Terrors & Experts-Csd - Hardcover

Phillips, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 057117583X ISBN 13: 9780571175833

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1996

Synopsis

In the style of his earlier books, "On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored" and "On Flirtation", the author discusses ways in which we may be terrorized by experts, and the idea of expertise itself. He challenges the conventional idea of the "self" as something to be known, and sets out to show how self-knowledge is the problem rather than the solution. By examining our wish to believe things - and people (including psychoanalysts) - the book offers a revision of psychoanalysis itself. For to take psychoanalysis seriously, Phillips suggests, is to be unable to take gurus seriously.

About this title

Review

Adam Phillips is most famous for his strikingly well written investigation into the margins of a life On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored but here he turns his critical gaze on his own profession. Terrors and Experts argues, often quite polemically, that no one can tell you what a good life is nor how to live it. Phillips suggests that psychoanalysis can, at best, suggest that all life stories are narratives that have certain logics, certain directions; and if one occasionally gets lost within the narrative one is telling about oneself, perhaps a certain form of conversation, called analysis, could be helpful. Phillips is careful--everything for him is provisional. The science of the unconscious that Freud discovered, Phillips believes, already always deconstructs any possible idea of a science of itself. Phillips reads in Freud a post-Freudian Freud always at battle with the scientism of the Professor. This caution, this constant contingent perhaps (non-dogmatic, anti-authoritarian), counsels us against creating experts of the mind or of life--as Phillips would ask, what would it mean to be an expert on life anyway? --Mark Thwaite

Review

Phillips is an engagingly dialectical thinker...This brief book is dense with both provocatively subversive and hopelessly murky musings. As such, it demands to be discussed and decoded as much as read.

ÝPhillips¨ radically redefines the legacy of Freud as a method of sustaining the life-giving stories that people tell themselves rather than a technological fix that will cure them. He is our leading proponent of the validity and vitality of the Freudian appeal. -- Bryan Appleyard "The Independent"

Adam Phillips Ýis¨ an interesting figure. In three recent books of essays he has started to put present-day psychoanalysis on the map. He reminds us that there is more to psychoanalysis than what Freud did (or didn't do) with Minna Bernays...What is most striking is Phillips' intellectual confidence...His writing about psychoanalysis Ýhas a¨ refreshing iconoclasm. He has ditched the old baggage--its prejudice against homosexuality, its obsession with instincts--and offers a psychoanalysis which is surprising. -- David Herman "New Statesman & Society"

time have served, that this cause for raising a glass is well placed.

obsession with instincts--and offers a psychoanalysis which is surprising.

such good effect in his previous [books]: paradox, aphorism, and exegesis of the mundane.

will be of interest to anyone who feels that something is wrong whenever people get very convinced that analysts know either all or nothing.

commentators on the subject who writes well, holds no brief for psychoanalysis as a profession and has a lot of philosophical and human sense

themselves rather than a technological fix that will cure them. He is our leading proponent of the validity and vitality of the Freudian appeal.

magnificent age-old battle between truth and beauty (science and art, order and disorder) continues, now rippling its way through the field of psychiatry.

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 057117583X
• ISBN 13: 9780571175833
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 184