthen it? Pip and the author of the novel are continually exercised by what, if anything, has to be done with first experiences, and what it is to repeat something. For something to be repeated there has to be some acknowledgement of its first having happened. Indeed, it may be a sense of repetition that alerts us to something having originally happened. And for something to be repeated there must, we assume, be a reason.

What are repeated on the first page of Great Expectations are three of Pip’s first impressions; and each of these first impressions is enigmatic. His name, his parents and the place he grew up in are all, he tells us, in different ways, made up by him out of the difficulty of his initial and initiating experiences. His ‘infant tongue’, he tells us in the opening paragraph, could not pronounce his father’s family name, Pirrip, nor his own first name, Philip, so, as he puts it, ‘I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.’ His sense of who his parents were he got from their graves. ‘As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones.’ Pip effectively invents himself through these acts of transformation; it is what he makes of what he is given–and how unreasonable these necessary, founding acts of transformation are–that Dickens impresses upon our attention. First impressions are material to work on. Unlike the first impressions we get of a character in a nineteenth-century melodrama–theatricals that particularly appealed to Dickens–the first impression we get of Pip is of someone bemused by his own first impressions. Pip is someone we are introduced to as a person preoccupied by what he calls his first fancies. He names himself, and construes his parents from singularly unpromising beginnings. We are introduced to Pip at the outset making himself up out of these first impressions in order to become recognizable to himself. If those popular theatrical melodramas that were so important for Dickens’s art of characterization worked by reassuring their audiences that their very first impressions of the characters were accurate, in Great Expectations Dickens immediately calls these assumptions into question. Our first impression of Pip is of someone who needs to tell us about his first impressions, and how these are integral to his sense of himself. Dickens, in short, is telling us at the beginning of Great Expectations about the creation of character.

The first thing that Pip wants to tell us about the place he grew up in is what he calls his ‘first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things’, with the inevitable implication that there will be further impressions, but that the identity of things has something to do with the ‘first most vivid and broad impression’ (Dickens’s phrasing here is characteristically subtle; it is not clear whether it is the first and also the most vivid and broad impression, or whether it is most vivid and broad because it is the first). Not merely reflecting on his impressions but reflecting on his first impressions is Pip’s singular concern. What we have come to call the inwardness, the inner complexity and idiosyncrasy of character, Dickens describes as this imaginative work done by Pip on his first fancies; his inventive reaction to an inheritance. The only thing that is transparent about (modern) character, Dickens seems to be saying, is the sheer scale of self-invention. Orphans are people who have lived before the invention of photography. They are people without pictures of their past provided by other people. Their first impressions are, so to speak, first hand.

There are of course here, as we shall see, suggestive links with Freud’s work. In Great Expectations, we might say, Dickens is psychologically minded; he is telling us stories about what could be going on inside people. But he has to make this compatible with the kind of caricature with which he made his name. So it is not strictly speaking true to say that Dickens’s exploitation of contemporary theatrical melodrama in his creation of character is straightforwardly a critique, a suspicion, about the inwardness of character as elitist and socially divisive. In melodrama, Juliet John writes in her instructive book Dickens’s Villains,

Character…is normally transparent. The audience cannot fail to understand immediately…a character’s destined role in the play and his or her ethical substance…This objectification of emotion is in keeping with melodrama’s communal, anti-individualistic agenda. Emotions are robbed of the unique status often accorded to them in post-Freudian culture; they do not ‘belong’ to the individual experiencing them but to common experience.

This is useful but it is fairer to say, I think, that as a genre–and this is what Dickens picks up on in his fiction, and particularly in Great Expectations–melodrama works with and on our wonderings about transparency, immediacy and first impressions; and especially our first impressions of other people. The drama of character, the suspense of character, is about what drama does to our expectations about character. Melodrama, as described here, says your expectations about this character are well founded; indeed, your first impressions and your expectations are at one with each other. Here you can relax because the expectations that inform your initial impression are confirming rather than disfiguring or distorting. The audience’s first impression of a character in a melodrama is a true but diminished thing because it cannot develop; impression conforms to expectation and vice versa. For Pip in Great Expectations Dickens wants to show us that his first impressions are true (and sometimes false) in ways in which he would never have expected. He is always seeing more than he realizes, and never quite sees what he does realize. So it is also instructive to see John as wanting, by way of explication, to set Dickens against Freud, and to stage this as a drama, if not a virtual allegory, of the communal in its war with an exclusive elite, the outward bound versus the inward. ‘Pip’s deviant characteristics,’ she writes,

can be read as directly linked to secrecy and self-obsession; his apparent growth to ‘maturity’, therefore, for the most part involves an attempt to escape from or even forget the self, rather than the kind of inwardly focused self-analysis so valued in our own therapy culture. Events or actions, rather than Hamlet-like introspection, are always the starting-point for self-knowledge in Great Expectations…The introspective individual prominent in high romanticism was to Dickens constitutive of, and constituted by, a culture of exclusivity.

Hamlet’s introspection was not, of course, unrelated to certain events and actions. If as John concedes self-knowledge is an issue in Great Expectations–though not of the ‘Hamlet-like introspection’ kind, or the ‘inwardly focused self-analysis so valued in our own therapy culture’ kind–then this self-knowledge devolves into knowing what any particular self has in common with all the other selves in the culture. And at its most caricatural these selves would be like the characters in nineteenth-century theatrical melodramas that Dickens so much enjoyed: transparent, immediately recognizable, unintrospective. Not the kind of people who make special claims on behalf of their inner complexity; not the kind of people who mystify themselves and others by believing in their own obscurity to themselves. Not the kind of people, in other words, who need to explain themselves.

And yet the one thing that does make Pip at all Hamlet-like, the one thing that does make Pip puzzling to himself–and not only to himself, of course–is the first time he does something, the first time something happens to him (so-called growing up is, after all, one first time after another). ‘I never have been so surprised in my life,’ Pip relates of his fight with ‘the pale young gentleman’ in Miss Havisham’s garden, ‘as I was when I let out the first blow, and saw him lying on his back, looking at me with a bloody nose and his face exceedingly foreshortened.’ With this first punch Pip’s perspective changes; the consequences of Pip’s action are looking at him. With Great Expectations the antinomy of Dickens and Freud proposed by John more exactly suggests the link. For both these writers of the nineteenth century we are at our most self-revealing–our most self-surprising and surprised–in our first impressions, and in what we do with them. And what is revealed is precisely our expectations, great and otherwise. For Freud, as we shall see–and in this he is clearly what Juliet John refers to as a high romantic–psychoanalysis is about the fate of early impressions; about the ways in which those early impressions are informed by those expectations called appetites, and the ways in which they are themselves transformed into expectations, great and otherwise. A trauma, we need to remember, is a species of first impression. And the great expectation that is desire is, in Freud’s view, a type of trauma.

If, in melodrama, our first impressions are sufficient–‘the audience cannot fail to understand immediately…a character’s destined role in the play and his or her ethical substance’–then anyone, or indeed any genre, not satisfied by first impressions, or not interested in the relationship between first impressions and consequent impressions, is going to be wondering where to start; or where the story starts from. In melodrama the audience can take something for granted–‘character is transparent’–and they can take it from there. They don’t have to suffer the so-called inwardness born of scepticism. There are foundations–being able to recognize people accurately–from which the drama can proceed. They are free from the obligation of a certain kind of suspicion. They can relax into the entertainment. It is this that Dickens is looking into through the growing child Pip, whose life, like all children’s lives, is riddled with first impressions; and in Great Expectations the word ‘first’ is used with inordinate frequency, as a troubling reminder. ‘When she first came to me,’ Miss Havisham says to Pip about Estella, ‘I meant to save her from misery like my own. At first I meant no more.’ ‘Well, well!’ Pip replies ‘I hope so.’ To put it as blandly as possible: first impressions, rather like first intentions, Dickens intimates in this novel, are informed by great expectations. What happens at first turns out not to be the first thing that had happened.

Perhaps there is a book to be written about first impressions in the nineteenth century, about the fate of first looking into, of first seeing and hearing and touching and smelling. In an age of such technological innovation there were clearly many opportunities–as in the well-documented accounts of people first seeing or travelling on the railways–for unprecedented experiences. Of course, people had always travelled, but they had never travelled in this way; just as they had always fought in wars and communicated with each other over great distances, but were now struck by the shock of the new methods of warfare and long-distance communication. My guess is–and this is only an impression; I am thinking here of, say, Ruskin’s teachings on seeing and drawing, or Baudelaire’s dandies–that in the nineteenth century at least some people were peculiarly exercised by the enigma of first impressions. And I want to suggest in this essay that Freud’s work of psychoanalysis, whatever else it is, is an enquiry into the nature and status of the first impression; that not only is Freud very interested in firstness–the word ‘first’ is used in Strachey’s Standard Edition translation 3,766 times (‘pleasure’, by way of comparison, is used 1,088 times)–but that also, for Freud, first impressions have to be redescribed as great expectations. For Freud, nothing is more revealing of our ambition and our history than what we think of as our first impressions. The notion of transference is Freud’s tribute to a paradox that is at the heart of psychoanalysis; that one’s first impressions are a (disguised) disclosure of one’s personal history. There is nothing more anachronistic than a first impression. From a psychoanalytic point of view there is often nothing less first than a first impression; indeed, the word ‘first’ in this context is a misnomer, a disavowal of the past.

In simple language one could say: we call them first impressions because they are not. Or, we want them to be first impressions because the phrase conjures us into starting afresh, persuades us of novelty to muffle the echoes. What Freud is saying is that we have what we refer to as first impressions only because there are antecedents to this firstness; not causes, exactly, but preconditions. It is as if, unbeknown to ourselves–that is, often quite unpredictably–our individual histories predispose us to respond in specific ways to specific signs. Just as the dream-work works the dream day in ways that can never occur to us (there is nothing we can do to work out what, if anything, from today will turn up, in whatever form, in our dreams); and we can be sexually aroused without knowing the provenance of our excitement; and amused, as Freud says, without really quite knowing what it is that has got to us; so our desire, and what it might latch on to, is an unknown quantity. From a psychoanalytic point of view we can never get the measure of ourselves because we can never quite know beforehand what we will be drawn into. When it comes to what Freud calls deferred action we can never be ahead of the game. Any scene, any apparently new experience–and especially, perhaps, anything we need to go back to as a first impression–may remind us of a trauma that until that moment, until that so-called first impression has called it up, was, to all intents and purposes, no trauma at all.

‘Only the occurrence of the second scene,’ as Laplanche and Pontalis put it in The Language of Psychoanalysis, ‘can endow the first one with pathogenic force.’ As Freud suggests in the case of Emma in the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, what makes something so strikingly a first impression–in a sense, what constitutes something as a first impression–is that it is at once the belated revision of a trauma that through revision constitutes the prior experience as an experience. ‘A memory is repressed,’ Freud writes, ‘which has become a trauma only by deferred action.’ These first impressions impress one because they make the past present in refigured form; these first impressions are history in the making. Indeed, to have a certain kind of so-called first impression is the only way through to the constructing of personal history. In Freud’s language these shocking or troubling apparently new experiences are secular epiphanies: revelations not of God’s grace but of the history of our desire. They link us to our losses. The shock of the new is how uncannily old it is, how secretly reminiscent of what we preferred to forget.

Emma, Freud writes,

is subject at the present time to a compulsion of not being able to go into shops alone. As a reason for this she produced a memory from the time when she was twelve years old (shortly after puberty). She went into a shop to buy something, saw the two shop assistants (one of whom she can remember) laughing together, and ran away in some kind of affect of fright. In connection with this, she was led to recall that the two of them were laughing at her clothes and that one of them had pleased her sexually.

All Emma experiences on first entering the shop is an utterly unintelligible fear; something has struck her, something has occurred to her that she must resist, and she is now unable to go into any shop unaccompanied. In other words, she would have had no first impression worth noting–nothing she would bother to call a first impression–if she had not been in some way unconsciously stirred by the scene in front of her. In a less dramatic way we might take this scene as emblematic, and wonder what makes anything or anyone strike us at all (we might, for example, ask of any writer, what it is about the language that strikes her). We might wonder what, unwittingly, we are bringing to the scene–two shop assistants laughing together–that makes it into a scene at all.

This makes such a strong, such an unavoidable, impression on Emma, Freud writes, because, without her realizing it at the time,

On two occasions when she was a child of eight s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Preface
• The Master-Mind Lectures
• Talking Nonsense and Knowing When to Stop
• Making the Case
• Doing It Alone
• For the Family
• On Not Making It Up
• Time Pieces
• The Dream Horizon
• The Forgetting Museum
• Learning to Live
• The Uses of Desire
• Nuisance Value
• Waiting for Returns
• Two Lectures on Expectations
• Paranoid Moderns
• The Analyst and the Bribe
• Two Talks on Needing to Know When It's Over
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Praise
• Other Books by Adam Phillips
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher