Adam Phillips & Hermione Lee: On Giving Up

Welcome to the London Review Bookshop podcast. To find out about her upcoming events, visit www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/events. Good evening everyone and welcome to the London Review Bookshop. It's a pleasure to welcome Adam Phillips and Hermione Lee. Adam, as you all know perfectly well, is a psychoanalyst and a writer not least for the London Review of Books, whose most recent publications include "On Wanting to Change" and "On Getting Better". Now joining the book we're here to celebrate this evening on Giving Up. Adam will be in conversation with Hermione Lee, whose most recent biography was of Tom Stopper in 2020 and before that Penelope Fitzgerald in 2013. They'll be in conversation for around 45 minutes, following which we've got time for questions from the floor with the roving mic, following which we've got time for buying books, refilling glasses, chatting and such like. So welcome Hermione and welcome Adam. Thank you. So it's a great treat and a great challenge for me to be in conversation with Adam Phillips, who is not exactly a national treasure, is certainly a notable treasure house of life, thought and language. And as you've just been told, and I'm going to tell you again, Adam is a psychoanalyst, a literary critic, a visiting professor at York, the editor of the Peneling Classics Freud, and a writer of very extraordinary, many very extraordinary books which absorb delight and sometimes in rage, which change what we know about ourselves and which once broached our extremely hard to give up or to give up on. This book, possibly his 26th, has a recognizably philipsian title on giving up, part proposition, part provocation. And I think it belongs with some of the other essay titles and book titles, just some of them just mentioned, as if you've been dwelling on this theme for a bit before writing this book, on wanting to change, on needing to know when it's over, on getting better, talking nonsense and knowing when to stop. So no nonsense is going to be talked here, but could you start by telling us what this theme of giving up is? What it means to you and why it's something that keeps perhaps coming back here and in different ways in our books. And maybe a tiny reading to start with if that helps. Josh, I should read now. I should just say that as you can hear my voice is going, which is not promising, but I think it'll last for the event. Okay, this is the bit I'm going to read, which is from the prologue. We tend to think of giving up in the ordinary way as a lack of courage, as an improper or embarrassing orientation, towards what is shameful and fearful. That is to say, we tend to value and even idealize the idea of seeing things through, of finishing things rather than abandoning them. Giving up has to be justified in a way that completion does not. Giving up doesn't usually make us proud of ourselves. It is a falling short of our preferred selves. Unless, of course, it is the sign of an ultimate and defining realism of what we call knowing our limitations. Giving up, in other words, is usually thought of as a failure rather than we have succeeding at something else. It's worth wondering to whom we believe we have to adjust to ourselves when we're giving up and when we are determinedly not giving up. So how are you changing that given view? Well, I think that the basic, one of the basic organising ideas in the book is that when we give things up, we believe we can change. And when we give up, we believe we can't. And so I think what I wanted to look at in the book was what our fantasies are about giving up and who we think we're giving things up to and what the project is, so to speak. Why we believe that giving up, smoking or chocolate, whatever it is, will get us the life we want. That's the first bit. The second bit, I think, is to do with a kind of a potentially spurious idea of heroism. I mean, tragic heroes don't give up. Trump doesn't give up. People wreak a lot of havoc when they don't give up. So one of the things I want to suggest in the book is it's really useful to know when to give up in certain circumstances. And that, in a way, the idea of giving up completely has become tainted by ideas to do with suicide and break down all that stuff. And I want it in a way to remove it from catastrophe. Okay. We'll come back to tragic heroes and we'll come back to catastrophe. Can I broach before we get any further the virtues of not giving up? So there is, as you say, there's a kind of social stigma about giving up in this everyday non-drastic, non-catastrophic forms. And as you say, no one writes in praise of giving up. There's a wonderful sense. We never say she is really good at giving up. That's something that people don't say. So there's always something that is shameful about it. But don't we think of it? It's new to sort of ingrained value system in most of us. To, as they say, try, try and try and to finish up a book to meet our deadline, not to walk out in the middle of an interview, to keep our friendships, to clear our plate. I mean, Beckett's quote of which there's only half of it in this, but Beckett's quote, "I can't go on, I'll go on," is the sort of despairing version of that. And some of us, including me, have temperaments which are averse to the idea of giving up in the social professional worldly sense. So what is wrong with not giving up? Well, I agree with you, and I think obviously persistence is of value. And this is also where psychoanalysis is useful, I think, with the idea of resistance. Because very often things we either are potentially pleasurable, although we want to do. There is an initial resistance to doing. And it's very crucial in a way that we don't give up at that point, because there are threshold anxieties all over the place. So that would be my way into this, which is, you need to find out whether you really want to give up. So people who are, as it were, quitters, I think are not ahead of the game, because I think one should err on the side of persistence. Right. There's a very, you yourself seem quite calm about giving up some, for instance, when it comes to writing. I noticed a very telling sentence in your Paris Review interview when you were talking about writing. And you say, "I pause on this sentence, I was tremendously struck by it." You say, "I sometimes get stuck, and then I just abandon it." I thought, "Gosh, there's something quite heroic about that." Or at least quite blasey. Is that really true? Well, it's really true. But the reason I get abandoned is because I can't try. I don't know what to do. I can't try it and write. I can't make more of an effort. It just isn't like that for me. So I can either write, or I can't write. Yeah. And if I can't, I don't try to. Fascinating. So the key book, you've already used it several times, the key word in the book. And there's always a key word in a book. The key word in the book is wanting. And there's lots of rather stylish aphorisms about wanting, which I'll quote three. In giving up, we're always asking whether what we had wanted to do is worth doing. To want something is to be left out of having it. What has always to be given up in giving up is the wanting. So could you serve it more about why wanting is so important? Well, in a way, I mean, certainly in a psychoanalytic story, not only in the psychoanalytic story, wanting is the heart of the matter. In other words, we begin. We're all sitting here now because we've wanted well enough, in other words, successfully enough to persist to survive. So it would seem to be that there's a fundamental level at which psychological life is about wanting. Now, it sophisticates, obviously, as one gets older, but nevertheless, we can't imagine a life without wanting. Now, of course, lots of lives have been imagined without wanting. But I think one's relationship to one's own wanting and to other people seems to me a fundamental thing. And something that psychoanalysis is really illuminating about. Because the culture says, or something, the culture says, it's really about, look how what you want, and then seeing if you've got the way we're all to get it. A kind of supermarket view of this of wanting. And people say things like, well, relationships are about gratifying one's wants and needs. Well, you could think, actually, relationships about finding out what one's wants are. So not the one comes equipped with one's wants, but they are discovered in relationship or they worked out in a relationship. So I think it's very difficult to, maybe just for people like us, if there isn't us, to imagine a life in which wanting isn't a very significant organizing issue. Is it a form of survival? Well, survival depends upon it. Yes, OK. But one of the interesting things, I think, in a way that psychoanalysis says, is that in a way, knowing absolutely what you want, is the most defensive thing you can do. Defensive. Defensive. Because what it does is it narrows one's mind around how prolific one's wanting might be. So the complexity of one's wanting might lead one to oversimplify oneself. So, is it a kind of tyranny? There's a sentence where you say there can be a tyranny of completion, which can narrow our understanding. So, can wanting, being driven by a particular form of wanting, can that be a kind of tyranny, which, as it were, overbears, giving out a changing one's mind? Or assuming that you know what your object of desire is, whereas you could work, in principle, the object of desire is always obscure. So, you're moving towards something or somebody, but you don't quite know. You never quite know why, and you don't quite know what you want. And it's therefore a process of discovery, not pre-knowledge. Yes, you've mentioned psychoanalysis, obviously. And the idea of wanting keeps taking you in the book and asks as readers back to childhood. I just want to give two little stories of childhood that you mention as a sort of way into this. One is actually not in this book, it's much earlier. It's in Houdini's box, which is a book of really about escaping or the possibility of escape. And you tell a story about a very troubled five-year-old girl who would come to have sessions with you and would play a very strange game of hide-and-seek at the start of each session. A sort of process that you had both to go through. And it was always rather the same each time. And then she would end it by saying, I give up. So that's one story. And you suppose you have a supposition when you've described this encounter as the game was possibly a fear of being given up, or perhaps a sense of failure. The other, which is in this book, is a wonderful and to me, very funny, dream fable of Kafka, where the narrator in this little dream fable or dream-style fable is being hailed as an Olympic champion of swimming. When, the narrator says, the fact is, I cannot even swim. I never learned to swim. And so the fable seems to suggest to you, writing about it, that we are always really the children we once were, that our adult was a massive kind of cover-up. That is, we once couldn't swim. So we really can't ever swim. There's a part of us that really aren't ever swimming. Yeah, but to put it slightly differently, developmental stages are not superseded. They're incorporated. So they stay with you, but at the same time, you have a wonderful passage on how bad we are at remembering our childhoods. How incredibly patchy it is, how weird it is that these major experiences that have happened to us as children, most of the time, we can't really remember it. I mean, it's a very extraordinary fact. We lived every second of these childhoods. And we can remember six scenes, or 12 scenes or whatever. And yet, we actually lived every second of it. And you think, where is it? So what is it? So what's the argument in relation to getting up? Is it that all the things that we didn't have, or like we didn't learn to swim, or we couldn't do, like, being found in a hide and seek game? I sort of somehow still in us. Or is it-- Yes, or you could think you leave home to meet the deprivations that your parents couldn't help but inflict on you? So the way your parents didn't give you, you leave home for. That'll be one way of describing it. And of course, of course, one's parents can't give one everything. That's the point. But it's as though one might go off into the world, hoping what was unrecognized in oneself will be seen by somebody else. Where does giving up come in? Will you be giving up your parents? Well, it might be that you might give up into spare. You might give up on the base of your childhood experience. You might lose confidence in other people's interest in your wants. Yeah. Is there really people aren't that interested in you? They don't care about your pleasure or your well-being. That would be a form of giving up. The other form of giving up that's at the heart of psychoanalysis and not on your psychoanalysis is giving up the parents in order to get to the next stage of your life. So is the search always for people who are then interested in you, as it were? Yes. That must partly be it, because if they're not sufficiently interested in your wants and your pleasure, then you can't really survive with them. So people who never find that-- I mean, there must be lots and lots of people who never find anyone who's interested in them at all. There may be, but hopefully they're out. I mean, one's got to try hard at this. Because obviously, it's easy to falter. It's easy to give up and to think-- Yes. There's no be out there, really. Or they're all hopeless. Is it like strict and moralising? The very. It's very moralising. You talked about tragedy earlier on. And you have a great section in here about the catastrophic tragic version of not giving up. How not giving up can be a tragic flaw, wanting something at all costs. What you call being frozen or immobilised by a tyranny of wants in your great examples are Matt Beth and Milton Satan. Those are the two-- I mean, we'll come on in a bit for another example, which is Hamlet, but just to stay with those two. So there's a kind of quality of vindictiveness and revengefulness about these characters. And also, that sense that Matt Beth says, so famous you and I, I'm in blood, sticked in so far, returning whereas Tejas is going, oh, I can't give up at this point. So heroes, those kind of tragic heroes, if you can call Milton Satan the hero, which I would like to, are catastrophic examples of not giving up. They can't be interrupted if you put it. Why are those examples useful to you? Well, I think because we have to imagine what these heroes imagine is the catastrophe of giving up. You know, what will Satan lose if he says to God or to his fellow fallen angels, this isn't going to work. And I know that I'm envious and really I'm quite objected and really God is the thing. And if there is any omnipotence in the world, it's in him. I mean, really, to God of the day now. Now, obviously, he can't do that. But anyway, more instinctively than that, is he can't even think it. It never crosses his mind. The only debate in hell is, and how are we going to win? It's all about success. And it's about not being able to contemplate failing. And that means not being able to contemplate the fact that God is in fact omnipotent. That the result has already been decided. And the reason we admire Satan, if we do, is because he is unwilling to submit to that. He won't submit to that determinist view. No, exactly. Yeah, in a way, the problem is that what he should have said is, there's no such thing as omniscience and omnipotence in the world. What he in fact said was, I've got it. So that's the future. I'm the future. So could you apply Milton Satan, or an interesting parallel map, Beth, to the characters of all the behavior of people that you might know? Yeah, for sure. Or the everyday people. That sort of tragic extremism is happening in every day, and presumably we've all witnessed perhaps in ourselves, the way in which envy creates retaliation, that when there's something that we, I mean, the envious part of ourselves thinks, shit, why can't I do that? The envious part of the self thinks, how wonderful to live in a world where people can do things that I can't do. And that's a huge difference. But once you're in an envious state of mind, you want to destroy the thing that you believe you're entitled to, but can't have. Yeah, so it's like desiring this man's art, and that man's art. Yes, exactly. Which is a terrible tract moment in that sonnet way. He can only get out of that, by the way, by thinking about the love of the person he loves. And, Beth, you have a wonderful riff on sleeplessness, essentially, in Macbeth. That Macbeth can't sleep. Macbeth has murdered sleep. Sleep is great for a blind man. And that's because he can't get up, presumably. So sleep is kind of giving up. Yeah. And also, Macbeth's useful to me in the book, because by implication, a good version of giving up is sleeping. Every night we give up consciousness. We give up vigilance. We give up attentiveness. And we relinquish something and sleep. And that seems to me a good picture of good giving up. So we should be able to do the equivalent of sleeping more often in different areas of our lives. Yes, but sleep, of course, takes us on to another and ultimately catastrophic example of giving up, if you think not about Macbeth, but about Hamlet. And this is where this subject becomes indeed very distressing and very painful, personally, to any reader of this book, which is the subject of suicide, which what Hamlet, Hamlet, you cannot give up. the idea of following the command of the ghost and taking the revenge. He doesn't do it, but he doesn't give up on it. But all the time he's thinking about the alternative, which is the ultimate. Well, it is though he can only bear it if he's got his eye on the exit, if he can believe there is a wout of this, and that sustains him so to speak. But this takes you very seriously to thinking about, to think about the way people think about suicide. And you say as a very interesting sentence, it is, you say this, it is never clear to us whether suicide is what we call a choice or the abrogation of a choice, the choice among other things to give up choosing. And of course I, I thought about this a lot when I was writing a book about the Geneva Wolf, the question whether that's a choice or the abrogation of a choice. So it's one of the, how can I put this? It's one of the aims of the to find different possible ways to think about suicide. Yes, and in a way, if it's possible to take some of the terror out of it, or the taboo out of it. In other words, that we would be able to acknowledge, not happily, that we would be able to acknowledge that for some people their lives are actually unbearable, going on living as torture. And so it may be what everyone's preferred values are, that dignified, the honourable, the honest, the greatest thing to do to kill oneself. That actually, the question, once you're in a secular world is, what's the point of suffering? What's it in the service of? Well, you could think it's in the service of getting over the suffering, or in the hope that it would produce something creative. But actually, we might be suffering for no good reason, and it may come to nothing. And there's a huge pile up of cultural religious prohibition, which we still have in our cultural makeup against thinking in that way. So this is a very kind of bold and radical and possibly offensive way of thinking about why people might choose. Yes, but I think what I'm horrified by is if you take the life as sacred line, then it means you are absolutely compelled to suffer whatever is inflicted upon you. And that seems to me sort of intolerable. There's an instinct, I'm many people may know this, but Winnicott gives this example, but he says, if somebody comes to me and says they want to kill themselves, I never try and dissuade them, I just try and make sure they do it for the right reasons. And that seems to me, if I want a better word, a very humane approach to this, which is not to assume or to persuade that somebody's got to be dissuaded from doing this, as though it is intrinsically a bad thing to do, but you need to find out what you think you're doing by doing it and why you're doing it. But will people always know? They won't always know, but one thing psychoanalysis might offer them is a conversation which they might find out just that. Okay, so we get here to the practice of psychoanalysis. And it seems here and in other books that you propose two versions of, to put it simply, two versions of psychoanalysis, and this is connected to the sort of tyranny and rigidity of these tragic heroes that you've been talking about, where there is, you know, in the red corner as it were, there is an essentialist, definitive, even coercive version of psychoanalysis. And in the, in the blue corner as it were, there's an experimental pluralist, inclusive version of it. So in the book called Side Effects, interestingly, use the same phrase as here. You talk about the possibility in analysis that, quote, "giving up is better than finishing." And you also talk here in this book about a kind of tyranny of generalizations, which psychoanalysis is prone to, and you set against that one of your favorite people, William James, who says the mind is a theater of simultaneous possibilities. So could you air this debate a bit more, and could you explain how the theme of giving up relates to this tension between different kinds, different versions of psychoanalysis? When you train to be a psychoanalyst, what is on offer is lots of accounts of what life is really like. These are essentialist accounts. So if you, and they're also concepts of cure, so if, just in a shorthand, if you're a, a, a bulbian, you would believe the aim of analysis is to establish a secure attachment to somebody. If you're a lecanean, you'd be encouraged to not give up on your desire. If you're a lecanean, you'd be encouraged to enable yourself to be surprised. If you're a Freudian, you will be enabled to love and work. And so it goes on. Now, what's tyrannical about these ideas is they are essentialist theorists, because what these people never say is, they always say, this is the truth about life, that's the implication. What they should be saying is, this is my preferred picture of what a life should be like. My belief is, people should achieve the depressive position. And here is the reason. But actually, this is a fictional supposition. It may not be for everybody. But the risk is that one's appetite for certainty is going to make one prone to adopt certain authority to figures, and simply accept their vocabulary. Now, the way in which for me, psychoanalysts sort of betrays itself is in its naivety about essentialism and its essentialisms, because it's as though at its worst, it tells us who we really are. As opposed to saying, we may be like this, or let's imagine really sexuality is the thing. What kind of life does that get you? Not sexuality is the thing, live with it, if you see what I mean, but actually consider what your life might be like if you take that to be true. So it's the difference between a life that is effectively predetermined by secondary theory and a life that's open in which you find out. So you might be finding out from a patient what for them would be a cure. So you're never going to tell them? They're going to find out. I couldn't tell them, because they put me in an inappropriate position of authority. Yes. But then if you take that to its ultimate logical extension, you would be like a words worthy and character always as the analyst moving about in worlds unrealised and listening and listening and listening, but not having any kind of a theory. And maybe nothing would happen. No, you couldn't, it's impossible not have a theory. In fact, not have lots of theories, whether you've read any books or not, everyone is full of theories about life. But I think the thing for me about psychoanalysis is that you can discuss the theory, if you say to me, it doesn't have to be simply a guideline or a blueprint. So I might interpret something to you from my point of view, but I would want this to be done in an atmosphere in which you would feel free to disagree or say it's different. You know, so I might, for example, think I'm a very kind person. But really, I need to find out from you what it would be for me to be kind to you, you know what I mean? So there's a big difference here. Yes. So yeah, it's very interesting. You're talking as it were in general or human terms about psychoanalysis here. But in the book, very often, you're very keen to embed psychoanalysis in a historical, in a very particular historical context for Freud mainly, but also for psychoanalysis more generally. And you set Freud alongside such writers as Kafka, and Musil, and Thomas Mann, and you place the birth of the psychoanalysical movement in the context of Jews, in Europe, of exile, of exclusion, and of a worldwide devastation and disillusionment about human behaviour crossing two world wars, entailing a kind of giving up on a capacity for belief in your nature. Why does this seem of such importance to you to emphasise this now in this book? Well, predating this, it did seem to me true that psychoanalysis is part of a larger cultural conversation. It's not a supreme fiction about life. It's one among many competing kinds of accounts of what a life might be about. I'm sure this is partly to do with what's going on in the world, the moment it's partly to do with my age. It must be to do with lots of things, if you say that I mean, because in my life, I haven't given up, and I haven't given up yet either. But I'm aware, and it's very striking to me, I gave this book personally to eight people. Every single one of them said, when they picked it up, that's what I want to do. And these are not depressed, people are suicidal, people, but everybody responds to the title. And that's kind of interesting, because you could think at its first minimal, well, it must be at least something we can contemplate. Because that's the thing about, how would you give up if you wanted to? What would you do? What would it be like? Well, that's why I think I said in the book that giving up should be tours in schools. And by that, I mean, there should be ways of talking about it. It's a bit like the book. we all hate her, everybody wants to walk out of the life. Everyone has a fantasy of just walking out on the life that surrounds them, you know, and then what. But this is a slight tangent, perhaps, to what I was hoping to hear more about, which is that historical context for psychoanalysis. Is it something you feel needs to be more emphasized? I do, because it's a period piece, psychoanalysis, and what else could it be? And it comes out of that period, and it seems to me, we are living in the aftermath of two catastrophic world wars, and they weren't very long ago, as it happens, and they really were catastrophic, as you said, in the introduction of the question. Those wars, whatever, I mean, obviously, did different things to different people, but they really did make people wonder what kind of confidence they could have in human nature. If people are capable of doing these kinds of things, then are we all capable of doing such things? And if we are, what does that make us? What kind of animals are we? And also, what kind of confidence can we have in cultural ideals? Do we really believe fairness or justice is going to be able to withstand the Holocaust? And all the other Holocaust. And is that why, in your view, psychoanalysis content to have a rather grimly determinist relationship with human behavior? Because it comes out of that. I think that must be true, and there must be a real anxiety of exaggerated optimism. Even if you just localize it and think all those Jews growing up in Vienna, who would come to Vienna, they really believe that, actually, they'd finally found a society that they could participate in. And then overnight it goes. I mean, there's a story about, and this is telling of Freud as well, a story about the French novelist Romain Roland, ghost of his at Freud in 1938. There are swastikers everywhere in the streets, etc. And Ronald says to Freud, "What do you think about the enemy?" Freud says, "Who's the enemy?" And Ronald says, "The Nazis." Freud says, "No, no, the enemy is the catholic church." Now that's the scale of denial that people are living in. And you can get in those kind of stories you can see. I mean, it's in Badenheim, you know. Well, I've been thinking about Tom Stopper's play, Leopold Stutt. Yeah. Again, you know, we thought we were being-- Yeah. We thought it was fine and good. We converted to Catholicism. We thought we were fine, you know. Yeah. And this book, like all your books, is very, very rich in literary illusions. I'll just give a short list. Empson, Beckett, Kafka, Camus, Shakespeare, Milton, the James Brothers, Darwin, Beryman, Mill, Musil, Mann, Haslet, Emerson. So it's a simple question. Do you draw life from such writers in a different way, say, then you draw life from Winnecock to Freud or Johnson Lear or Marion Mill? No. For me, the original thing is literature. And these people are writers to me. It doesn't mean they're not other things as well. But for me, it's all writing. And it's published with education and sensibility. But I studied literary university. That was the thing is the thing for me. And so when I started reading Winnecock's say, or eventually Freud, I thought, it's a really interesting writers. I didn't think, oh, I'll be a psychoanalyst to begin with. I thought, this is really interesting writing. And then it evolved. But it was that way round. Is that unusual, do you think? Thinking of you in terms of your psychoanalytical profession, Roland, as a literary critic in an essayist and a writer? Do you think that's rather unusual in your world? It was. Because when I trained, which is a long time ago, people who went into, I trained the child psychotherapist, people who went into it tended to done psychology or social work or a version of that. And lip service was paid to literature. And literature was the forever being rolled on to prove the truths of psychoanalysis in the last way. And psychoanalytics were not read as though they were written. They were read as though they were documentary reports of our lives. And that was very weird if you'd had a literary education. I think things have changed. I don't know because I have much to do with psychoanalytics and stuff. Institution's out really. But I imagine now people are more broadly educated. And I imagine people from a wider range of subjects would be, if they're interested in psychoanalysis, we're drawn to it. There's also a link back to your topic, which is very often, I mean, you talk about Dostoevsky at one point. Very often novels give you a possibility of a book that gives up on itself in a way that doesn't have an ending. There's a question that this is actually not here. This is inside effects. You say, how would we read a novel if we knew it to be without an ending? What happens if you give up on endings? And so literature, I mean, it's a ridiculous generalization. But in a way, it gives you, perhaps, a free space in terms of things not having to be conclusive. Yes, it creates the illusion of a beginning, middle, end, knowing that the end could not be the end. Your literary form also has a kind of potential open-endedness about it. And that is the literary form of the essay in the tradition of Francis Bacon, of truth, a pen of experience, hazlit, on the pleasure of hating, Virginia Woolf on being ill. So why is it that you have made this form your form? You obviously love it and cherish it and get an enormous amount out of using it. You have an essay in a collection of essays about essay logic and the essay is called up to a point where you say of essay writing. Something is tried out in words with no aspiration to the complete or the definitive. So I take it as a form where you don't have to be tyrannical, where you don't have to be single-minded and conclusive. Yes. So why is it a form that you don't do so much? Well, it wasn't a calculation. I didn't think, oh, I'd like to write an essay. That was the form the writing took. But I think, of course, it's, you know, one writes the books, one writes because the book's one's right. And I had read Lamb and Haslitt and Emerson and they had a very powerful effect on me. They didn't make me think, I know I'd write an essay, I just remember loving lots of this writing. When I came to write psychologic things, I was dismayed by how poor most of the writing was, that it was really boring, really technical, and really sort of unduly in-house. And I, of course, had read, because of my education, some really fabulous essays. So it seemed kind of the obvious thing to do. And as you've said, if you don't want to write propaganda, you write essays. There's something Virginia Woolf says about essay, she has a lot to say about essay writing, when she says it creates a kind of veil between the, I'm slightly misquoting, I'm ashamed to say, a kind of veil between the self and the reader. So you don't have to say, "I." Yeah. Now, some essay writers do say, "I." That's part of the process. But some don't, and you don't say, "No, I don't know." You never say, "I." Is that true? No, why not? I don't really know. Again, it's not a conscious intention, that. But I suppose I don't want it to be too limited to me. I mean, that's what it gets to me now. Well, that's what she felt, too. Yes, yeah, yeah. And she's obsessed about ecotism, and not one. Yeah. Oh, she is extremely ecotism, but it's a good thing to be obsessed about, in that sense, because at least you could be alert to the scale of oneself preoccupation. But the essay allows for a kind of meditation or contemplation or process of thinking, where you can sort of generalize, even though you're taking it from your own perspective. Yes, and you can get away with it, because you're not speaking for a position of immense authority, and that frees you. And also, you know when you write, there are lots of different voices, but there are lots of different sentences in you, and they don't all fit together. And in an essay, you can include them. For me, if it sounds good, I leave it in. You are very often very stylish, aphoristic. You like a point. You like a sentence with a point. Quite risky that, actually. But yes, it is. But that's where the pleasure is, that these sentences turn up. Obviously, I don't understand. I think, oh, I'm going to write some aphorisms now. I write, and things turn up as I write. And when they turn up like that, I'm just thrilled. I just think, this is amazing. But it's a bit like the thing you quoted, and the stop-on book. The stop-out says, "When I write a really great player, I don't think, gosh, I'll clever I am. I think how lucky I've been." Well, I feel the same. I don't think, God, I'm amazingly intelligent. I think, what a huge piece of luck. This turned up. Generally, in this conversation, I'm taking you seriously. And generally, I think people do take you seriously when they're reading you, or presumably, when they're in conversation with you as your patients. But do you always want to be taken seriously? Is playfulness a lot? part of what the essay form allows, even on serious matters. I mean, you like jokes. Yeah. And there's a lovely reference in here to Philip Roth referring to Kafka as a great thing to say. Yeah, damn comedian. It's a great thing to say. Mutual favourite line. And you couldn't resist it. So how much does playfulness play a part? And how dangerous is playfulness when you're talking about some extremely serious and critical. Yeah. But one of the things Freud showed us, which we didn't need to be shown, is that it's not more truthful to be serious. But he's not very playful. Nobody has written a joke and some of the jokes are funny. Not many. Really? Okay. Not many. I'll need to be careful. It's not hilarious. But anyway, the theory is interesting. And I have no wish to be taken earnestly. Okay. That's a different thing. And obviously I want more laughs, presumably like we old to some extent. So it's not as though I think seriousness is some great thing. But some things are serious. It's, or it's, no, they are, nothing's intrinsically serious. But it can be made serious or made absurd or made funny or whatever. What I don't want to do, I don't want it to be any mockery in my writing at all. And I also, as you've intimated, I don't want to be, because I don't feel facetious about things that are grave, and things that match to people. So that's quite important. But I would want that to be the kind of freeplay of imagination, in which if something is amusing, it turns out you put it in. And obviously I love it when I write funny things. You know, I love Oscar Wilde. I, when I read Wilde, I think, why can't we all take tour? There's all the time. It would be intolerable. But it would be great. But I love that difference between facetiousness and mockery on the one hand and playfulness on the other. So I've got one more question and then I'd like to open this up if there are any other questions. And this is about your relationship with your readers. Who, who are the we and the us who come up on every page, as opposed to the eye, who doesn't come up? Are these like-minded readers who are just like you? Are these intellectuals who've been psychoanalyzed? Are they readers who have your sort of education and politics and social perspectives? Or are they the entire human race? They're anybody who's interested. Okay. Just that. I don't write for psychoanalysts, and I don't publish in psychonic journals. I don't mean I don't want psychoanalysts through my writing, but I'm not writing for them, us. So I would want these books to be for people who, well, on the one hand, love them and hate them, but primarily, are interested. Just that. That slightly gets you off the hook of talking about we a lot in the books, as if there's an understanding that we all think in the same way. No, it's a wish for we. It's my group of imaginary like-minded people. People whose company I would really enjoy. Well, they're here. So they may want to ask you a question or two. So I think there's a mic if there's a gentleman here. Thanks, Beth. That was brilliant. On giving up as obviously a book and you're a writer and you described your experience of writing, and it was so extraordinary that various people in the room sort of made an expression, including Hermione, of that you write and then you give up if you don't have anything to write, but it just sort of comes out of you in this automatic way. And I suspect that that isn't the experience of the vast majority of people when they write, and I just wondered if in the form of a book that you've written, if that is your experience of writing, maybe your sense of giving up is unrelatable. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I used to be embarrassed about the fact that I actually find writing both very, very easy and very pleasurable. It's not a struggle. In any way, I wouldn't do it if it was. It's not torturous. I don't feel I'm trying to articulate something that resists articulation. I know lots of writers for whom that is the case. So when I was younger, I thought, perhaps I'm not really a writer. And now I don't think that. I just think people are different and have different ways of doing it. And I'm glad that I happen to be able to do this. But it's just like having a writer here. It's just a piece of luck. But it's has been one of the really intense pleasures of my life writing. I just find it incredibly thrilling. And then if you find other people want to read it, that's even better. Other questions? Yes, here. When you talk about, hello, thank you for brilliant talk. When you talk about getting such a pleasure from writing and then when it doesn't come stopping, are you sad when that happens? Well, there's a passage in Miles Davis's autobiography where he says, every morning, I would wake up and there'd be music in my head. And I would get up and I'd play it. And one morning he woke up and there was no music in his head. And he then became a drug addict and alcoholic, had sex with hundreds of women, et cetera. He completely imploded. And I was always haunted by that before I wrote anything. So it looks, but no, I'm not. It never occurs to me because it seems to be true until this morning that when I sit down, I can't write all the time. I'm glad I have little time to write. But when I do sit down to write, I can mostly write. And it's luck. It's nothing else. So discipline, isn't it? Well, I don't-- I mean, when's the morning at your desk? At seven o'clock. That's what you do on a windy day. Yeah, I might be, but it could also be that I've organized something. So unconsciously, I'm waiting for Wednesday. And when I get there, because often on Wednesdays, when I used to walk to work, as I walk to work, the first sentence would occur to me. So it's programmed. So it's by me or by something. So there's an element to that. But also, you know, I've read a lot of books because I like reading. And there's all factors. Another question. Yes, I'm looking for a woman to ask a question. Yes, next. Okay, no, you go first. No, no, I'm sorry, that's very bigoted all me. Thank you very much. Yeah, it is a woman question, in fact, because in the list of references, you know, literary references, there were no women. And so it's a gender question, which is also related to the cover of the book. I'm just quite tempted to ask you to kind of psychoanalyze the cover of your own book. Oh, my gosh. Well, the else your first question is, there are actually quite a lot of, and then I does in the book. Obviously, as a man of my age, I was educated in a male literary tradition, but things have changed. And even in the tradition I was educated in, there were a lot of, an hour, a lot of extraordinary female writers, as you know. That's partly my fault. Actually, entirely my fault. It is that I gave the list of the people who occur most often, as it were. Yeah, and that's like misrepresentation. I'm glad you said that. Yeah, no, now do the cover. The cover is slightly more difficult because I don't know, I am disowny responsibility for this. I was offered this cover and I loved it. I saw it partly because I think the title of the book was funny. It's not entirely intended to be funny, but it's partly intended to be funny. And the look on this, I mean, it looks a bit like a blade, but obviously it's a Michelangelo. But the look on this man's face is so absurd, and he has such a developed body. So it's like a parody of a certain version of Masculot. And I thought, when I saw it, I thought, that's exactly what we should give up. Thank you. You know, this gentleman here, who has a question. And you were saying that suicide was like the most difficult, one of the most difficult themes treated forms of giving up. And I think you also mentioned breakdown. What is that by way of giving up? Well, it depends. It's impossible to generalise about these things. And the word breakdown is so much in the culture that is very hard to know what it really means. When a cult wrote a very, very interesting paper called Fear of Breakdown. And in that paper, he said, the breakdown we fear, when and if we do fear it, is a breakdown we've already had. Now, a breakdown, of course, kept without being glimmer about this, a breakdown can also be a breakthrough that people sometimes need for things to break down in themselves for other things to emerge. So the question always is, when one collapses or gives up or has a breakdown is what then becomes possible. And that depends entirely on the environment in which it happens. Because these symptoms, anxieties and thoughts and fears are performance art. They're looking for a recipient. And everything depends upon the available recipients. I'm going to shift slightly with a fight. I'm going to take the privilege of asking the last question. And I may be wrongly informed about this item, but I think you may be thinking about a book with the Shakespeare critic, Stephen Greenblatt, about Second Charles. and chances and chances in Shakespeare and second chances in Freud. And I wondered whether you could talk a little bit, you may not want to talk about that book yet, but a little bit about we started with Giving Up, but perhaps to end with the concept of the second child? Well, it seems somehow ironic to write a book on Giving Up, followed by a book called Second Chances, and this happened in a sense, contingently, because I'd written this book, Stephen, then, without making a meal of this, Stephen is a friend of mine. We always had the fancy writing book together, it was kind of a fantasy. And then Stephen said to me, "I'm thinking of writing a book on Giving Up in Shakespeare, on Second Chances in Shakespeare. I wasn't a Freudian Slope, okay?" I think it was. "Hey, you would know, I would know." Yeah, no, I know, and it wasn't. And Stephen wanted to write his bit on Second Chances in Shakespeare. When he said this to me, it seemed to me, as we were suddenly, all of psychoanalysis is about second chances. So then it seemed obvious, in a way, that we could write this book together, because so much, obviously, just the fact of psychoanalysis suggests that, the fact that it exists as a treatment suggests there are second chances, there may be second chances available. And the second chance, or the idea of the second chance, is might be integral to a life which has some future in it, or some hope in it. So that a life could be the kind of thing like a play that could be rehearsed, say. I could go on, but I should have to read the book. This was just as much of a treat, and just as much of a challenge, as I hoped and expected it would be. And so I'm also grateful to you, and also to you, the audience. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening. To find out more about London Review Bookshop events, visit LondonReviewBookshop.co.uk/events.