On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored
Essays finding depth in ordinary states such as boredom, kissing and worrying.
Like Chekhov, Phillips writes as well as he doctors, and his fascination with the subtleties of human behaviour makes him a good storyteller.
Adam Phillips gathers essays on states of mind that clinical writing usually passes over: boredom, worrying, risk, solitude, kissing, tickling, the wish for composure. Each essay treats its small subject as serious analytic material, moving between Winnicott and object-relations thinking, literary reference, and brief clinical vignettes. Published in 1993, the collection reads more as a set of provocations than a system.
Running through the pieces is a scepticism about analytic mastery. Phillips argues that psychoanalysis absorbed a conviction that the good life is the scrutinised life, and that this appetite for total self-knowledge can itself become a symptom. He makes a case for tolerating what cannot be interpreted, and for the ordinary states patients arrive with rather than the meanings an analyst might impose on them.
For the practitioner, the book offers a tentative model of interpretation and a defence of not-knowing as clinical ground rather than failure.
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
- 1993
- Faber & Faber
- Faber & Faber
- 143
- 9780571170227