Adaptations: Disquisitions on Psychoanalysis - Softcover

Phillip Freeman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 159571216X ISBN 13: 9781595712165

Publisher: Word Association, 2007

Synopsis

What do the perfection of Seville orange marmalade by Trappist monks, Clinton s admittance to the Eucharist communion, and the use of an epoxy resin in the repair of the Sphinx have in common? They all have to do with the struggles of psychoanalysts to hold onto their dignity and identity in the modern marketplace.

Or so argues Phillip Freeman, MD, in his book, Adaptations: Disquisitions on Psychoanalysis 1997-2006. For the past fifteen years, Dr. Freeman has entertained hundreds of Boston area psychoanalysts with annual monologues chronicling the well intended foibles of this most unmanageable of professions. Squeezed by pharmaceutical giants, managed care driven short term therapies, and the self-help industries, psychoanalysts have been forced out of their quiet offices into the forbidding deserts of commerce and community. Often the results have not been pretty. Sometimes they have been lured by the golden calf.

But the analysts are not alone. What profession is not on the run? Medicine, journalism, accounting, academia, publishing all have struggled to hold onto some recognizable sense of themselves while seeking to adapt and survive in a fast paced, results driven modern economy. Readers of these chronicles of psychoanalytic villagers trying to recognize their own reflections in the mirror readily will recognize themselves and their own wounded disciplines.

A CD including three of the live performances of these monologues and one studio session accompanies the book.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Phillip Freeman is a psychiatrist and a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute Institute. He has faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School and at the Boston University Medical School where he was director of Medical Student Education and a vice chair in the Department of Psychiatry. His publications include writing about psychoanalytic education, psychopathology, and applied psychoanalysis. He discusses and consults to production of films and plays in the Boston area. His private practice is in Newton, Massachusetts.

Review

I have heard audio cassette versions of a few of these astonishing speeches, because bootleg tapes of a few of them have circulated in my circles. The speeches are a literary genre invented by Phillip Freeman, compounded out of the spirit Freud's essays, the most brilliant style of university lecture, the most subtle and savage standup comedy I have ever heard, and, perhaps oddly, the most moving and protracted of wedding toasts. But maybe not so oddly, for these addresses are a marriage of love, wit, great learning and immense intelligence. I know nothing remotely like them. It is a fantastic stroke of luck that they have found their way into print. --Fredric Paul Smoler, Sarah Lawrence College

These brilliant, nonlinear annual disquisitions on the state of psychoanalysis, gild their philosophic pills in marvelous comic displays of their author s erudition. Charming the reader as they illuminate the multiple problems currently facing psychoanalysts, they can provide profit and pleasure to a much wider readership than the local celebrants to whom they were originally addressed. --Anton Kris, MD, Boston Psychoanalytic Institute

Psychoanalysts tend to take themselves much too seriouslybut Phillip Freeman has an antidote he holds up a fun house mirror ruthlessly surveying the field, mocking every sacred cow he can find and puncturing any balloon that has gotten overinflated. This he does with deadpan psychotic humor and irresistible charm. Lucky Boston! Phillip is the Shakespearean fool who illuminates, and thereby ameliorates, the tragedy. --Owen Renik, MD, San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute

About this edition

• Publisher: Word Association
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 159571216X
• ISBN 13: 9781595712165
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 91