Side Effects

A collection of essays by a psychoanalyst who reads the consulting room the way he reads novels: for the aside, the slip, the thing said off topic. Phillips takes the accidental by-products of speech, the material a patient does not mean to hand over, as the place where feeling and meaning actually gather. Free association becomes less a technique than an argument about where the truth of a session sits, which is rarely in what was planned to be said.

Around this Phillips sets a suspicion of cure and of the modern demand for happiness. He treats the wish to be understood, the pull toward endings, and the appetite for interpretation as themselves worth analysing rather than obeying. Novelists and poets, Empson among them, supply his cases as readily as clinical ones.

For the clinician the book reframes what counts as usable. It argues for staying with interruption, digression and resistance instead of resolving them, and for reading the therapist's own investments alongside the patient's.