ADAM PHILLIPS is explaining why he struggled to develop a fictional character: 'My writing is more of a delirium than a sense of other people.' This solipsism is surprising from the clinician and essayist, whose 12 books have revitalised Sigmund Freud's exploration of the self-obsessed psyche. It's not that Phillips' elliptical prose lacks the nuance for fiction. But unlike many other literary essayists, Phillips isn't a novelist manque. 'I would be bored by setting scenes and descriptive prose.'
Phillips speaks in a rush of perfectly formed sentences, which mirror his paradoxical writing. Critics reach for desperately abstruse formulations to capture his patented style. The novelist Will Self - formerly an analysand of Phillips' - has praised his 'circumambulation tergiversation'. A Phillips essay presents less a linear argument than a playful interrogation of conventional assumptions about an idea. Even while ranging across innocuous-sounding themes - such as tickling, cross-dressing, flirtation, hinting, being laughed at, kissing and boredom - the elusiveness of his essays makes precis near-impossible.
'I don't want people to be able to repeat what I think. I want them to have their own thoughts. The guru is the problem not the solution here. So, I'm very reassured that people often say: 'I can't remember anything about that book but I really enjoyed it'.'
The slipperiness of his writing reflects the psychoanalytic process. In his new book, Side Effects, Phillips describes digression as secular revelation. 'With psychoanalysis, people come with a coherent narrative, and what turns up is an opportunity to speak up about their stray or nomadic thoughts.'
He practises four days a week from his Notting Hill flat, charging modest fees of up to #50 (HK$735) per 45-minute session. 'I don't want to be part of the culture that believes that something is good if it's expensive,' he says. Hanif Kureishi, Tim Lott and Will Self are former patients, but, contrary to hearsay, Phillips rarely takes on celebrities. 'That's just not the culture I want to be part of.' His sole requirement for accepting a patient is that he's 'moved by what they're suffering from'.
In place of the Freudian image of the detached analyst, Phillips suggests that the therapist-patient dynamic is an 'intimately impersonal relationship. But that doesn't make it less intimate. It's not a laboratory.'
He confines his writing to Wednesdays, but works at a dizzying pace, producing enough lectures and essays for a new book most years. 'I'm slightly fearful of giving myself more time to write. I'm fearful of what might happen if the writing ran out, because it comes from a part of me that I have no control over.'