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It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. — Donald Woods Winnicott (1971/2001)
Reading Adam Phillips is like being on a play date with an extremely bright literary friend who is only too happy to include you in his on-going psychoanalytic musings. Phillips has written 20 books, most of which are collections of essays. Phillips's engagement, like many essayists, is with words in conversations with himself, the reader, and his subjects. Psychoanalytic theory is his primary playground within which to explore philosophic and analytic paradoxes of what it may mean to be human. And the essay is the privileged form Phillips uses to best articulate the capacities and limitations we have as analysts in engaging the unconscious.
Phillips's essays are a wondering about, and a wandering through things. To the extent that he is typically not trying to prove or promote any one thing in particular but rather is juggling several ideas at once his essays can be among the most playful of this literary form. Unlike the case report or research paper, which are designed to show causal relationships between what is done and what happens next, his writing is an opportunity to privilege possibilities. In one of the most forceful pieces among this collection of 26 essays, “Coda: Up to a Point,” we learn that Phillips writes essays, whose definition he cites from the Oxford English Dictionary as “[t]he action or process of trying or testing; an assay.. .. An attempt, endeavor. ..” because he believes it is the literary form most conducive to questioning the idea of unitary truth and singular expertise as it relates to any subject particularly psychoanalytic investigation. “What the literary essay offers the psychoanalyst, and that the psychoanalyst has refused, is the opportunity to be neither definitive nor right, but in a psychoanalyt