Adam Phillips on Attention Seeking: Curiosity in Therapy and Art

If explanation is the self-cure for curiosity, we have a lot of explaining to stop doing; if desire is the refuge from wide-angled attention, we have a lot of wanting to relinquish.

In Attention Seeking, Adam Phillips offers a way of thinking about attention that moves beyond the obvious. Attention is something we give and receive, and is in turns needed, wanted, and feared in its various forms.

In psychotherapy, we notice that a symptom, or a state of mind, is something that claims our attention in a particular way. As Phillips suggests, psychoanalysis (and by extension other forms of therapy) might aim to free us from certain kinds of self-preoccupation.

If you are reflecting on your own experience of therapy or curiosity, you are welcome to get in touch.

Attention, Symptoms, and Self-Preoccupation

The relinquishing of a “symptom” might have something to do with gradually coming to find it less interesting, and less deserving of so much attention. Or perhaps that it has a place, but as part of the story rather than the whole, and that other aspects of experience are ultimately more deserving of our attention.

This is not something that can be forced. It is something to be arrived at.

It often involves a process of paying attention in a different way. Asking the symptom what it is really wanting to turn our attention towards.

There is also a potential danger in psychotherapy here. That we become more absorbed in our symptoms, and increasingly beholden to previous attempts at self-cure, rather than freed from them.

...everyone's attention is absorbed by something, even if it is only distractedness, or the lack of control they have over their attention.

Attention as a Way of Knowing

“Both psychoanalysis, as a writing and a therapeutic practice, and the reading of literature… work by making us self-conscious about the nature and the quality of our attention, our language; by drawing our attention to certain preoccupations, they make us wonder what our attention may be seeking and avoiding…

..And many people seek out and value experiences in which they can lose themselves… psychoanalysis, at its best… is the therapy that frees people to lose interest in themselves; there’s nothing more self-preoccupying than a symptom…”

This introduces an important shift.

Attention is not simply something we control. It reveals something about us. What we return to, what we avoid, what absorbs us. These begin to form a picture of how we are trying to live. In this sense, reflection upon attention itself, becomes a way of knowing.

Curiosity and the Image in Art Psychotherapy

Sometimes people in Art Psychotherapy will hope that the therapist will tell them what their image means. It is my observation that it is more often the case that the patient fears that the therapist will do exactly that.

There are at least two aspects to this. Firstly, the concern that it may reveal more than they are currently ready to share, perhaps touching something too immediate or too tender. Something like an “unthought known” that cannot simply be brought into the light all at once.

But there is also another kind of fear.

That in saying what the image “means”, the therapist takes from the client their own capacity to make meaning. That interpretation becomes a kind of theft, closing down the very process it is meant to support.

The role of the Art Psychotherapist, as I understand it, is to collaborate without collusion. To enter into a shared curiosity about the image, holding in mind its multiple levels of significance. One of these may be its function as a transferential object, but it is never only that.

The image is something to stay with, rather than to explain away.

Curiosity in Galleries and Institutions

With regard to explanation as the self-cure for curiosity, it is difficult not to think about the increasing presence of explanatory texts in galleries and institutions.

These are often justified as forms of education, or as ways of making art more accessible. And although there is truth in that, it is also worth considering another possibility.

That explanation can, at times, function as a way of closing down curiosity. Of narrowing the field of possible meanings, and positioning knowledge as something already settled.

If curiosity requires space, then too much explanation may begin to limit it.

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Andrew Phillips is a Visual Artist, Psychotherapist, and Creative Mentor.

Thank you for reading this article. If something here resonates with your own experience of therapy, attention, or creative work, you are very welcome to get in touch with any questions or to arrange an initial consultation.

Find out more about psychotherapy sessions online in the UK, and how we might begin working together. I am an HCPC registered Art Psychotherapist, offering an approach informed by depth psychology.

I also offer online mentoring for artists and creative professionals. Conversations to enrich your vision for art and life.

You can view and purchase original artworks via the website shop. My painting and mixed-media work explores landscape and the numinous.