Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature [Hardcover]

Adam Phillips (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 5, 2001

As an essayist, Adam Phillips combines the best of two worlds: a mastery of psychotherapy as both practitioner and theorist, and a reputation as one of the best literary writers around. In this collection of essays, he brings these two gifts to bear upon each other, speculating on the relative merits of psychoanalysis and literature and on the connections between them. In his quirky, epigrammatic style, Phillips shows us how psychoanalysis and literature at their best share the goal of shedding light on human character, the most fascinating of disorders.Promises, Promises reveals Phillips as a virtuoso performer able to reach far beyond the borders of psychoanalytic discourse, into art, novels, poetry, and history. This collection gives us insights into Martin Amis's Night Train, Nijinsky's diary, Tom Stoppard and A. E. Housman, Amy Clampitt, the effect of the Blitz on Londoners, and a case history of clutter. It confirms Phillips as a writer whose work, in the words of the Guardian, "hovers in a strange and haunting borderland between rigour and delight."

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Phillips, a well-known psychotherapist and literary critic, believes that the "talking cure" of psychoanalysis, dependent as it is upon language, is inextricably linked to literature. Accordingly, he has produced a number of insightful essays that explore the relationship between the literary arts and the unconscious. In this new collection of book reviews, lectures, and critical pieces, Phillips juxtaposes anecdotes from his own psychotherapy practice with discussions of works by an eclectic group of authors: A.E. Housman, Melanie Klein, Fernando Pessoa, Fritz Wittels, and Hart Crane, to name just a few. Not surprisingly, he also includes liberal references in many of the pieces to Freud's writings and theories. A useful addition to interdisciplinary studies, this unique book is recommended for academic collections. Ellen Sullivan, Ferguson Lib., Stamford, CT
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Intellectually stimulating and refreshingly unbiased." -- --Kirkus Reviews

"The many and varied essays in Adam Phillips's book effervesce with interest." -- --The Sunday Times of London --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 280 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (February 5, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465056776
• ISBN-13: 978-0465056774
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,291,907 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essays that are smart, curious, and kind, March 13, 2002

By 

Eileen Galen (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Promises, Promises: Essays on Poetry and Psychoanalysis (Paperback)

In the Preface to this collection of essays Phillips comes right out and describes the duo of language and psychoanalysis as warp and woof. Without one, the other loses form - and meaning. Each and both are his focus here, and he manages in this book to ably wear two hats: that of an enthusiastically literary (he read English as an undergraduate) psychotherapist, and also an essayist on literary topics who is - not at all by accident - unapologetically psychoanalytically-oriented. He is playful and he writes with clarity and precision. You never puzzle out a Phillips sentence; you reread because you were pleased the first time. In addition his clinical experiences (as a child psychotherapist) inform some of the pieces.

Sometimes he is elegantly simple - to set the hook, and is almost epigrammatic, as when he asserts, "One way of describing growing up would be to say that it involves a transition from the imperative to the interrogative - from 'Food!' to 'I want' - to 'Can I have?'" In addition, the Phillips knack for successfully and bracingly arguing both sides of a story is out in full force.

Some of the subjects under discussion are poetry and psychoanalysis; narcissism (not such a bad thing); anorexia nervosa; clutter (as "the obstacle to desire" and the "object of desire"); agoraphobia; poet Frederick Seidel's one book of published poems; grief and melancholy; jokes, and an appreciation of Martin Amis (which jauntily starts out, "For three words once, in 1987, Martin Amis sounded like D.H. Lawrence.") Several (among them "Christopher Hill's Revolution and Me") are autobiographical, and all are thoroughly engaging.

There are 28 essays. Some are book reviews. Some discuss writers or thinkers I'd never read. One of Phillips' abilities is to reference someone with whom you are unfamiliar, and make that person come alive in the course of the essay. You will not be lost, or lose interest.

You can dip into this book, come back to it, skip around, or steam through it. Phillips is flexible, and so is this collection. From Phillips' essay on American psychotherapist and essayist Leslie Farber, in which he mentions Farber's writing style: "Out of languages at odds with each other, if not actually at war with each other - the languages of Freud, of Sullivan, of Buber; of autobiography, of existentialism, of phenomenology, of a too-much-protested-against romanticism - Farber has found a way of being at once easily accessible to his readers, and surely but subtly unusually demanding of them." Phillips was also describing himself.

A very worthwhile book.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essays that are smart, curious, and kind, March 24, 2001

By 

Eileen Galen (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature (Hardcover)

In the Preface to this collection of essays Phillips comes right out and describes the duo of language and psychoanalysis as warp and woof. Without one, the other loses form - and meaning. Each and both are his focus here, and he manages in this book to ably wear two hats: that of an enthusiastically literary (he read English as an undergraduate) psychotherapist, and also an essayist on literary topics who is - not at all by accident - unapologetically psychoanalytically-oriented. He is playful and he writes with clarity and precision. You never puzzle out a Phillips sentence; you reread because you were pleased the first time. In addition his clinical experiences (as a child psychotherapist) inform some of the pieces.

Sometimes he is elegantly simple - to set the hook, and is almost epigrammatic, as when he asserts, "One way of describing growing up would be to say that it involves a transition from the imperative to the interrogative - from 'Food!' to 'I want' - to 'Can I have?'" In addition, the Phillips knack for successfully and bracingly arguing both sides of a story is out in full force.

Some of the subjects under discussion are poetry and psychoanalysis; narcissism (not such a bad thing); anorexia nervosa; clutter (as "the obstacle to desire" and the "object of desire"); agoraphobia; poet Frederick Seidel's one book of published poems; grief and melancholy; jokes, and an appreciation of Martin Amis (which jauntily starts out, "For three words once, in 1987, Martin Amis sounded like D.H. Lawrence.") Several (among them "Christopher Hill's Revolution and Me") are autobiographical, and all are thoroughly engaging.

There are 28 essays. Some are book reviews. Some discuss writers or thinkers I'd never read. One of Phillips' abilities is to reference someone with whom you are unfamiliar, and make that person come alive in the course of the essay. You will not be lost, or lose interest.

You can dip into this book, come back to it, skip around, or steam through it. Phillips is flexible, and so is this collection. From Phillips' essay on American psychotherapist and essayist Leslie Farber, in which he mentions Farber's writing style: "Out of languages at odds with each other, if not actually at war with each other - the languages of Freud, of Sullivan, of Buber; of autobiography, of existentialism, of phenomenology, of a too-much-protested-against romanticism - Farber has found a way of being at once easily accessible to his readers, and surely but subtly unusually demanding of them." Phillips was also describing himself.

A very worthwhile book.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Provocative reading......., August 25, 2001

By 

Dianne Foster "Di" (USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature (Hardcover)

Adam Phillips takes the title of his book -- PROMISES, PROMISES -- from the last entry in this collection of essays, where he outlines the underlying theme of his collection. He says, "For me - for all sorts of reasons - there has always been only one category, literature, of which psychoanalysis becomes a part." He says in reading, one carries out a solitary act, a meditation of sorts. In reading literature -- whatever that is, and the lines have become clouded in recent years -- one engages a person who is not present in the room. On the other hand, psychoanalysis where one engages someone who is in the room is "literature restored to practicality -- the absolute antithesis of art for art's sake..." All these essays deal with some aspect of psychoanalysis and frequently Phillips uses the published word - 'literature' - to illustrate his point. Sometimes, an essay is a "talk" Phillips has given to a group, such as "On Translating a Person" originally presented as the Gwyn Jones Memorial Lecture in Cardiff Wales in 2000. In this essay, Phillips refers to a book by Raymond William entitled 'Materialism and Culture', about Welsh society. Because Phillips is from Wales (and Jewish), he is interested in how Williams "translates" the Welsh culture. Phillips says "What Williams is alerting us to is that what he calls the emergence of 'structures of feelings' depend upon the culture forms available for use. And each of those forms carries with it a history and a class consciousness." Phillips applies this idea to psychoanalysis where he says the individual has a "consciousness of history, a consciousness of alternatives, a consciousness of aspirations and possibilities: a wish for translation." He says, "Psychoanalyst don't think of themselves as translating people. The analyst interprets, reconstructs, questions, redescribes, returns the signifier..but he rarely describes what he does as translating the patient's material." Yet, the analyst is assisting the analysand to interpret his own life, to read his own text, to translate. In the end, who decides if the translation is a good one? Many of the essays are reviews of books-most biographies and a few autobiographies. A few works of non-fiction are included. I particularly enjoyed "Doing Heads" a review of Patrick McGrath's book 'Picador Book of New Gothic' which describes how horror stories moved from the exteral world to the internal world with the arrival of Edgar Allen Poe who dealt with "the terror inside." All of these essays explore the challenge of knowing the self, establishing an "identity" by reading and absorbing literature and/or by taking a more pragmatic approach and entering analysis. In the first, the writer who is not present facilitates the reader's interpretation and understanding. In the latter, the analyst who is present facilitates the act of reading and interpreting the self. In both situations, the reader is free to choose how and what s/he will interpret, absorb, and apply. Phillips seems to have concluded that while one can spend a lifetime attempting to know the self in the end the authentic self may be unknowable.