Overall Favorite Books of 2016
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9.
UNFORBIDDEN PLEASURES
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The English psychoanalytical writer Adam
Phillips has written with beguiling nuance about such variousness of
our psychic experience as the
importance of “fertile solitude,”the
value of missing out, and the
rewards of being out of balance.
In Unforbidden
Pleasures, he explores our paradoxical desires and
the topsy-turvy ways we go about pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.
In the collection’s standout essay, titled
“Against Self-Criticism,” Phillips reaches across the space-time of culture to
both revolt against and pay homage to Susan Sontag’s masterwork Against
Interpretation, and examines “our virulent, predatory
self-criticism [has] become one of our greatest pleasures.” He writes:
In broaching the possibility of being,
in some way, against self-criticism, we have to imagine a world in which
celebration is less suspect than criticism; in which the alternatives of
celebration and criticism are seen as a determined narrowing of the repertoire;
and in which we praise whatever we can.
But we have become so indoctrinated in this
conscience of self-criticism, both collectively and individually, that we’ve
grown reflexively suspicious of that alternative possibility. (Kafka, the great
patron-martyr of self-criticism, captured this pathology perfectly: “There’s
only one thing certain. That is one’s own inadequacy.”) Phillips writes:
Self-criticism, and the self as critical,
are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called selves.
[…]
Nothing
makes us more critical, more confounded — more suspicious, or appalled, or even
mildly amused — than the suggestion that we should drop all this relentless
criticism; that we should be less impressed by it. Or at least that
self-criticism should cease to have the hold over us that it does.
BRAIN PICKINGS
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