Terrors and Experts - Softcover

Phillips, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674874803 ISBN 13: 9780674874800

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1997

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

Review:

What is psychoanalysis good for? The British essayist and psychotherapist Adam Phillips believes it's good for creating the sense that everyday life is worth approaching with wonder. In Terrors and Experts, Phillips redefines the terms in which many people discuss--and dismiss--psychoanalysis. He does this by examining it as a social practice, not a science, and criticizes analysts that believe that if they and their patients simply find things out, all their patients' problems will go away. Says Phillips, "When a doctor tries to solve every problem, rather than help his patient tolerate the terrifying uncertainties of introspection, he becomes an expert on human possibility, something no one could ever be, despite the posturing of our own favorite authorities."

About the Author:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0674874803
• ISBN 13: 9780674874800
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 132