Promises, Promises
About this book
Has psychoanalysis failed to keep its promise? What are psychoanalysis and literature good for? And what, if anything, have they got to do with each other?
Promises, Promises is a delightful new collection of essays which sets out to make and break the links between psychoanalysis and literature. It confirms Adam Phillips as a virtuoso performer able to reach far beyond the borders of psychoanalytic discourse into art, drama, poetry and history. This collection gives us insights into anorexia and cloning, the work of Tom Stoppard and A.E. Housman, the effect of the Blitz on Londoners, Nijinsky's diary and Martin Amis's
Night Train, and provides a case history of clutter. In a final essay, the author turns to the question - why sign up for analysis when you could read a book?
Promoting everywhere a refreshing version of a psychoanalysis that is more committed to happiness and inspiration than to self-knowledge or some absolute truth,
Promises, Promises reaffirms Adam Phillips as a writer whose work, in the words of one reviewer, 'hovers in a strange and haunting borderland between rigour and delight.'
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Landing Page
- Praise
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Poetry and Psychoanalysis
- 2 Bombs Away
- 3 Clutter: A Case History
- 4 Winnicott’s Hamlet
- 5 The Sexual Liberation of Fritz Wittels
- 6 The Manicuring of Jacques Lacan
- 7 Pessoa’s Appearances
- 8 On Translating a Person
- 9 Appreciating Pater
- 10 Minding Out
- 11 An Answer to Questions
- 12 Smile
- 13 Martin Amis and the Female Policeman
- 14 Narcissism, For and Against
- 15 Roaring Boy
- 16 Frederick Seidel’s New Poetry
- 17 Coming to Grief
- 18 Editing Housman
- 19 On Eating, and Preferring Not To
- 20 The Pragmatics of Passion
- 21 Farber’s Quibble
- 22 Prynne Collected
- 23 Christopher Hill’s Revolution and Me
- 24 Sameness is All
- 25 Nijinsky’s New Diary
- 26 Jokes Apart
- 27 Doing Heads
- 28 Promises, Promises
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
- Also by the Author
- Copyright
