On Not Knowing What You Want: Adam Phillips and the Psychoanalytic Imagination

Newport Psychoanalytic Institute

9/5/26-11/20/2026

Adam Phillips writes about psychoanalysis the way psychoanalysis is supposed to work: slant, unsettling, arriving somewhere you didn't expect. His subject is ordinary life: what we want and can't have, what we avoid and can't name, the selves we might have been and didn't become. He is interested in ambivalence not as a problem to resolve but as the very texture of being alive.

This course takes Phillips seriously as both a clinical thinker and a literary one because for Phillips, the two are inseparable. Drawing broadly across his essays and books, we will examine his readings on desire, frustration, boredom, and loss; his insistence on the value of not-knowing; his skepticism toward cure and his complicated tenderness toward the patient who wants to be fixed. Throughout, we will ask what his ideas demand of the clinician who takes them up: what kind of presence, what kind of listening, what kind of willingness to stay in the unresolved.

For advanced clinicians, Phillips is less a theorist to master than a sensibility to reckon with one that asks whether psychoanalysis can resist its own temptation toward coherence, and what becomes possible when it does.