On Adam Phillips

I AM INTENSELY ENVIOUS of Adam Phillips. The British psychoanalyst and writer has published some twenty-odd books, starting with a study of the British analyst Donald Winnicott in 1988. Every year or so since then he has issued a new volume of psychoanalytically tinged observations on “the unexamined life.” To hear him tell it, this prodigious output has been achieved without agony or even second thoughts. Phillips laid out his routine in an interview with the Paris Review: on Wednesdays, the weekday he puts aside from clinical practice, he sits down at his desk and simply writes himself out. “I don’t try. I’m not somebody who works hard at writing. I wouldn’t know how to do that. I wouldn’t know what to do, if you see what I mean.” It’s as if writer’s block were a skill, something you had to “know how to do”—as though he just missed school on the day the rest of us learned how to stare for hours at a blinking cursor. “I sit down and write. That is really what happens.”