Phillips is one of the finest prose stylists at work in the language, an Emerson for our time.
One Way and Another gathers nineteen essays that Adam Phillips selected from across his writing life, set alongside several new pieces and an introduction by John Banville. Phillips, a psychoanalyst, writes on tickling, boredom, clutter, forgetting, and the shifting shape of desire, moving between the consulting room and literature without settling in either.
For the clinician, the value lies in how Phillips treats ordinary states as openings rather than symptoms. He reads boredom as a suspended wish, tickling as a study in consent and its limits, and clutter as a case history in what a person cannot let go. The essays model a way of attending to a patient's language that stays curious and unhurried, resisting the pull toward diagnosis.
Hamish Hamilton published the collection in 2013. Banville's introduction places Phillips in the tradition of the essay rather than the clinical paper, which is where these pieces do their work.
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
- 2013
- Hamish Hamilton
- Hamish Hamilton
- 394
- 9780241145807