On Flirtation

On Flirtation gathers essays in which Adam Phillips treats flirtation, and the wish to stay uncommitted, as a subject for clinical attention in its own right rather than a lapse from it. He reads the flirt as someone who keeps things in play, sustaining uncertainty instead of settling it, and asks what analysis loses when it hurries toward a single, authoritative account of a life.

Across the pieces Phillips moves between clinical work with children and adults and close reading of writers including Philip Roth, Isaac Rosenberg, Karl Kraus and John Clare, and comes to describe psychoanalysis itself as a multi-authored autobiography, its story told and retold by analyst and analysand together. He resists the master plot, arguing that a life admits many tellings rather than one.

For a clinician, the book offers a sustained case for holding interpretation open, for treating provisionality and the refusal of premature closure as clinical resources rather than evasions.