_"lffhhu;ln \'\'\"'_. n. Balance Adam P illip

Transcription

1 _"lffhhu;ln \'\'\"'_ n. Balance Adam P illip

2 On Balance ADAM PHILLIPS FARRAR, STRAUS AND CIROUX New York

3 \ Farrar, Straus and Giroux 18 West 18th Street, New York Copyright 2010 by Adam Phillips All rights reserved Distributed in Canada by D&M Publishers, Inc. Printed in the United States of America Originally published in 2010 by Hamish Hamilton, Great Britain Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux First American edition, 2010 Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from "Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)" by Bob Dylan, copyright 1985 by Special Rider Music. Reprinted by permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Phillips, Adam. On balance / Adam Phillips. p. cm. ISBN (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Cognitive balance. 2. Desire. 3. Proportion Psychological aspects. I. Title. BF337.C62P dc

4 For Michel Gribinski and Michael Neve

5 .. what counts as an accurate report of experience is a matter of what a community will let you get away with. Richard Rorty, 'Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God' Underneath the disability my inability was intact. Adam Mars-J ones, Pilcrow People unused to upholstered fu rniture do not have a desire fo r it. Keith Thomas, The Ends if Life

6 Contents Priface xi Five Short Talks on Excess I I In Excess I II Enough Is Enough II III Sex Mad 21 IV On Being Too Much for Ourselves 31 V Believe It or Not 40 On What Is Fundamental 4 9 Sleeping It Off 81 Children Behaving Badly 85 I Should School Make You Happy? 85 Il Truancy Now 100 The Authenticity Issue 105 Negative Capabilities li8 I The Horse li8 Il The Helpless 123 III The Perfectionist 15 9 IV The Lost 168

7 x Contents On Getting Away with It Forms of Inattention I Arbus's Freaks Il Celebrating Sebald III Mendelsohn's Histories IV Auden's Magic Mothers and Fairy Tales I Jack and His Beanstalk Il The Least of Her Problems: Cinderella and Men Forsaken Favourites 308 Ackl10w ledgemert ts

8 Preface 'There seems to be something singularly captivating in the word balance, ' John Stuart Mill said in a talk to the Mutual Improvement Society in r834, 'as if, because anything is called a balance, it must, for that reason, be necessarily good. ' When we want a balanced economy, or a balance of power, or want people to make balanced judgements; when we describe disturbing people as unbalanced, or assume, as we are likely to do these days, that anyone who is troubled by anything is suffering from a chemical imbalance, we are promoting the image that Mill wants us to be wary of. That it is an image - a picture of something, of somebody creating a kind of order - and that we are beguiled by it is worth noting. Justice with her scales is infinitely reassuring; the man walking on wire between the Twin Towers is both horrifying and fascinating; and children, so soon after learning to walk, loving to go round and round in circles until they fall over is puzzling (the advantage of lying on the floor, Kafka remarked in his diary, is that there is nowhere else to fall). Balance, like all our fundamental things, is something we can find, keep, lose and use; it is something we often want. Because it is

9 xii Priface 'singularly captivating', Mill suggests, we think it must 'be necessarily good'. There is indeed nothing like it; but Mill thinks we should be suspicious of anything that might confine us by lulling us into a state of inattention. We wouldn't put it quite like that now, but the people we fall in love with we find singularly captivating, as are any of the people (or ideas) that inspire us, for better or for worse. What is strange about Mill's simple observation is that it is the singularly captivating that tends to make us lose our balance. Mill intimates with his peculiar logic that the idea of balance can unbalance us. And yet in one traditional version of the moral life, as Mill knows, it is balance that is sought. Indeed, it was part of Mill's liberalism to believe that we should be able to 'enter into the mind and circumstance' of those with opposing views to our own. When the dramatist Mark Ravenhill writes that 'Art that isn't driven by this basic impulse to create an unbalanced view of the world is probably bad or weak,' we are not shocked by this, partly because after Romanticism we take it for granted that this is the province of art; elsewhere it is balance that is required. Art, ideally, is where the unbalanced views should be kept, as far away from religion and politics as possible. If we want art to be an isolation ward it is because we know just how contagious these so-called unbalanced views of the world can be (fascism, racism and sexism in modern liberal societies

10 Priface xiii are unbalanced views, but liberal democratic values are not). It is of some significance that when we talk about many of the things that matter most to us - as the essays in this book on excess, on fundamentalism and on schooling suggest - we soon lose our so-called balanced views. So we should not, perhaps, underestimate our wish to lose our balance, even though it's often easier to get up than to fall over. Indeed, the sign that something does matter to us is that we lose our steadiness. The first psychoanalysts, who wanted to think of themselves as scientists, considered psychoanalysis as akind of laboratory for the study of unbalanced views; it wasn't long before they began to believe that everyone, including themselves, hadn't merely lost their balance, they had never had it. And that everyone, by nature, as it were, was in disarray, was riven with conflict. (They also tended to believe that psychoanalysis was unequivocally a good thing when, on balance, it is something about which we should always be divided.) Like Mill, they began to realize that balance - or more specifically the idea of the balanced mind - was no longer a useful picture for modern people. They asked us to ask why anyone would want to be a well-balanced person: what were the conditions - familial, political, economic - that might produce this as an ideal? So the essays in this book are about the balancing acts that modern societies involve us in. Secular, liberal societies encourage