Entropy Plot

Emmeline Clein on the analyst who delivered her from rock bottom.

Artwork by Sofia Belen Criswell

My father is obsessed with outdated maps. By which I mean he loves artifacts of history, theoretical relics, remnants of abandoned plans, evidence that someone was once on their way. My mother is obsessed with other people’s predilections—the more bizarre and arcane, the better. Near the end of his life, her father kept overstuffed manila folders by the desk he turned into his deathbed, where he asked me to file hundreds of printed articles into slots lovingly labeled in his all-capitalized, handwritten pen: LAMENTS, ATHEISM, STUCCATORS, PALINDROMES, PORPHYRY, STUPOR MUNDI, VALCOUR AIME. Map a man’s fixations, my mother would argue, and you might find out what happened to him, or worse, what he wants. But cartography, I’ve learned, is a wily art.

I discovered the writings of the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips at the bottom of a rabbit hole, nearing rock bottom. It was a bad summer for almost everyone I love. The landscape was riven by nervous breakdowns, spiritual roadblocks, and camouflaged pits of emotional quicksand, not to mention mountains of credit card debt. I underlined maniacally, scrawling startled slivers of revelation in the margins.

Phillips is the author of many books—On Giving Up, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, Monogamy, and Unforbidden Pleasures, to name a few, and most recently, The Life You Want—in addition to incisive, psychoanalytically infused literary criticism, published regularly in the London Review of Books. I thought I wanted a map or a guidebook, so I found an irreverent Virgil in him, never mind the fact that he encourages improvisation when asked for stage directions. A riff is usually an off-ramp, so he suggests learning to lean into the curves and handling the open road with panache, one hand on the radio dial. On the other hand, I know a lot of people addicted to destinations. In his psychoanalytic biography of Harry Houdini, Phillips recommends clambering back up the escape hatches we build—all the better to get a bird’s eye view of the void, not to mention a closer look at what we’re running from, which, he’d wager, is whatever we are most afraid to lose.

I kept his prose on my person that July, hopscotching my way through emotional minefields, not without getting burned. I’d been diving headfirst into misadventures that I hoped would relieve my intrusive thoughts, but really I was surrendering myself to their whirring motor. Someone once shouted “She’s on fire!” across a party at me, and the man I was talking to yelled back “I know!” because we were halfway through inventing a lingua franca that would lobotomize anyone attempting to eavesdrop. Really, I’d stepped backwards into a decorative candle, and my hair was in flames.

Phillips condemns theorists who prize gravity at the expense of gusto. If you have the juice, eureka is all about delivery. Not to be confused with deliverance, which, after all, is the detritus of a desire for risk, and usually requires a savior. “If you are keeping your eye on the exit, you can’t give yourself much time to see what is going on in the room,” he writes. “In other words––and most literature is these other words,” Phillips writes, there are “no experts on love. And love, whatever else it is, is terror.” In my experience, terror is not necessarily terrifying if you aren’t afraid to get your sense of self wet, or at least a little muddy.

A friend once told me we have the same problem: emotional Pangaea. Contrary to the dictates of the self-help feministas who fill my TikTok feed, my boundaries remain demilitarized zones. The internet divas encourage defining and enforcing your borders to protect your peace. This is not an uneducated or unearned stance––women have spent generations drafted into the endless battle of managing other people’s emotions. But a defensive crouch is a constrictive posture, one that keeps you from stretching your legs, let alone growing. Phillips finds our contemporary fervor for erecting emotional borders evocative, suggestive of a larger cartographic yearning: for a clear route to certain, enclosed selfhood, free of dependence in all its pains and pleasures.

Beneath the more unyielding language of boundaries, he sees a wish not just to protect the self, but to fix it in place. “The map becomes the ground beneath their feet; and maps are always a smaller ground,” Phillips writes in his provocative new book—whose playful title, The Life You Want, flirts with the possibility that you could describe your desires only to be surprised by deeper wants that exceed them, not to mention the other, still-illegible sentiments that might lurk beneath the enjambment. Phillips is an impassioned conversationalist, one who believes psychoanalysis betrays itself by putting the couch on a pedestal. The practice, instead, should be construed as just another genre of conversation, as sublimely quotidian as a meet-cute. This is a conviction that reveals his priorities for conversation, identity, and language itself, all of which are conceits he considers far more fungible, thankfully, than we’ve long assumed.

“In describing the life you want, you may be merely the ventriloquist’s dummy of your culture,” he writes. But, if we reconceive of “language as a tool kit rather than a bully or a saboteur or a dictator or a seducer,” we can instead cast our own internal puppet shows, weaving the narrative threads of our lives into novel tapestries. Treating “philosophy as [a] transitional genre,” Phillips writes a comedy sketch-cum-treatise, puppeteering Richard Rorty, the father of American pragmatism, and Sigmund Freud into his protagonists.

Where psychoanalysis inquires about our buried desires, insisting on their implacability to the point of determinism, pragmatism promises to rewrite a life story in vocabularies that might harbor a new ending. On their own, Phillip finds each theorem a bit dry and wanting—but in dialogue, they provide a choose-your-own-adventure game. Together, they allow us to traverse the harrowing territory between Freud’s unconscious—a threatening, “seething cauldron of instinctual life”—and Rorty’s much friendlier “conversational partner that feeds us our best lines.”

Putting the paradigms of psychoanalysis and pragmatism in conversation, he discovers they are equally seductive, useful “fictions.” The two have been counting cards under the table, playing unlikely accomplices all along. I fall easily for his fleshy connections; I like convoluted syntax I can misinterpret.

So in storytelling as in life, we are narratively intertwined. Our resistance to helping each other reflects a terror of needing help, evinces a “resistance to being properly noticed; and to the dependence being helped entails.” If we consider the entropy of our dependencies “an inspiration, not a terror” we might write our lives into unexpected genres: love letters, or––and!––novels. An exemplary, spry aside––wondering when, if ever, autonomy might be all it’s cracked up to be, he tucks the following parenthetical into his cheek: “(useful for voting, say, but not that useful for falling in love, or writing poems).”

Often, I can hardly tell whether I’m executing a rescue mission or embarking on a fool’s errand. I once borrowed a getaway vehicle to break my friend out of the psych ward. When I put the key in the ignition, an unnerving number of dashboard lights flared on. But what’s a little low tire pressure? A bumpy road is simply a rickety massage chair, if we accept “pragmatic redescription as secular alchemy.” Everyone got home safely, even if I got a little ash in the cupholder. The discharge forms filled a binder thick as a Bible.

If rescues require foolhardiness—an inclination towards risk, alacrity in the overstep—then so do the attachments Philllips finds fertile. Co-conspirators, frenemies, former lovers, real friends: these are relationships not governed by clean lines or best practices. They are improvisations, rife with lurking danger and open to misrecognition. By which I don’t mean misunderstanding, but zany translation, meaning melted down into something new, words welded into tools you didn’t know you needed until someone else strung the right sentence together, and tied it around your wrist as a friendship bracelet.

“If you beat a person into shape, you are bullying them; if you beat metal into shape, you are making something.” With a crafty rhetorical trick, Phillips transforms a liar into a fabricator, a master craftsman. If we operate from the premise that credulity is a bid for relation, fabulism is less deceptive than connective. The best storytellers want the listener to pen the coda. Two of my best friends are in an intellectual feud neither of them is aware of, over their diametrically opposed definitions of the word “durational.” One is a consummate flirt and a recovering liar, the other is prone to unconsummated affairs and autofiction. One finds the word meaningless, because doesn’t everything have a duration? The other thinks that’s the point, a blunt instrument is still a tool.

Phillips finds our contemporary fervor for erecting emotional borders evocative, and suggestive of a larger cartographic yearning: for a clear route to certain, enclosed selfhood, free of dependence in all its pains and pleasures.

Someone I almost knew believes fear is foresight. It might be a flare sometimes, but terror is also often a barely posed question—a muffled urge worthy of attention, a pool cue awaiting warm fingers, angled aim. A religious devotion to foresight fits a life into a sturdy masterplot, but I prefer my autofiction more digressive. Phillips insists that flirts are the opposite of experts, who promise to soothe your fears but are actually paid to stoke them. Our culture’s trophy chest rewards its players for winning old games: completing the marriage plot, getting rich, solving the crime––Phillips, instead, plays truth and dare with his readers: “Do you want to enjoy it or do you want to understand it?”

We were all beginners once. Mired in melancholy, my novice’s mindset can set someone else at ease, and melt my own malaise. Phillips admits that he was ineluctably altered by a book he never read with a title he never forgot––Ageing for Beginners. I imagine he got the gist, if not the point. The liminal spaces we’re trained to avoid might be life-affirming detours––flirtations, fantasies, and free association can “eroticize the contingency of our lives by turning doubt or ambiguity into suspense.” To their credit, my parents chose not to clutch old trophies in sweaty palms. Rather, they concocted tangential side plots, followed directions from bygone eras, made up the rules as they drove, and became beginners again. My grandfather’s manila folders, like any good map, charted the threads that pulled him off course. Take your eye off the prize, and you might catch the sparkle in someone else’s. Hatch an entropy plot and find “something you want more than the life you want.”

Here’s a story Phillips once told in a book, cribbed from a poem based on a rumor: A band of soldiers is totally mapless and utterly lost in the Pyrenees in the dead of winter, certain death approaching. A last cigarette is rolled with jocular dread. A folded map emerges, stuck to the bottom of a bag of tobacco. A miracle––they make it back to base camp, only to realize those faded lines charted an entirely different mountain range. They’d just needed the conceit of instruction—a pocketed, authoritative premise. The point Phillips makes about this myth or memory is that our edges are too often honed into razors. Wield a weapon like a toy, learn a new game, choose your words delicately, and you might just delight an opponent into becoming your teammate.

Missing the point or meandering around it reveals surprising angles, diagonal inquiries. Our culture sells smugness at the cost of spontaneity. Following a map of––or better yet, around––the wrong place raises questions, inspires punch lines, illuminates crevices. If these directions haven’t quite been clear, let the girl in the passenger seat tell you when to turn. Relentlessly en route, you might find yourself, suddenly, on the way home, which is somewhere you’ve never been. ♦