Terrors and Experts - Hardcover

Phillips, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067487479X ISBN 13: 9780674874794

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Iris Murdoch once suggested that to understand any philosopher's work we must ask what he or she is frightened of. To understand any psychoanalyst's work--both as a clinician and as a writer--we should ask what he or she loves, because psychoanalysis is about the unacceptable and about love, two things that we may prefer to keep apart, but that Freud found to be inextricable. If it is possible to talk about psychoanalysis as a scandal, without spuriously glamorizing it, then one way of doing it is simply to say that Freud discovered that love was compatible, though often furtively, with all that it was meant to exclude. There are, in other words--and most of literature is made up of these words--no experts on love. And love, whatever else it is, is terror.

In a manner characteristically engaging and challenging, charming and maddening, Adam Phillips teases out the complicity between desire and the forbidden, longing and dread. His book is a chronicle of that all-too-human terror, and of how expertise, in the form of psychoanalysis, addresses our fears--in essence, turns our terror into meaning.

It is terror, of course, that traditionally drives us into the arms of the experts. Phillips takes up those topics about which psychoanalysis claims expertise--childhood, sexuality, love, development, dreams, art, the unconscious, unhappiness--and explores what Freud's description of the unconscious does to the idea of expertise, in life and in psychoanalysis itself. If we are not, as Freud's ideas tell us, masters of our own houses, then what kind of claims can we make for ourselves? In what senses can we know what we are doing? These questions, so central to the human condition and to the state of psychoanalysis, resonate through this book as Phillips considers our notions of competence, of a professional self, of expertise in every realm of life from parenting to psychoanalysis. Terrors and Experts testifies to what makes psychoanalysis interesting, to that interest in psychoanalysis--which teaches us the meaning of our ignorance--that makes the terrors of life more bearable, even valuable.

About this title

About the Author

Adam Phillips is Principal Child Psychotherapist in the Wolverton Gardens Child and Family Consultation Centre, London.

Reviews

Psychoanalysts, argues Phillips (On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored), must realize that psychic life will always be much more complicated than the explanations they impose on it; they must give up the authority over experience once granted them by our culture. The chapter entitled "Authorities" uses letters between Freud and disciple Sandor Ferenczi to illustrate current critiques of analysts acting as father figures. Other chapters re-examine fundamental psychoanalytic concepts ("Fears," "Dreams," "Sexes") and demonstrate how the analyst might utilize the patient's own beliefs about him- or herself in making sense of experience: we might all be "experts" if properly listened to. The chapter on "Symptoms" presents material from the couch, allowing us to observe how Phillips's gentle interventions during therapy actually work. Although the book insistently draws out the theoretical and philosophical implications of its premises, it is lucid and will be comprehensible to those with a lay understanding of Freud's thinking.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Seven wide-ranging essays on intrapsychic processes and the analytic relationship that are five parts scintillation, four parts intellectual irritation, and one part obscurity. Phillips, a British psychoanalyst and author of On Flirtation and On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (not reviewed), writes the way the psychoanalytic patient is urged to proceed: associatively, aware that the self is far more fluid, provisional, and sometimes perverse than rational discourse would have it. In writing about terror and experts (both refer more to the analyst than the patient), authorities, symptoms, fears, dreams, sexes (more about sexuality than gender) and mind, Phillips's underlying premise is that psychoanalysis needs ``intelligent hostility,'' which he more than provides with an ironic, deconstructionist perspective on the analyst's craft. Phillips is an engagingly dialectical thinker, noting, for example, how and why our wanting love is inescapably coupled with a deep fear of abandonment. He can also be delightfully playful, for he feels, rightly, that psychoanalysts take themselves too seriously, adding, more dubiously, ``They forget . . . that they are only telling stories about stories.'' His writing is replete with pithy, sometimes downright wonderful insights, as when he notes that ``relationships are often constituted by what one dares not say to the other person.'' Yet nearly as often, Phillips uses a kind of extreme intellectual and rhetorical shorthand that will leave many readers baffled, e.g., his claim that ``in psychoanalysis one can see very clearly how two people can sit in a room together and kill each other's pleasure: the aim of analysis is to understand how this happens, and to restore pleasure in each other's company.'' Thus, 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. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067487479X
• ISBN 13: 9780674874794
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 110