Adam Phillips on why asking for help can feel unbearable

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]You suggest that the most basic resistance in psychoanalysis at the very least is the resistance to being helped.

[00:00:06]Um but not just simply a resistance to being helped or refusing to be helped, but maybe the idea that one wants to be helped or to help oneself in one's own time.

[00:00:16]>> Yeah.

[00:00:17]>> And in one's own manner.

[00:00:19]And it's important to sort of read this into resistance rather than to see resistance either as a negative, like you know, you're resisting >> Yeah.

[00:00:26]>> the work, or as a simply heroic act.

[00:00:29]>> Yeah. Yeah.

[00:00:30]It's it it seems to me at its best it's a way of um taking your own time to do what you want to do. It's really about that. When I worked at um Charing Cross Hospital, I worked with various family therapists. And one of them is Michael Peter Reader. When he would see a family or indeed an individual person, he would begin by taking a history of their relationship to being helped.

[00:00:56]Not a personal history, if you see what I mean, but a history of their relation to being helped. And it was really obviously very very revealing, because fundamentally it was a history of their relation to dependence.

[00:01:07]But you don't need to use that word.

[00:01:09]But that somebody can acknowledge that there's something that they need, and they can acknowledge that somebody else has it, and they can bear to make the demand, is a huge developmental achievement.

[00:01:25]And that seems to me to be the most interesting thing about it, which is whatever the conflict is about being helped. It seems to be pretty considerable for all of us in some way.

[00:01:37]>> It's really unbearable, then.

[00:01:38]>> It's >> It's unbearable to ask for help.

[00:01:40]>> Yes, well, that's the question. If it is, the question is and what is unbearable about it?

[00:01:46]>> Mhm.

[00:01:47]>> I mean, in a way it's a bit like um a question about envy, isn't it?

[00:01:51]Which is the envious part of oneself thinks [ __ ] why can't I do that?

[00:01:57]Or why can't I have that?

[00:01:59]The unenvious part of oneself thinks how wonderful it is to live in a world where there are people who can do things I can't do.

[00:02:07]But they're two very, very different ways of living.

[00:02:10]And so it would seem to me the question is whether one can bear the acknowledgement that A one needs and wants things and that they reside in other people and that therefore there has to be the medium of a relationship to make that exchange possible. And it's such a fundamental exchange because we couldn't we wouldn't be sitting here now if we hadn't been considerably helped in our lives by obviously initially our parents but then lots of other people.

[00:02:40]>> I think you know sometimes when I'm listening to patients I I think that they they come and they're there and they speak but they're not quite asking for help.

[00:02:51]>> Well, people come for psychoanalysis to find out why they've come for psychoanalysis.

[00:02:57]Because obviously they couldn't possibly know absolutely.

[00:03:00]They know they're suffering from something but they don't quite know what they're asking for and you could think one of the things we are eliciting or facilitating is somebody being able to articulate what they might need or want from another person.

[00:03:15]>> Mhm.