a strange and haunting borderland between rigour and delight.
Promises, Promises gathers essays in which Adam Phillips sets psychoanalysis and literature side by side and lets each read the other. The subjects range widely: anorexia and cloning, Tom Stoppard and A.E. Housman, Nijinsky's diary, the effect of the Blitz on Londoners, Martin Amis's novel Night Train, and a piece on clutter. Across them Phillips treats analytic listening as a kind of reading, and asks what psychoanalysis actually delivers once it stops claiming to be a science.
The argument runs toward a psychoanalysis more interested in pleasure and inspiration than in self-knowledge or final truth. Phillips presses the question of whether a person is better served by analysis or by a book, and keeps the two practices in productive tension rather than settling it.
For a clinician the essays offer a way of holding interpretation lightly, reading the consulting room as closely as a text, and staying sceptical about cure. Faber published the collection in 2000.
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
- 2000
- Faber & Faber
- Faber & Faber
- 400
- 9780571209736