Does psychoanalysis teach us that freedom and equality are impossible for human beings? We would all like to think of ourselves as freedom-loving, egalitarian and democratic. Yet Freud has taught us that everything we do and say is rich in ambiguity and we are riven by conflict and antagonism, within and without. But if is true that our inner lives are one unflagging drama of desire and dependence, of greed, rivalry and abjection, then how can we ever presume to know what might be good for someone else? With all his customary grace and deftness, the celebrated writer Adam Phillips explores these issues in a liberating collection of essays. He looks at such topics as our fantasies of freedom and the nature of inhibition, at free association and the social role of mockery; he examine too the lives and works of such diverse figures as Svengali and Christopher Isherwood, Bertrand Russell and Saul Bellow. Throughout, Adam Phillips demonstrates how psychoanalysis - as a treatment and an experience and a way of reading - can, like democracy, allow people to speak and be heard.
Author
Adam Phillips is a British psychotherapist and essayist. Since 2003 he has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. Phillips was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954, the child of second-generation Polish Jews. He grew up as part of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins and describes his parents as "very consciously Jewish but not believing". As a child, his first interest was the study of tropical birds and it was not until adolescence that he developed an interest in literature. He went on to study English at St John's College, Oxford, graduating with a third class degree. His defining influences are literary – he was inspired to become a psychoanalyst after reading Carl Jung's autobiography and he has always believed psychoanalysis to be closer to poetry than medicine. Adapted from Wikipedia. Phillips is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. He has been described by The Times as "the Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis" for his "brilliantly amusing and often profoundly unsettling" work; and by John Banville as "one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time."
