Terrors and Experts

By Adam Phillips and adam-phillips

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674874803
• ISBN13: 9780674874800
• Release Date: April 1997
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 132 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Excellent book

Especially if you are one of those people who is disillousioned with much of psychoanalysis, Phillips has an incredible way of presenting paradox, and thinking about symptoms and psychologists in new and interesting ways. A must if you're a psychologist, and a double must if you're in grad school. The only thing negative I can say about Phillips is that his writing style can start to repeat after a while so its best not to read two Phillips books back to back.

Psychoanalysis as Subject and Object

"People come for psychoanalysis - or choose someone to have a conversation with - when they feel they can no longer keep a secret." In this slim and satisfying book, Phillips distills his not inconsiderable devotion to psychoanalysis into six thoughtful essays. Phillips seems to have read everything; he thinks deeply, and has an astonishing ability to synthesize. His assertions challenge the reader, and he supports them with evidence. His essays read like easy, intelligent musings, but he has slyly assembled his facts. Some of his sources are Lacan, Winnicott, Freud, Ferenczi, Franz Kafka, Khan, Descartes - among many others. He's an original, a clinician as well as a theoretician, and has a compassionate heart as well as a great mind.