Seven wide-ranging essays on intrapsychic processes and the
analytic relationship that are five parts scintillation, four parts
intellectual irritation, and one part obscurity. Phillips, a
British psychoanalyst and author of On Flirtation and On Kissing;
Tickling and Being Bored (not reviewed), writes the way the
psychoanalytic patient is urged to proceed: associatively, aware
that the self is far more fluid, provisional, and sometimes
perverse than rational discourse would have it. In writing about
terror and experts (both refer more to the analyst than the
patient), authorities, symptoms, fears, dreams, sexes (more about
sexuality than gender) and mind, Phillips's underlying premise is
that psychoanalysis needs "intelligent hostility," which he more
than provides with an ironic, deconstructionist perspective on the
analyst's craft. Phillips is an engagingly dialectical thinker,
noting, for example, how and why our wanting love is inescapably
coupled with a deep fear of abandonment. He can also be
delightfully playful, for he feels, rightly, that psychoanalysts
take themselves too seriously, adding, more dubiously, "They forget
. . . that they are only telling stories about stories." His
writing is replete with pithy, sometimes downright wonderful
insights, as when he notes that "relationships are often
constituted by what one dares not say to the other person." Yet
nearly as often, Phillips uses a kind of extreme intellectual and
rhetorical shorthand that will leave many readers baffled, e.g.,
his claim that "in psychoanalysis one can see very clearly how two
people can sit in a room together and kill each other's pleasure:
the aim of analysis is to understand how this happens, and to
restore pleasure in each other's company." Thus, this brief book is
dense with both provocatively subversive and hopelessly murky
musings. As such, it demands to be discussed and decoded as much as
read. (Kirkus Reviews)
In the style of his earlier books, "On Kissing, Tickling and Being
Bored" and "On Flirtation", the author discusses ways in which we
may be terrorized by experts, and the idea of expertise itself. He
challenges the conventional idea of the "self" as something to be
known, and sets out to show how self-knowledge is the problem
rather than the solution. By examining our wish to believe things -
and people (including psychoanalysts) - the book offers a revision
of psychoanalysis itself. For to take psychoanalysis seriously,
Phillips suggests, is to be unable to take gurus seriously.
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