Side Effects

Phillips is delightful to read. He has a very good sense of humor, and he makes the ideas accessible for all readers.

Adam Phillips gives credit to Donald Winnicott, author of Playing and Reality, for the side show which is called the cohesion of ideas as a defence organization to prevent distraction for institutional thinking at a particular space, time, people, money, or political transition like David Bromberg's song called Sharon:The same rowdy crowd that was here last night is back again.Anything you thought was going to stop is gainsaid by dreadful continuity with whatever you try to avoid thinking about.

Adam Phillips is a favorite author of mine, a wonderful essayist and prose stylist. His writing expresses clarity in the face of obscurity, precision in confronting ambiguity and complexity. If you have any interest in Freud and psychoanalysis generally, or if you wonder about patterns and tendencies, both in yourself and in the culture, which you intimate but can't quite pinpoint or articulate, then I definitely recommend his work. "Side Effects" is very good, but I think his best may be "On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored" - a truly beautiful book.

adam phillips leaves out the number one reason psychoanalysts are attracted to literature: you don't have to know the person to theorize about her. it's so much easier to analyze someone you've never met,and the characters she made up, than it is to approach the clinical setting where a real relationship is involved. it seems to me that the reason analysts and others are interested in analyzing famous people they've never met, never talked to or had any relationship with, is it's so, so easy. you can say anything you want and jane austen isn't here to say "huh? where'd you ever get that idea about me?" in a real analysis that type of response from the patient is common. the analyst has to know how to respond back. in literary analysis hey, there's no one around you have to relate to. you can basically say anything you want and the more clever you are the farther away from the subject you can get. that is, you can escape into your pretty words and no one will ever say, hold on, whatever happened to your subject? aren't you talking about adam?