The Cure for Psychoanalysis

Two essays and a recorded seminar day make up this short book. In the first essay Phillips reads Winnicott on play, by way of an encounter with Marion Milner; the second turns to psychoanalytic ideas of cure. A long conversation with the analyst Edward Corrigan, plus audience questions and faculty responses from a day at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy in New York, fills out the rest.

The through line is a suspicion of cure as a goal. Phillips treats analysis less as the removal of symptoms than as a practice of play, curiosity, and staying with what cannot be known. To cure psychoanalysis, on this account, is to loosen its grip on curing.

For the clinician the value lies in register. The spoken format lets Phillips think aloud, field questions from practitioners, and revise as he goes, offering a working picture of the analytic stance rather than a set of techniques.