Good Enough | Sam Adler-Bell

Psychoanalysis, Phillips insists, should not be about coming to conclusions but coming to beginnings. Sándor Ferenczi, a close collaborator of Freud, suggested that “the patient is not cured by free-association, he is cured when he can free-associate.” Which is another way of saying the analysis is only over when it can begin.

Psychoanalysis, Phillips has written, “is a conversation that enables people to understand what stops them having the kinds of conversation they want.” This sort of provoking, ludic oversimplification, which simultaneously domesticates, satirizes, and widens the field of Freudian inquiry, is precisely Phillipsian.