On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored

On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674417968
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
In a style that is writerly and audacious, Adam Phillips takes up a variety of seemingly ordinary subjects underinvestigated by psychoanalysis--kissing, worrying, risk, solitude, composure, even farting as it relates to worrying. He argues that psychoanalysis began as a virtuoso improvisation within the science of medicine, but that virtuosity has given way to the dream of science that only the examined life is worth living. Phillips goes on to show how the drive to omniscience has been unfortunate both for psychoanalysis and for life. He reveals how much one's psychic health depends on establishing a realm of life that successfully resists examination.

On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored

On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674417968
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Get Book

Book Description
In a style that is writerly and audacious, Adam Phillips takes up a variety of seemingly ordinary subjects underinvestigated by psychoanalysis--kissing, worrying, risk, solitude, composure, even farting as it relates to worrying. He argues that psychoanalysis began as a virtuoso improvisation within the science of medicine, but that virtuosity has given way to the dream of science that only the examined life is worth living. Phillips goes on to show how the drive to omniscience has been unfortunate both for psychoanalysis and for life. He reveals how much one's psychic health depends on establishing a realm of life that successfully resists examination.

On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored

On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674634633
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
Psychotherapist Adam Phillips focuses on a variety of subjects rarely investigated by psychoanalysis--such things as kissing, worrying, risk, and solitude. Phillips rejects the common notion that only the examined life is worth living, asserting that one's psychic health depends on establishing a realm of life that successfully resists interpretation.

On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored

On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571266223
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
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 psychoanalysis as an attempt to cure idolatry through idolatry; and even about farting as it relates to worrying. Psychoanalysis began as a virtuoso improvisation within the science of medicine, but virtuosity has given way to the dream of science that only the examined life is worth living. Phillips shows that the drive to omniscience has been unfortunate both for psychoanalysis and for life. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored is a set of meditations on underinvestigated themes in psyochoanalysis that shows how much one's psychic health depends on establishing a realm of life that successfully resists examination.

Monogamy

Monogamy PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307772764
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
A provocative collection of meditations on coupledom and its discontents that is "playful, brilliant ... profound ... keeps us faithful to the last page" (The New York Observer)—from the witty psychoanalyst and author of On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored. Adam Phillips manages to unsettle one of our most dearly held ideals, that of the monogamous couple, by speculating upon the impulses that most threaten it—boredom, desire, and the tempting idea that erotic fulfillment might lie elsewhere. With 121 brilliant aphorisms, the witty, erudite psychoanalyst who gave us On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored distills the urgent questions and knotty paradoxes behind our mating impulse, and reveals the centrality of monogamy to our notions of marriage, family, the self—in fact, to everything that matters. The only truly monogamous relationship is the one we have with ourselves. Every marriage is a blind date that makes you wonder what the alternatives are to a blind date. There's nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage.

On Flirtation

On Flirtation PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674634404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This is a book about the possibilities of flirtation, its risks and instructive amusements - about the spaces flirtation opens in the stories we tell ourselves, particularly within the framework of psychoanalysis.

Missing Out

Missing Out PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429949538
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
From the leading psychoanalyst Adam Phillips comes Missing Out, a transformative book about the lives we wish we had and what they can teach us about who we are All of us lead two parallel lives: the one we are actively living, and the one we feel we should have had or might yet have. As hard as we try to exist in the moment, the unlived life is an inescapable presence, a shadow at our heels. And this itself can become the story of our lives: an elegy to unmet needs and sacrificed desires. We become haunted by the myth of our own potential, of what we have in ourselves to be or to do. And this can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short. But what happens if we remove the idea of failure from the equation? With his flair for graceful paradox, the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips suggests that if we accept frustration as a way of outlining what we really want, satisfaction suddenly becomes possible. To crave a life without frustration is to crave a life without the potential to identify and accomplish our desires. In this elegant, compassionate, and absorbing book, Phillips draws deeply on his own clinical experience as well as on the works of Shakespeare and Freud, of D. W. Winnicott and William James, to suggest that frustration, not getting it, and and getting away with it are all chapters in our unlived lives—and may be essential to the one fully lived.

The Beast in the Nursery

The Beast in the Nursery PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307772756
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
If you are disturbed by the idea that to grow up is to learn to live with disillusionment, if you are fascinated by the perplexity of child-rearing, or if you fear you were more creative as a child, The Beast in the Nursery offers an illuminating and possibly life-changing experience. In four interrelated essays, Adam Phillips arrives at startling new insights into issues that preoccupied Freud, showing in the process that far from having lost its relevance, psychoanalysis is still one of our most incisive tools for the exploration of the human psyche and its possibilities. Phillips transforms the genre of the essay into an instrument for intellectual investigation of the most absorbing kind.

Unforbidden Pleasures

Unforbidden Pleasures PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374278024
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
"Originally published in 2015 by Hamish Hamilton, Great Britain"--Title page verso.

Terrors and Experts

Terrors and Experts PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674874800
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
This book is a chronicle of the all-too-human terror that drives us into the arms of experts, and of how expertise, in the form of psychoanalysis, addresses our fears - in essence, turns our terror into meaning.

A Philosophy of Boredom

A Philosophy of Boredom PDF Author: Lars Svendsen
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781861892171
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Am account of boredom, something that we have all suffered from, yet actually know very little about.