An edited collection in which writers from literature, philosophy, art, architecture, music, and medicine take a single word, interruption, and follow it across their fields. The contributors include Stanley Cavell, Gabriel Josipovici, Joseph Rykwert, Victor Burgin, and the composer George Benjamin, with Adam Phillips supplying the psychoanalytic thread and David Hillman the literary one. The argument running through the pieces is that interruption is not only a nuisance to be managed but a condition of meaning: a break can constitute attention, continuity, and a sense of self as much as it damages them.
For the clinician the interest is oblique but real. Phillips treats the pause, the broken sentence, and the moment a train of thought is cut as material rather than obstacle, which bears on how free association is heard and how the frame holds interruption. The essays reward a reader willing to think about listening across registers rather than one seeking technique.
About the authors
David Hillman
David Hillman is a British literary scholar who teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of King's College. His work centres on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, the history of the body, and psychoanalysis. He is the author of Shakespeare's Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (2007), and co-editor, with Adam Phillips, of The Book of Interruptions (2007) and, with Carla Mazzio, of The Body in Parts.
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
- 2007
- Peter Lang
- Peter Lang
- 150
- 9783039113446