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- [00:00]
A
I do think that there's something very addictive for a lot of people about work that is over above economic necessity.
- [00:12]
B
Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's Avi here, and today we have one of my all time favorite talks by Adam Phillips, the psychologist who talks about the importance of giving up. This talk changed my worldview. So often in this life we're told to persevere, but when is it actually important to recognize that it's time to give up? Well, more on that in this talk by Adam Phillips. He's interviewed by Claudia Canavan, who's a health journalist and editor at the New Scientist. So without any further ado, I will hand over to Claudia.
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C
Hello, my name's Claudia Canavan. I'm a journalist and head of features at New Scientist magazine. Joining me today for a conversation on the importance of giving up is Adam Phillips. Adam, as everybody knows, is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and the author of many illuminating books and essays, including On Giving Up. Adam, let's start here, if we may. Why do you think our culture idolizes perseverance?
- [01:54]
A
Well, I'm not entirely sure. I mean, you can see how it fits into fairly puritanical fantasies about seeing things through and doing one's best and being loyal and being thorough and a kind of anxiety about uncompleted actions. So I think that there's a whole network of preoccupations that make people feel that giving up is a bad thing to do. And we are obviously giving up is not taught in schools, and it probably should be because we also have the other experience, which is sometimes a regret about not having given up on a relationship, an interest, a book early enough that we've persisted and this has been a waste of time. So it seems to me there's something fundamental about the freedom of doing it and of course, the conflict of doing it.
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C
What do we risk losing when we never give up or have a bit of a thing about refusing to give her up? How can it be dangerous?
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A
Well, I don't think it can be dangerous, but the risk would be that you don't allow yourself to find out what your real enjoyment is. So your dutifulness usurps your pleasure because you could think, well, I've read 100 pages of this book and actually I am not enjoying it. Well, given there are a lot of wonderful books, why would one waste one's time? And I think that's a picture of this, which is it's something to do with one's relationship to one's enjoyment and how one. What one wants to spend one's time actually doing.
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C
And so giving up can be freeing or creative.
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A
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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C
You located this, this desire to not give up in this kind of puritanical framework. Can you say more about how did we get here? Why is that the framework?
- [03:34]
A
Well, I mean, I don't want to be disparaging about not giving up. See what I mean? This is a very equivocal thing. So my book, indeed me, doesn't encourage people to give up. What I think I do want to encourage people to do is to be able to think about whether they would want to give up and what they might fear they're losing in giving something up. I do think that, you know, there's something fundamental, I think, about loyalty and continuity and feeling that one has seen something through, as though the implication is this kind of weakness of character or failure of nerve that really one's best self finishes things. Well, sometimes it's true, but sometimes it isn't. And the difficult, obviously there can be no method here, but one has to take the risk of making that decision. In other words, not staying too long when the business is actually finished. And I think probably everybody has got an experience of that in relationships where they feel retrospectively, it's hard to know what that means, but in retrospect, they felt they stayed too long and it matters.
- [04:38]
C
Does that feed into kind of status quo bias where we're scared to shake the boat?
- [04:43]
A
It could be. There could be lots of reasons. And also it's, you know, it's worth trying at things, you know, again, I don't want to disparage making an effort. Oh, my God. For example, if you want to learn to play the piano, you have to persist. And everybody who can play the piano knows that they've had to go on against great resistances sometimes. So in a way, the art of this is knowing what is a resistance. Now, usually there's a resistance when there's an anticipation of pleasure beyond the resistance, as opposed to thinking, this is not for me, this is really not my cup of tea. For whatever reason.
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C
You'Ve argued that we should always be open to revising ourselves. What does this revision look like in psychological terms? You know, what does it mean if we give up on the idea of, like, a fixed self?
- [05:37]
A
Well, what it would mean is, for people who like these kind of ideas, that there is no fixed self and that fixing oneself and having what one might think of as an identity is a self cure for an anxiety. The anxiety is about the complexity of oneself and of how prolific and elaborate one's desires and wants might be. So it's as though in one version of this, if I can know who I am and therefore know what I want, I've solved the problem. Now, the extreme version of this, of course, is an addiction. So when I think, what do I want? I think I want a cigarette. And it's as though the problem is solved. The consequence, though, is that I'm undernourished. And so this is something to do, I think, with being able to bear or being interested in the complexity of one's own mind and the fact one has conflicting and competing desires.
- [06:29]
C
How do we try and untangle these conflicting and competing desires?
- [06:33]
A
Well, I don't know the answer, but one of the things we do is we have conversations with other people and we take risks. Johnstream will call experiments in living. So when something is alluring or tempting, we can shy away from it or we can give it a go. And it would seem to me, depending on what kind of life you want, there's a character in a Norman Mailer novel who says, you learn everything fighting your fear. So that, if you like, is an argument against not being tyrannized by inhibition or just being curious enough to find out what one's less inhibited self is like.
- [07:11]
C
Fighting your fear, do you think? I suppose something that comes up for me when we're having this conversation, Adam, is is it harder for people now in this decade to fight their fear? Because, for example, take an example would be that now university fees are extremely high, high. And so stopping your university course and trying something new is kind of. It's a riskier gamble perhaps, than it, than it once was. How, how do you reflect on how our attitude to fear, I suppose, has. Has changed through the decades that you've been working?
- [07:43]
A
Well, I think without being melodramatic, I don't know how anybody can bear to live at the moment just because what's, what's. What's going on in the world. If you say to me, and there is so much fear and there is so much to fear, so it would be very unrealistic in a way to be nonchalant or bold or overly bold. On the other hand, it would seem to me, if we're thinking about, say, our children, we want our children to be able to fight their. I want my children to be able to fight their fear. And that means finding something out, because given Everybody's frightened and everybody's anxious quite a lot of the time, then the action or the new experience is the other side of that anxiety. And so that's what I would want to encourage people to do, but not in some blithe, beglamoured way, as if. So this is fabulous. It would be acknowledged that it's a risk. There really is a risk. And you can try something out, it can fail, or it can harm you, or it can harm other people. But it seems to me sometimes, at least, it's better to take the risk than not to.
- [08:42]
C
Adam, how does this obsession that we have in our culture of potential, you know, actualizing our potential, how does this feed into our attitude towards giving up or not giving up?
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A
I think the. I think potential is tricky, as I said, because we can't know what it is. But in a way, we rely. Certainly when we're growing up, we rely on other people to see things in us that we can't see and to. In a sense, our parents are guardians of our future selves. So we rely on people, which is, first of all family and then teachers, to be able to imagine our potential and lure us into finding out whether it is potential. The risk of the idea of potential, of course, is that it can be very tyrannical. I mean, I can spend my whole life trying to realize what I think of as my potential and have actually no idea what it is. So I think it might be better to drop the idea of potential and replace it with the idea of real enjoyment. What do you actually find yourself really enjoying doing? That would seem to me the basic thing here. Because if you really enjoy it and you're not fobbed off with kind of substitute enjoyments, if you really enjoy it, you will be engaged and you will forget yourself and something will happen. If you don't really enjoy it, you'll know that you're simply plugging a hole. So it's the difference between trying to plug a hole in oneself and opening oneself up to experiences. That'll be one way of describing it.
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C
I think perhaps so many of us now, we almost. We've lost that capacity, right, that capacity to enter flow when we're doing something that we enjoy. Because we live in such a. Oftentimes our time is so rigid, so structured, and I think that's probably been something that's been a shift over the past few decades, arguably. Could you say something about that?
- [10:27]
A
Well, I think it's to do with overstimulation and a kind of craving for distraction and. And this must be partly to do with. Well, obviously it's partly to do with capitalism. There's an excess of things to consume and therefore things to notice. What this makes very difficult is the forgetting of oneself in the service of being absorbed in something. And it would seem to me one of the things that for me is useful psychoanalysis is that ideally it enables people to forget themselves. You know, when anybody's anxious or depressed or whatever, they're thinking about themselves a lot. It's eternal self preoccupation. So the question is, how do you free yourself of that? How do you relinquish that, such that you can be genuinely interested in the world and other people? And I think increasingly the world is demanding a great deal of our attention. So if, for example, we are very excited and perturbed by what's going on, say, in the Middle east, take one example, I think we've got to think, A, it is a catastrophe and B, there's more to us than our preoccupation with what's going on in the Middle East. And I think there's a temptation always to narrow one's mind and narrow one's attention, even if one's attention is on a catastrophe. But that means one is, in a sense, not making choices. And this is all about choice. Let me tell you a story. You may know this story, everybody in the room may know this story, but it's had a very powerful impact on me when I read it. It's in Sar's book, Being a Nothingness. He talks about a young couple, and every morning they come down for breakfast and they sit by the window having breakfast, and the husband goes off to work and the wife sits by the window all day crying. And when he comes back, she perks up. Now, Sartre says the obvious interpretation of this is that she's got a separation anxiety. But Sarge says, no, no, no, no. What she's got, really got is a fear of freedom. When her husband leaves, she can do whatever she wants, and that's what she's seeking refuge from. And that seems to me a good picture of what we're talking about, which is all the ways in which one might have of evading thinking about what one's choices are and what one's desires might be.
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C
Why are we scared of our choices? Why are we scared of the choices that we do have?
- [12:47]
A
Oh, because we don't know where we're going to end up. It's to do with the unpredictable nature of choice and it being a risk. And so you can See why we all, sometimes, and some of us more than others, would privilege safety over excitement? Because at least we think we know where we are with safety. The trouble with safety is all you get from safety is safety.
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C
Do you think most of us privilege safety over excitement?
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A
I don't know. I just don't know. Most of us.
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C
Extremely fair. I want to just pick back up on potential, the idea of potential. Do you think that our potential, our obsession with our potential, is that something to do with modern culture, or is that an innate obsession of just human societies, do you think?
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A
I think it's a combination. I don't know enough to answer the question, really, but I think it's a combination of things. Because obviously capitalism is based on continual consumption, endless consumption. So our potential to want is exploited. We've got to keep wanting and buying and so on. So I think it's partly to do with a political ethos, it's partly to do with an anxiety about not wanting anything, that there was a Welsh psychoanalyst called Ernest Jones who invented the concept of what he called aphanis. Aphanesis is when one desires nothing, when there's nothing and nobody in the world one wants. And he believed this was the fundamental catastrophe that everybody somehow faces. There being nothing you actually want, because obviously there's nothing you want. There's no future. You're not lured into anything and you're not enlivened. And so I think that's somewhere in the background here. We've got to keep wanting because we're frightened if we stop, we might not want, or we might be very dismayed by what there is to want.
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C
How do you think we could foster a culture, Adam, that allows us to consider what we might give up? Not glamorizing giving up, not saying you must. But how do we foster a culture in which people feel that they can actually have a choice between the two things?
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A
Well, I think it would be genuinely good if this was taught in schools and the various examples were given of good and bad giving up just so that it becomes a language that children, as they grow up, can speak and think about. Because I think, in a way, I don't. I don't know this, but I think that it isn't taught basically, and it's basically discouraged, and it's too naive and too over simple to discourage it. So I think you can imagine lots of situations where children could be shown both in, you know, drama, in literature, in history, in politics, situations where the question is, would it be better to give up? And I Think children could be very engaged by this and very interested.
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C
Could you give some examples of, you know, when people have decided to give up and it has been advantageous or something you've noticed?
- [15:46]
A
Well, I think. I think in a way there are lots of them, because when giving up works, it opens up the world, if you see what I mean. Whereas prior to that, one had been imprisoned in one's persistence as though there was nowhere else to go. Once you give something up, then you can see what there is. Obviously, when people talk about giving up, they talk about giving up chocolate or alcohol or drugs or something. And when people talk about giving things up, I think I say this in the book. They believe they can change. When they give up, they believe they can't. And that's, I think, always going to be the question here, which is a. Do you believe you can change and do you have a picture of ways in which you would like to be able to change? And I think giving up is only viable if it's worth it, if it's worth the trouble. And that means there's got to be an equally alluring or differently alluring prospect.
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C
Is it important we all believe that we can change? Does that matter to us to be cypress.
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A
Yes, it does matter, because, I mean, everybody in this room is getting older every second we're sitting here. No one is thinking this, obviously, but it is true. So biologically or psychobiology, change is what we are living in. And it would seem to me therefore, realistic in the best sense to be able to acknowledge that clearly there is a life cycle. You know, children to begin with are absolutely dependent. They, they crawl, they walk, they learn to speak. There clearly is puberty, there's menopause, all these things. So there is a psychobiological life cycle. So change is built into the system. The question then in the middle of this is how, within those biological constraints, can we improvise? What can we do with that? And I think that's where the interest and the action is.
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C
I would love to know a bit about what might happen to a person who has really, really internalized this idea that they may never quit. And the examples they were given as where, you know, these stories of, you know, Einstein was told he was slow. And if you just, you know, if we all just commit to trying to change, we too can reach these. These dizzying heights. But we must never, ever give up. What. What does that do to a child who is kind of, I guess, brought up on those. Those stories?
- [17:58]
A
Well, the risk is being made to feel a failure I mean, we've all met casualties of piano lessons there, there are plenty of them. And you think sometimes it really would have been better to free the child from this tyranny. Now, some children, it wouldn't be. With some children it's much better. And they've come to really enjoy and appreciate the fact that their parents compelled them. But not everybody feels like this. Now, it may be impossible prospector to work this out, but it's worth at least considering that one thing your child could do is not go on with a piano lesson.
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C
And how would you advise a parent to begin to untangle that or to think about.
- [18:36]
A
Well, I think if you can be and if you want to be, you have to be alert to how compliant and dut your child is, as opposed to how spontaneous and imaginatively desiring they are. Because it's the difference between believing you know what's best for your child and finding out what your child tells you may be best for them. Something like that. There was a very, very interesting French child analyst called Maud Manoni who said the most difficult experience for a mother. I mean, obviously I don't know this, but the most difficult experience for a mother is putting together the fantasy they've had of the child inside them with the actuality of the child that is born. And that, if you like, in this story, is an ongoing crisis. So it's as though in this story the mother has very elaborate sense of who the child is and what it might be. And then there's the real child. And the question is, how much exchange is there between these two phenomena? And that's the difficult bit because obviously we need our parents to have ideas about who we are. But we may not need our parents to have too absolute a sense of who we are. That's all.
- [19:46]
C
How do we think about this from the point of view of ourselves? I think a lot of us might have a fantasy of who we are, the kind of person we want to be. And there's perhaps a disconnect between who we truly are, who we are when we enter flow, like you said, the things we truly enjoy. How do we begin to realize who we are?
- [20:03]
A
Well, suffering is in the gap between who I experience myself as being and. And the distance from the self I want to be. That's where we suffer, if you like. And it seems to me that's what acculturation is. We grow up and we are given lots of pictures of what it is to be a good man, a good woman, etc. And each person depending on their you know, affluence, background, etc. Has to find out within those constraints what's possible. And obviously the environment is what matters here. Because if. If you've grown up in a certain family, certain kind of family, if you say to a child, do you want water or apple juice? They will believe they must choose one of those two. Whereas the child who's had a different kind of upbringing will think, no, actually I want Coke. There's something else I want that I'm not being offered. In other words, they wouldn't feel they have to comply with a given repertoire. And that's the difference.
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C
For those of us who are involved in the life of a child, how should we frame this to them? How should we encourage them to seek their own expression of choice?
- [21:14]
A
Well, that too, of course, is a project. And so the risk would be that that's your demand on your child. It would be like saying, be spontaneous. What I think people can do, in fact, are doing in different ways all the time, is being more or less attuned to the nuances in the child's languages and more or less interested in what the child might happen to want, be interested in, etc. So, you know, we may not want our child to be a stamp collector, but if they have a passion for stamp collecting, it seems to be better to go with it to begin with. In other words, you're led. You don't make the children follow too much. You do both. Obviously, you have to do both, because we know more than they do. But nevertheless, we are attentive to what they might find themselves being interested in and being timid about, say, so we can try things out.
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C
Where does that timidity or that shame start to seep in for children about their choice?
- [22:13]
A
I think very early on. I mean, anybody who's ashamed of themselves has been shamed by somebody. This is not some natural, innate thing. Somebody has been made to feel mortified by doing something. For example, I might have been dancing and my parents might have said to me, don't show off. And at that moment, something terrible might have happened to me because I thought I was dancing and they thought I was showing off, and they're the authorities. And at that moment, and it's not always catastrophic, but at that moment I could internalize the thought. I've done something really unacceptable now, and I need to keep an eye on myself. And that could go on forever.
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C
And we've all had these experiences, right? We've all been shamed for something and we've internalized that we must never dance or show off or whatever it is. When we recognize that that's what's going on for us, how do we begin to step away from that?
- [23:07]
A
Or we start dancing. I mean, we try out if it still appeals to us, the very thing that we were ashamed about, we find out, and we may genuinely feel ashamed, or we may have all sorts of other feelings as well. Because at the top of all these big abstractions like shame and guilt, we live as if we know exactly what they mean and we don't. They can be unpacked and they can be described in different ways. And I think one of the things one might want to do is to, and this happens in psychoanalysis, is enable a conversation about precisely these experiences. So if somebody feels very guilty about something, you may ask them whether they think they've done something wrong or whether they feel they should be punished, and whether actually they think they've done something right that other people don't agree about. In other words, we're inclined to feel that our guilt is telling the truth to us about ourselves. And sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. And it seems to me worth being awake, alert to that, to bring it.
- [24:10]
C
Back, ground to giving up. It seems that in, I think, modern Internet culture, we're in a moment of real polarity. You know, on one hand you have people speaking about quiet quitting, you know, doing the very bare minimum work. On the other hand, you have a lot of people sharing, you know, wake up at 5am routines and hustle, hustle, hustle. Are we in a moment of kind of, I suppose, polarity between people who are perhaps glamorize giving up and people who glamorize the grind?
- [24:38]
A
I don't know. I mean, I think that there is a real dilemma about. Obviously we've been acculturated to believe that we should spend our lives working or we should spend our lives achieving things. Well, that may or may not be true. They're not facts of life, these things. They're cultural constructions. I do think that there's something very addictive for a lot of people about work that is over above economic necessity. And I think that, in a sense, for some people is troubling because obviously you could wake up one morning and think, actually, I don't know why I'm doing this. This is sort of pointless, or my heart is really not in this. But in order for you to know that, you have to be in an environment, you have to have relationships with people who are willing to say this to you. Who are actually interested in what you might be feeling about these things. There's a very interesting vignette in an American psychoanalyst called Immanuel Ghent where the woman is on the couch and she's talking and it's quite cold in the room. And at a certain point, Ghent gets up, he's got a blanket in the room, and puts a blanket over her legs. And at this point, the woman bursts out crying, and she says, I didn't realize I was cold until you put the blanket on me. And that seems to me very, very powerful and poignant because it's as though it required his recognition for her to know what she was actually feeling. Now, that could be a model for a lot of sociability. And by that I simply mean our willingness or unwillingness to intuit or guess or try out what other people might need and act on that.
- [26:23]
C
Adam, thank you so very much.
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B
Thanks for listening to Philosophy for our times. How did you guys find the episode? We'd love to hear and really appreciate when you guys reach out to us in the email that is in the show notes. If you like our content and want to see the videos of the live talks, don't hesitate to visit IAI tv. And if you fancy coming to an event like this yourself, we have our festival in London and Hay. As for now, I will just tell you all to keep remembering that sometimes the right thing to do is walk away.