Synopses & Reviews
In a style that is writerly and audacious, Adam Phillips takes up a variety of seemingly ordinary subjects underinvestigated by psychoanalysis--kissing, worrying, risk, solitude, composure, evenfarting as it relates to worrying.
He argues that psychoanalysis began as a virtuoso improvisation within the science of medicine, but that virtuosity has given way to the dream of science that onlythe examined life is worth living. Phillips goes on to show how the drive to omniscience has been unfortunate both for psychoanalysis and for life. He reveals how much one's psychic health depends on establishing a realm of life thatsuccessfully resists examination.
Review
Adam Phillips...writes about magnificently light subjects (kissing, tickling and, best of all, worrying) with a great deal of insight...He writes with farsighted equanimity about everything from solitude to spiders.In this regard, he's a bit like an Oliver Sacks of psychoanalysis, both affable and unalarmed.
Review
In three superb books, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored; On Flirtation; and Terrors andExperts...[Phillips] has endorsed pleasure as a laudable goal (imagine!) and enshrined narrative as a form of soul making. In the process, he's punched lovely skylights into the gloomy Freudian edifice and in generaldone much to rehabilitate the psychoanalytic enterprise by honoring the idiosyncrasy of human experience and by wielding method lightly, playfully, humanely.
Review
In three superb books, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored; On Flirtation; and Terrors andExperts...[Phillips] has endorsed pleasure as a laudable goal (imagine!) and enshrined narrative as a form of soul making. In the process, he's punched lovely skylights into the gloomy Freudian edifice and in generaldone much to rehabilitate the psychoanalytic enterprise by honoring the idiosyncrasy of human experience and by wielding method lightly, playfully, humanely.
Review
Like Chekhov, Phillips writes as well as he doctors, and his fascination with the subtleties of human behavior makes him a good storyteller...He has a welcome openness to the essential strangeness of every person;this alone is reason enough to read him.
Review
These are extremely insightful psychoanalytic essays on things like worry and solitude, which are of much more concern to me than issues like wanting to sleep with your closest relatives
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [123]-129) and index.
About the Author
Adam Phillipsis Principal Child Psychotherapist in the Wolverton Gardens Child and Family Consultation Centre, London.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. On Tickling
2. First Hates: Phobias in Theory
3. On Risk andSolitude
4. On Composure
5. Worrying and Its Discontents
6. Returning the Dream: In Memoriam Masud Khan
7. On Being Bored
8. Looking at Obstacles
9. Plotting for Kisses
10. Playing Mothers:Between Pedagogy and Transference
11. Psychoanalysis and Idolatry
Notes
Credits
Index