Attention Seeking

Drawn from three connected talks, the book treats attention as a psychoanalytic problem rather than a mental skill. Phillips argues that attention is never neutral: it is desired, rationed, given and withdrawn, and what holds it discloses as much as its object. He sets an official curiosity, the kind we are permitted, against an unofficial curiosity running beneath it, and questions the common assumption that what we attend to defines who we are. Inattention, on this account, is as revealing as focus, and being attended to carries its own dangers.

For a clinician, this reframes the consulting room as an economy of attention. It offers a vocabulary for what a patient courts, what they cannot bear to have noticed, and what they keep from the analyst and from themselves. Phillips writes with characteristic aphorism, keeping the argument suggestive rather than systematic, closer to essay than to theory.