Although he ranked himself with Copernicus and Darwin, perhaps we should put him alongside Ibsen, Strindberg, Joyce and Lawrence. Behind Phillips's fine, discursive book lies a fundamental, informing uneasiness that psychoanalysis may be pretending to an authority that it cannot ultimately possess. The drawbacks of this for clinical medicine seem obvious. Freud's doctrine of the powerful unconscious has taught us increasingly to interpret illness in metaphorical terms, yet to resist the idea that diagnostic emotional suppositions may not be hard fact. One possibility is that many of the cases were indeed due to a physical disorder.
Conversion is the essence of psychoanalysis, as well as of language itself.
Both try to resolve the contradictions of being alive through alchemical transformations, wresting new securities from the chaos of old and rooted griefs, calming the mind's ever-threatening anarchy through narratives that channel our experience and hold it in a kind of tense but apparent orderliness. Freud believed this too. It was his most seductive experiment, and easily the most fallacious. Even our memory of them is a reorganisation of the material by a meaning-obsessed waking consciousness. In truth, the magico-religious cultures of the ancient world probably got closer to decoding the mysterious dialect of dreams than he did.