Terrors and Experts

Adam Phillips takes the topics psychoanalysis claims to command, childhood, sexuality, dreams, development, love, the unconscious, and asks what Freud's account of the mind does to the idea that anyone can be an authority on them. His method is essayistic and associative rather than systematic. He works by turning familiar analytic certainties over until their confidence starts to look like a defence against fear.

The argument runs through the figure of the expert. Terror, Phillips suggests, is what sends people to specialists, and psychoanalysis earns its keep by converting dread into meaning. But if the unconscious means we are not masters of our own houses, the analyst's claim to know is itself unsettled. Competence becomes a question rather than a credential.

For the clinician the book is a sustained argument for holding authority loosely: attending to how a patient performs self-knowledge, and treating one's own not-knowing as material rather than failure.