You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book records a day-long conference with Adam Phillips, at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (ICP) in New York (as far as such a live event may be recorded). It contains one paper that Phillips gave that day—“Winnicott's Magic: Playing and Reality and Reality” (pp. 9-38)—as well as another paper—“The Cure for Psychoanalysis” (pp. 145-173)—that he wrote following this conference. In addition, the book includes questions and commentaries by various members of the ICP regarding these papers and a lovely interview, which is more of a conversation between Phillips and his old friend Ed Corrigan, a faculty member at the ICP.
During their conversation Ed Corrigan mentioned the following story (p. 64). Not far from Phillips' house there is a book shop. One day, a nun enters that shop and, while wandering around the shelves, points at Phillips' book, Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (1993), and tells the saleswoman that it is her favorite book. Moreover, she had carried a copy of it with her throughout her mission to the Balkans during the Bosnian war. When the saleswoman tells her that the author happens to live in the neighborhood and asks what her favorite essay is, the nun replies that she had never read the book. She had kept it with her just for its title.
To me, this beautiful story captures the gist of Phillips' version of psychoanalysis: the psychoanalysis of open edges, of not presuming to know—neither the wheat from the chaff, nor the cure from the illness. Instead of knowing, it has, first and foremost, the courage not to know. It is an intelligent plea for the unintelligible, humbly advocating that we should let life tell us what it has in store, as it unpacks itself on our doorstep while we live through it. For Phillips, as for the nun, one could never guess that one could fish with a tiny bait, such as a random title or—if one is a therapist—with an interpretation. One can only enjoy playing with it. In fact, in a way, playing with something or