Synopses & Reviews
Iris Murdoch once suggested that to understand any philosopher's work we must ask what he or she is frightened of. To understand any psychoanalyst's work--both as a clinician and as a writer--weshould ask what he or she loves, because psychoanalysis is about the unacceptable and about love, two things that we may prefer to keep apart, but that Freud found to be inextricable. If it is possible to talk about psychoanalysis as ascandal, without spuriously glamorizing it, then one way of doing it is simply to say that Freud discovered that love was compatible, though often furtively, with all that it was meant to exclude. There are, in other words--and most ofliterature is made up of these words--no experts on love. And love, whatever else it is, is terror.
In a manner characteristically engaging and challenging, charming and maddening, Adam Phillipsteases out the complicity between desire and the forbidden, longing and dread. His book is a chronicle of that all-too-human terror, and of how expertise, in the form of psychoanalysis, addresses our fears--in essence, turns our terrorinto meaning.
It is terror, of course, that traditionally drives us into the arms of the experts. Phillips takes up those topics about which psychoanalysis claims expertise--childhood, sexuality,love, development, dreams, art, the unconscious, unhappiness--and explores what Freud's description of the unconscious does to the idea of expertise, in life and in psychoanalysis itself. If we are not, as Freud's ideas tell us, mastersof our own houses, then what kind of claims can we make for ourselves? In what senses can we know what we are doing? These questions, so central to the human condition and to the state of psychoanalysis, resonate through this book asPhillips considers our notions of competence, of a professional self, of expertise in every realm of life from parenting to psychoanalysis. Terrors and Expertstestifies to what makes psychoanalysisinteresting, to that interest in psychoanalysis--which teaches us the meaning of our ignorance--that makes the terrors of life more bearable, even valuable.
Review
[Phillips] radically redefines the legacy of Freudas a method of sustaining the life-giving stories that people tellthemselves rather than a technological fix that will cure them. He is our leading proponent of the validity and vitality of the Freudian appeal.
Review
Skillfully dovetailing criticism of psychoanalytic theory with clinical experience, Phillips wants analysis to be playful rather than dogmatic, to celebrate ambiguity, not rigidity...Terrors andExpertsdisplays the witty verve of On Kissingand its marvelous follow-up, On Flirtation...Terrors and Expertsprovides ample evidence that Phillips is one of today's most thoughtful, as well as entertaining, writers on the mind. [He makes] an expert case for turning psychoanalysis into a more creative and pleasurable discipline.
Review
[Phillips] radically redefines the legacy of Freudas a method of sustaining the life-giving stories that people tellthemselves rather than a technological fix that will cure them. He is our leading proponent of the validity and vitality of the Freudian appeal.
Review
In three superb books, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored; On Flirtation; and Terrors and Experts...[Phillips] has endorsed pleasure as alaudable 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 general done much to rehabilitate the psychoanalytic enterprise by honoringthe idiosyncrasy of human experience and by wielding method lightly, playfully, humanely.
Review
Phillips's specification of the play of language as entering into 'an ordinary-language psychoanalysis', in alluding to so-called ordinary language philosophy, is an invitation to think further of psychoanalysis inconnection with philosophy, specifically with the work of J. L. Austin and of the later Wittgenstein...I find this invitation to philosophy congenial and this way of writing attractive...Reports of Adam Phillips's celebrity suggest thathis redescriptions are being rewarded. What I have noted here, in considering the relation of certain of Phillips's texts and practices with certain philosophical others, are various cues for finding, so far as my present competence andtime have served, that this cause for raising a glass is well placed.
Review
Adam Phillips [is] an interesting figure. In three recent books of essays he has started to put present-day psychoanalysis on the map. He reminds us that there is more to psychoanalysis than what Freud did (ordidn't do) with Minna Bernays...What is most striking is Phillips' intellectual confidence...His writing about psychoanalysis [has a] refreshing iconoclasm. He has ditched the old baggage--its prejudice against homosexuality, itsobsession with instincts--and offers a psychoanalysis which is surprising.
Review
In spite of the scientific shakedown of their ideology, psychoanalysts continue to have much to offer, if Adam Phillips and his new book, Terrors and Experts, are any indication. Achild psychoanalyst and the author of several earlier books, Mr. Phillips continues here a project begun in On Flirtationof emphasizing the importance of uncertainty, error and magic in ourthinking...Mr. Phillips writes well; his phrases dance, teasing from the reader new and often exciting ways of thinking about old ideas...The book is short, generally delightful...offering much to think about during these days when thatmagnificent age-old battle between truth and beauty (science and art, order and disorder) continues, now rippling its way through the field of psychiatry.
Review
'Phillips is one of the most intelligent and humane of psychoanalytic writers and Terrors and Expertscontains a great number of thought-provoking and sometimes brilliant ideas. Itwill be of interest to anyone who feels that something is wrong whenever people get very convinced that analysts know either all or nothing.'
Review
'Phillips wants us to recognize that psychoanalysis is not a science but an art...He means that like the novelist and the poet, the psychoanalyst should know things that the scientist does not--things about thelimits to self-knowledge, the unpredictability of the human psyche, the ambiguities of moral life, the indeterminacy of meaning...The man is so literary he makes Proust sound like the author of Modern OrganicChemistry.'
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-106) and index.
About the Author
Adam Phillipsis Principal Child Psychotherapist in the Wolverton Gardens Child and Family Consultation Centre, London.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Terrors and Experts: An Introduction
1.Authorities
2. Symptoms
3. Fears
4. Dreams
5. Sexes
6. Minds
Bibliography
Index