On Getting Better, by Adam

were sumptuously entertained by Mary Stuart and her husband Francis II.

They were accompanied by two dozen attendants and a train of refugee monks, for whom there seemed no future in England. En route, Jane gave birth to their first son.

The book’s most novel parts deal with Jane’s years in Spain, where she lived between her husband’s estate in Extremadura and Philip II’s court in Madrid. At first, she struggled with the weather and the food – she requested consignments of herring, salmon and Shropshire cheese from England – but within a few decades she was producing recipes for Spanish cakes and biscuits.

She became an important figure at Philip II’s court, where the king treated her as an oracle on the inscrutable English queen and she in turn acted as spokeswoman for England’s increasingly downtrodden Catholics.

Although the 16th century is commonly regarded as an era of polarisation, Courtauld shows how Jane was able to a degree to straddle divisions of religion and politics. She remained a pious Catholic throughout her life and provided succour to Catholic exiles in Spain, yet also served as unofficial consul general for English Protestant visitors to the country. She involved herself in intrigues against Elizabeth I, but never formally renounced her allegiance to the queen.

Occasionally, Courtauld exaggerates Jane’s influence. She was never, for instance, a serious candidate to become Philip’s Governor of Flanders after the death in 1571 of her husband (who had been due to take up that office), however noisily the Catholic exiles championed her cause. Dynamic Jane may have been, but in the 16th century women not of the blood royal were still required to operate in the shadows.

Yet, overall, this is a balanced, colourful and revealing biography of a pioneer of Anglo-Spanish living. How to get well soon

OLIVER EAGLETON On Getting Better By Adam Phillips Penguin £6.99

I first encountered Adam Phillips – Britain’s most prominent literary psychoanalyst – at a seminar in Oxford, where he spoke about the poetry of Frank O’Hara.

Before opening the floor to questions, Phillips addressed the audience in a tone that was both solemn and unassuming. ‘I am against intimidation,’ he said. ‘So I don’t want anyone to feel intimidated out of speaking; nor do I want anyone to feel intimidated into speaking.’

Over the next hour, something happened that one rarely sees inside an Oxbridge college. People began to talk freely – almost free-associatively. No one seemed compelled to prove their eloquence or erudition.

And Phillips, hanging on every word, responded not so much with arguments, as with counter-questions, quotations, provocations and jokes.

In Phillips’s vast oeuvre (more than 20 books, most of them essay collections), the theme of intimidation constantly recurs. Tyrants, experts, authorities and superegos: these forces inhibit the spontaneous flow of language, and hence our capacity to surprise or contradict or understand ourselves. The task of therapy is to circumvent them, and thereby to sharpen our sensitivity to the unruly impulses of the unconscious.

In On Getting Better, Phillips sets out to distinguish the aims of talking therapy from those of medical science. The latter, he says, relies on experts, diagnoses and treatments – features that have no place in the former. Unlike the doctor, the analyst does not claim to have exclusive knowledge which gives him or her privileged insight into the patient.

If anything, the analyst’s role is to resist making the kind of definitive judgements and prescriptions we’d expect from a GP.

In their place, the analyst displays irrepressible curiosity about the analysand’s unconscious and a commitment to follow its sinuous course.

Whereas medicine creates a hierarchy of knowledge, Phillips’s vision of analysis involves a radically egalitarian relationship between therapist and patient.

When patients strive to ‘get better’, they are often striving to substitute the person they are with the person they want to be. This, Phillips warns us, is a dangerous operation. For how can we know definitively who we want to be?

More often than not, our aims and ideals are derived from external authorities. Our desires are not our own. So an effective psychoanalysis should never teach us to fulfil our ambitions. It should rather explain how we developed those ambitions in the first place, and how we might develop others.

Phillips spent years working as an NHS child therapist, and believes that adults have much to learn from children.

His latest book observes that ‘to grow up is to learn what it is to be better’. Growing up, in other words, means internalising the images of health, wellness, happiness or fulfilment that society imposes on the individual.

It is difficult to read Phillips’s meditations on authoritarianism in 2021 without bringing to mind their political context, as a rising New Right – emblematised by Trump, Modi, Orbán and Johnson – erodes democracy the world over. And when one makes that association, one begins to doubt the broader applicability of Phillips’s model. Do we believe his claim that fluid instincts are always preferable to rigid ideals? Or are certain ideals worth protecting from their political adversaries?

Phillips masterfully describes the value of free speech in the consulting room. But is it possible that his vision is more suited to living within a repressive society than to mounting a resistance?