Chris Bucklow in conversation with Adam Phillips
AP. Yes and it would make sense... it may be more paradoxical or contradictory that you are... you have a strong sense of what you want, but you can be surprised that you don’t know everything about yourself. And that may be the main point - it may be that one is being lured down a road which is suggesting that the project in some way is to know everything about one’s self as though one could, whereas actually while one knows something, it is really subject to modification. It is astonishing how surprised one can be. It’s very interesting to see Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut - the couple are happily married and so on, the wife describes having been in a hotel lobby and some man - she looks across the lobby, and she says at that moment I would have done anything for him. So here is a person perfectly capable of being rooted in a family, married with a child and suddenly has an experience where everything they have organised themselves around becomes redundant in about a second. That's the moment I think we are talking about on a grand scale. On a more minor scale we’re talking about what Freud calls dream work. Which is simply that you and I are having this conversation now - we may be interested in the continuities of what’s being said, while tonight you might dream about the colour of my shirt. If you were able to take it to an analyst it would disclose infinite ranges of personal history, way in excess of anything you got out of this meeting. So Freud is saying it is as though there is somebody else inside you who has quite another agenda. Freud would say we are now in the dream day, so every day is a preparation for a dream, in which whatever it is, some other artist inside us is looking for something entirely different that is quite at odds with it - and we have no idea what it is. Because there are objects in the world that can evoke parts of ourselves that are just... it’s as though the world is potentially too evocative.