Going Sane
Adam Phillips Hamish Hamilton, 245pp, £14.99
ISBN 0241142091
How do you write about sanity when, historically, all the attraction is on the side of its opposite? Both literature and medicine have been strangely averse to the subject. In the vast index to Robert Burton's prodigious 17th-century Anatomy of Melancholy, for example, a mere three entries point to the author's asides on the topic of the healthy mind. It seems an odd omission - until you consider how, as Adam Phillips reminds us, western culture has flattered and burdened the mad with a weight of expectation. Creative genius, depthless introspection, unabashed sexuality and reckless glamour: we attribute all this and more to the unhinged, while jealously guarding our own sanity like a fragile and filthy secret.
In the 17th century, "sanity" was a catch-all for both physical and psychological health, for the whole organism's reasoned propriety. The word's closeness to the modern "sanitation" is a clue to the hygienic symbolism to which the idea of mental robustness (another suspect meta-phor) has long been subject. Sanity, it seems, is a matter of psychic cleansing, of purging and protecting. To be sane is to resist, to not let go. We imagine a mind that threatens to leak, spill, rupture; so we try to keep our heads - to keep, as it were, our shit together. Characteristically, Phillips turns a good deal of this venerable wisdom on its pate: true sanity, he argues, would be at ease with the dirt of desire, the unruliness of our innermost urges. Such is the insight, he claims in a neat and devious reading of Hamlet, of Polonius's equation of "madness" with "method".
In Going Sane, however, we soon come across a quietly telling phrase: "our noblest pastime, self-assessment". It is hard not to get the sense that Phillips is pandering here to a readership that knows little of actual madness and a little too much of the debased, solipsistic lexicon of the "unhealthy" and the "inappropriate". Early chapters spend too much time appealing to an ailing and ill-defined "we", as in: "We need an alternative now to wealth, happiness, security and long life as the main constituents of a Good Life." That "now" also reveals a lot: as if it is understood from the outset that "we" are all suffering under some exigent state of emotional emergency, although at times this seems to amount to nothing more than being well-off and self-obsessed at the turn of the 21st century.
Much of Going Sane reads as if its author has been cured of all complexity, all oddity, all useful insanity. It is worth recalling that psychoanalysis is most persuasive as an extravagance of thought, style, interpretation. It is the brilliant implausibility of Sigmund Freud that ultimately convinces, not some reasoned plod through his readers' workaday worries about jobs, family, sex, and so on. The drama is much more precise and expansive than that. And Phillips's earlier books are nothing if not dramatic, chiefly at the level of his extraordinary sentences. His stylistic panache, his deft side-slip from sinuous exposition to snappy apercu, is often dispiritingly absent from Going Sane. Phillips has restricted his purview to the point of proffering sentences such as: "Strung out bet-ween romance and pornography it is no longer clear what men and women want to use each other for [sic]." That's a Sunday supplement strapline, a trailer for overeager epigrams on the psychosexual muddle that "we" (them again) have got into.
The book is at its best when Phillips eschews the self-help flummery, leaves off the glib gestures at a vaguely sketched contemporary moment, and homes in on the specifics of suffering. We are reminded, as he imagines how madness feels from the inside, what a skilful clinician he must be. The analyst, like Edgar Allan Poe's detective Dupin, is a sort of telepathist: he has first of all to imagine the incommunicable conundrum of his subject's mind. As ever, Phillips does it brilliantly, conjuring the affectless desert of autism, the undifferentiated distress of the schizophrenic, the frantic lethargy of the depressed. It is here, too, that Phillips the stylist returns: (un)canny, paradoxical, given to sly feints and sudden stabs at the strictures of common sense: "We are only pessimistic, presumably, because we expect to get what we want in the end." And what we want, he suggests, is a "deep" sanity: a health that is no longer frightened of itself, never mind its lurking shadow.
Brian Dillon's first book, In the Dark Room, will be published by Penguin this year
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