He knows what Freud felt and sometimes openly admitted, that the world's age-old gathering of insight into human nature is stored in its literature, that poets are and always have been what Shelley once called them, "the unacknowledged legislators of the world" - priest-like expounders of sacred mysteries, "unapprehended inspiration".
What we know, in any field, is largely what we are able formally to express, and the telling of stories is history's most articulately evolved medium for the expression of human psychology and behaviour.
Perhaps what Freud really did was to write the explicit and single-minded parables of hunger and erotomania that literature had not yet written, or had balked at writing during long centuries of Pauline Christian conditioning. 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. When Phillips describes Freud as writing "science which sounded like literature", it is possible to go further and argue that psychoanalytic theory is actually literature dressed up as scientific investigation. Art's strength is metaphorical: it works by analogy, by reorganisation and rearrangement, and has the freedom and irresponsibility of thought itself. Psychoanalysis claims to be essentially a science: to proceed, like physics, by broadly verifiable laws and to embody some sort of literal truth. 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. As Lewis Wolpert, in his recent superb study of depression, Malignant Sadness, observes: "It is curious that conversion disorders, made so famous by Freud, in which emotional conflict was converted into, for example, blindness, deafness or paralysis, seem nowadays to be very rare. One possibility is that many of the cases were indeed due to a physical disorder."
It's not surprising that [Freud] saw dreams as a kind of art, a "royal road to the unconscious" that could be read, picked apart and diligently expounded as though the analyst were a supremely authoritative literary critic. It was his most seductive experiment, and easily the most fallacious.
For him, the work of Freud and the other great psychological thinkers is more imaginatively enabling than it is empirically accurate or "true".