Preface Acknowledgements On Flirtation: An Introduction I. The Uses of the Past 1. Contingency for Beginners 2. Freud and the Uses of Forgetting 3. On Love 4. On Success 5. Besides Good and Evil 6. The Telling of Selves II. Psychoanalysis Reviewed 7. Depression 8. Anna Freud 9. Perversion 10. Freud and Jones 11. Cross-Dressing 12. Erich Fromm 13. Guilt 14. Freud's Circle 15. Futures III. Writing Outside 16. Philip Roth's Patrimony 17. Isaac Rosenberg's English 18. Karl Kraus's Complaint 19. John Clare's Exposure Bibliography Index
Phillips writes as a "flirt"--in the special sense he defines in his opening essay--but how much richer his book is for that. Before next going into print, the envious rivals and embittered former lovers who nowadays cluster around Freud's name should all report to Phillips for a lesson in flirtation. -- Malcolm Bowie, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, University of Oxford
Adam Phillips is Principal Child Psychotherapist in the Wolverton Gardens Child and Family Consultation Centre, London.
[Phillips'] writing is strong and lucid...[He] writes of his work
with child and adult patients in the moving and exciting way that
marked the clinical writings of D.W. Winnicott and the early works
of M. Masud R. Khan.
*New York Times Book Review*
In Phillipstour de force.
*Times Literary Supplement*
[These] essays are intellectual flirtations that use the wiles of
paradox to tease us into liberating ourselves from the old stories,
to make us accept the madcap contingency of our lives...On
Flirtation is everything Phillips says psychoanalytic writing
should be--a pleasure rather than a misery to read, "a kind of
practical poetry."
*Boston Phoenix*
Adam Phillips' On Flirtation is less a study of the psychology of
coquetry than it is a delightful glimpse into the pleasures of
uncertainty. Flirtation is Phillips' metaphor for playing with
stimulating ideas so that we can explore anew their complexity
without fear of adhering to stultifying orthodoxy or succumbing to
overearnestness...On Flirtation will be fascinating to all those
who wish to restore the importance of contingency in human life and
who, committed to open psychoanalytic inquiry, realize that not
everything can be neatly understood or mastered...Given Phillips'
subtle mind, appreciation of complexity, tolerance of conflicting
views, rejection of traditional forms of closure, and epigrammatic
style, it is no accident that he has written a superb book.
*Psychoanalytic Books*
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.
*Esquire*
Phillips writes as a "flirt"--in the special sense he defines in
his opening essay--but how much richer his book is for that. Before
next going into print, the envious rivals and embittered former
lovers who nowadays cluster around Freud's name should all report
to Phillips for a lesson in flirtation.
*Malcolm Bowie, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature,
University of Oxford*
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