Monogamy may be his most probing and original work to date.
Monogamy is a short book of 121 numbered aphorisms in which Adam Phillips writes about desire inside the couple. Rather than build a sustained argument, he sets down fragments, each turning a familiar assumption about fidelity, jealousy and coupledom until it shows a different face. Phillips treats monogamy and infidelity as inseparable: the couple lives always in relation to a possible third, and the wish for one partner keeps company with the wish for others.
The tone is sceptical and playful, closer to the essay and the epigram than to the case study. Phillips reads the happy couple as an object of unease rather than an ideal, and he keeps returning to what people want from constancy and what they fear in it.
For a clinician, the book offers compact formulations of the fantasies patients bring to fidelity and betrayal, and a language for the third that shadows every pairing. It was first published by Faber in 1996.
About the author
Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips (born 1954) is a British psychoanalyst and essayist working within the psychoanalytic tradition. He served as principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London and is general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics translations of Freud. A regular contributor to the London Review of Books, he has written many books, among them On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Going Sane, and Becoming Freud, and is known for essays that bring psychoanalytic thinking to a general readership.
Details
- 1996
- Faber & Faber
- Faber & Faber
- 128
- 9780571179893