On Kissing, Tickling & Being Bored – Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cobe) - Hardcover

Phillips, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674634624 ISBN 13: 9780674634626

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1993

Synopsis

Tickle a child, and she peals with laughter. Go on too long, and her laughter is sure to turn to tears. Where is that ticklish line between pleasure and pain? Why do we risk its being crossed? Does psychoanalysis possess the language to talk about such an extraordinary ordinary thing? In a style that is writerly and audacious, Adam Phillips takes up this subject and others largely overlooked by psychoanalysis - kissing, worrying, risk, solitude, and composure. He writes about phobias as a kind of theory, a form of protection against curiosity; about analysis as a patient's way of reconstituting solitude; about "good-enough" mothering as the antithesis of "bad-enough" imperialism; about psychoanalysis as an attempt to cure idolatry through idolatry; and even about farting as it relates to worrying. Psychoanalysis began as a virtuoso improvisation within the science of medicine, but virtuosity has given way to the dream of science that only the examined life is worth living. Phillips shows that the drive to omniscience has been unfortunate both for psychoanalysis and for life. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored is a set of meditations on underinvestigated themes in psyochoanalysis that shows how much one's psychic health depends on establishing a realm of life that successfully resists examination.

About this title

Review:

A childlike freshness of vision informs these essays, which are at once compact, sophisticated, sharply knowing, yet almost provocatively casual, relaxed, amusing... Phillips is strikingly original and suggestive as a wry observer of psychoanalysis... A telling, engaging, brilliantly amusing and unsettling book. -- Robert Coles "Raritan" In three superb books, "On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored"; "On Flirtation"; and "Terrors and Experts..". Phillips has endorsed pleasure as a laudable goal (imagine!) and enshrined narrative as a form of soul making. In the process, he's punched lovely skylights into the gloomy Freudian edifice and in general done much to rehabilitate the psychoanalytic enterprise by honoring the idiosyncrasy of human experience and by wielding method lightly, playfully, humanely. -- Will Blythe "Esquire" Like Chekhov, Phillips writes as well as he doctors, and his fascination with the subtleties of human behavior makes him a good storyteller...He has a welcome openness to the essential strangeness of every person; this alone is reason enough to read him. -- Jane Mendelsohn "Guardian" Adam Phillips...writes about magnificently light subjects (kissing, tickling and, best of all, worrying) with a great deal of insight...He writes with farsighted equanimity about everything from solitude to spiders. In this regard, he's a bit like an Oliver Sacks of psychoanalysis, both affable and unalarmed. -- Gail Caldwell "Boston Sunday Globe" this alone is reason enough to read him. In this regard, he's a bit like an Oliver Sacks of psychoanalysis, both affable and unalarmed. as a wry observer of psychoanalysis...[A] telling, engaging, brilliantly amusing and unsettling book. done much to rehabilitate the psychoanalytic enterprise by honoring the idiosyncrasy of human experience and by wielding method lightly, playfully, humanely. These are extremely insightful psychoanalytic essays on things like worry and solitude, which are of much more concern to me than issues like wanting to sleep with your closest relatives

Synopsis:

A set of fascinating meditations on underinvestigated themes in psychoanalysis e.g., kissing, worrying, risk, solitude, and composure. Most of the essays have been previously published. Accessible to a general audience. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0674634624
• ISBN 13: 9780674634626
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 150