On Flirtation

Author:   Adam Phillips
Publisher:   Harvard University Press
ISBN:  

9780674634404


Pages:   256
Publication Date:   01 March 1996
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

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On Flirtation


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Overview

People tend to flirt only with serious things--madness, disaster, other people's affections. So is flirtation dangerous, exploiting the ambiguity of promises to sabotage our cherished notions of commitment? Or is it, as Adam Phillips suggests, a productive pleasure, keeping things in play, letting us get to know them in different ways, allowing us the fascination of what is unconvincing? 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. Phillips looks at life as a tale to be told but rejects the idea of a master plot. Instead, he says, we should be open to the contingent, and flirtation shows us the way. His book observes children flirting with their parents, our various selves flirting with one another, and literature flirting with psychoanalysis. As Phillips explores the links between literature and psychoanalysis--ranging from Philip Roth to Isaac Rosenberg, Karl Kraus to John Clare--psychoanalysis emerges as a multi-authored autobiography. Its subjects are love, loss, and memory; its authors are the analyst and the analysand, as well as the several selves brought to life in the process. A passionate and delightfully playful defense of the virtues of being uncommitted, On Flirtation sets before us the virtue of a yet deeper commitment to the openendedness of our life stories.

Full Product Details

Author:   Adam Phillips
Publisher:   Harvard University Press
Imprint:   Harvard University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 14.00cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 21.00cm
Weight:   0.290kg
ISBN:  

9780674634404


ISBN 10:   0674634403
Pages:   256
Publication Date:   01 March 1996
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

Preface Acknowledgements On Flirtation: An Introduction I. The Uses of the Past 1. Contingency for Beginners 2. Freud and the Uses of Forgetting 3. On Love 4. On Success 5. Besides Good and Evil 6. The Telling of Selves II. Psychoanalysis Reviewed 7. Depression 8. Anna Freud 9. Perversion 10. Freud and Jones 11. Cross-Dressing 12. Erich Fromm 13. Guilt 14. Freud's Circle 15. Futures III. Writing Outside 16. Philip Roth's Patrimony 17. Isaac Rosenberg's English 18. Karl Kraus's Complaint 19. John Clare's Exposure Bibliography Index

Reviews

In three superb books, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored ; On Flirtation ; and Terrors and Experts ...[Phillips] has endorsed pleasure as a laudable goal (imagine!) and enshrined narrative as a form of soul making. In the process, he's punched lovely skylights into the gloomy Freudian edifice and in general done much to rehabilitate the psychoanalytic enterprise by honoring the idiosyncrasy of human experience and by wielding method lightly, playfully, humanely. -- Will Blythe Esquire


[Phillips'] writing is strong and lucid...[He] writes of his work with child and adult patients in the moving and exciting way that marked the clinical writings of D.W. Winnicott and the early works of M. Masud R. Khan. -- Janet Malcolm New York Times Book Review In Phillips


[Phillips'] writing is strong and lucid...[He] writes of his work with child and adult patients in the moving and exciting way that marked the clinical writings of D.W. Winnicott and the early works of M. Masud R. Khan. -- Janet Malcolm New York Times Book Review In Phillips</author' hands, nothing is as ordinary as it appears to be. Each essay is a kind of mystery tour; you never know where you are going to end up...[A] tour de force. -- David Ingleby Times Literary Supplement [These] essays are intellectual flirtations that use the wiles of paradox to tease us into liberating ourselves from the old stories, to make us accept the madcap contingency of our lives...On Flirtation is everything Phillips says psychoanalytic writing should be--a pleasure rather than a misery to read, a kind of practical poetry. -- Bill Marx Boston Phoenix Adam Phillips' On Flirtation is less a study of the psychology of coquetry than it is a delightful glimpse into the pleasures of uncertainty. Flirtation is Phillips' metaphor for playing with stimulating ideas so that we can explore anew their complexity without fear of adhering to stultifying orthodoxy or succumbing to overearnestness...On Flirtation will be fascinating to all those who wish to restore the importance of contingency in human life and who, committed to open psychoanalytic inquiry, realize that not everything can be neatly understood or mastered...Given Phillips' subtle mind, appreciation of complexity, tolerance of conflicting views, rejection of traditional forms of closure, and epigrammatic style, it is no accident that he has written a superb book. -- Donald Kuspit Psychoanalytic Books In three superb books, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored; On Flirtation; and Terrors and Experts...[Phillips] has endorsed pleasure as a laudable goal (imagine!) and enshrined narrative as a form of soul making. In the process, he's punched lovely skylights into the gloomy Freudian edifice and in general done much to rehabilitate the psychoanalytic enterprise by honoring the idiosyncrasy of human experience and by wielding method lightly, playfully, humanely. -- Will Blythe Esquire


Author Information

Adam Phillips is Principal Child Psychotherapist in the Wolverton Gardens Child and Family Consultation Centre, London.

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