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Attention Seeking
'Everything depends on what, if anything, we find interesting: on what we are encouraged and educated to find interesting, and what we find ourselves being interested in despite ourselves. There is our official curiosity and our unofficial curiosity (and psychoanalysis is a story about the relationship between the two)...' Based on three connected talks on the subject of attention, this pocket-sized book from Adam Phillips is a fascinating and memorable introduction to idea and the uses of our attention.
On Flirtation
Adam Phillips uses the idea of flirtation to explore the virtues of being uncommitted - to people, to ideas, to methods - and the pleasures of uncertainty. These buoyant essays promote a psychoanalysis with a light touch, a psychoanalysis for pleasure and curiosity.'In On Flirtation, he has again deployed all his erudition and perception to beguiling effect . . . Adam Phillips may well be one of our greatest contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers.' Independent on Sunday
On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored
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 psych...
On Kindness
The pleasures of kindness have been well known since the dawn of western thought. Kindness, declared Marcus Aurelius, was mankind's 'greatest delight' - and centuries-worth of thinkers and writers have echoed him. But today many people seem to find these pleasures literally incredible. Instead of embracing the benefits of altruism, as a species we seem to be becoming deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each other, with motives that are generally self-seeking. This book explains how and why this has come about, and argues that the affectionate life - a life lived in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others - is the one we should all be inclined to live. 'We mutually belong to one another,' as the philosopher Alan Ryan writes, and the good life is one 'that reflects this truth'. What the Victorians called 'open-heartedness' and the Christians 'caritas' remains essential to our emotional and mental health, for reasons both obvious and hidden, argue the authors of this elegant and indispensable exploration of the concept of kindness.
On Wanting to Change
From the UK's foremost literary psychoanalyst, a dazzling new book on the universal urge to change our lives. We live in a world in which we are invited to change - to become our best selves, through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy. We change all the time - growing older and older - and how we think about change changes over time too. We want to think of our lives as progress myths - as narratives of positive personal growth - at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks. So there are the stories we tell about change, and there are the changes we actually make - and they don't always go, or come, together . . . This sparkling book is about that fact.
Winnicott
D.W. Winnicott’s remarkable books, including The Piggle, Home Is Where We Start From and The Child, Family and the Outside World (all published by Penguin) are still read, valued and argued with over thirty years after his death. Adam Phillips's short book, now issued with a new preface, is an elegant, thoughtful attempt to get to grips with a writer, paediatrician and psychiatrist whose work with children and mothers (and the wider implications their relationship has for all of us) continues to be profoundly relevant and fascinating.
Dreams, Memories, and Reality
Philip lives alone with his dog Barnabas, miles from the nearest mountain town. Late one evening, while he and Barnabas are out running, they are attacked by a very handsome male. Philip shoots him, immediately regrets it, and brings him home to deal with his wounds. Soon he realizes there is something very different about the man, beginning with the fact he is unable to speak or understand English. Adam is different. Other than recalling his name, Ád-hamh, he has no memories, including why he ended up naked in a cave high in the mountains above Philip's house. He survived on the blood of animals he kills, until the night Philip finds him and brings him home. Slowly, Philip teaches Adam about his new life. In the process, he discovers things about Adam that will change both their lives forever.
On Balance
When might we know that enough is enough? Does the road of excess ever lead to the palace of wisdom? And should we be happy, or is there something better we can be? In 'On Balance', psychoanalyst Adam Phillips addresses a variety of urgent concerns centred around the idea of balance.
Night Heron
Tell them, the Night Heron is hunting . . . A lone man escapes a labour camp in the dead of night, fleeing across the winter desert of north-west China. Two decades earlier, he was a spy for the British. Now he finds Beijing transformed and crawling with danger - the fugitive must quickly disappear on its surveillance-blanketed streets or face death. Desperate and ruthless, he reaches out to his one-time MI6 paymasters via journalist Philip Mangan, offering secrets in return for his life. Mangan is dragged into a deeper and deeper whirlpool of lies, as the secrets prove more valuable than either of them could ever have known... and not only to the British.
Missing Out
All of us lead two parallel lives- the life we actually live and the one that we wish for and fantasise about. And this life unlived (the one that never actually happens, the one we might be living but for some reason are not) can occupy an extraordinary part of our mental life. We share our lives, in a sense, with the people we have failed to be - and this can become itself the story of our lives- an elegy to needs unmet, desires sacrificed and roads untaken. We quickly notice as children that our needs, like our wishes, are often unmet. And we begin then to learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like. We become haunted by the myth of our own potential, of ...
