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 Here

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.

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.

Monogamy

Monogamy PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307772764
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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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.

Unforbidden Pleasures

Unforbidden Pleasures PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374712719
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Much has been written of the forbidden pleasures. But what of the "unforbidden" pleasures? Unforbidden Pleasures is the singular new book from Adam Phillips, the author of Missing Out, Going Sane, and On Balance. Here, with his signature insight and erudition, Phillips takes Oscar Wilde as a springboard for a deep dive into the meanings and importance of the unforbidden, from the fall of our "first parents," Adam and Eve, to the work of the great psychoanalytic thinkers. Forbidden pleasures, he argues, are the ones we tend to think about, yet when you look into it, it is probable that we get as much pleasure, if not more, from unforbidden pleasures than from those that are taboo. And we may have underestimated just how restricted our restrictiveness, in thrall to the forbidden and its rules, may make us. An ambitious book that speaks to the precariousness of modern life, Unforbidden Pleasures explores the philosophical, psychological, and social dynamics that govern human desire and shape our everyday reality.

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.

Equals

Equals PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher:
ISBN: 0786749954
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Written in his beloved epigrammatic and aphoristic style, Equals extends Adam Phillips's probings into the psychological and the political, bringing his trenchant wit to such subjects as the usefulness of inhibitions and the paradox of permissive authority. He explores why citizens in a democracy are so eager to establish levels of hierarchy when the system is based on the assumption that every man is created equal. And he ponders the importance of mockery in group behavior, and the psyche's struggle as a metaphor for political conflict.

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.

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.