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“The various hobby horses of contemporary psychoanalysis—myths of development, the perverse romance of ‘emotional nurture,’ the fetishization of language, the obsession with ‘relationships,’ each in their different ways drifts toward a disavowal of the sensuous pleasures of childhood. In their commitment to the child's future, they forget his bodily beginnings” (p. 103). Once again in his inimitable, provocative fashion, Adam Phillips jabs ever so cleverly at psychoanalytic theorizing that has become too dogmatic, ingeniously using what he feels are the best elements of psychoanalytic theory in his critique. Epigrammatic in style, flirtatiously Socratic in method, this book is, nonetheless, a battle cry to psychoanalysis not to forget its beginnings, not to throw away in our new theories what has made us most unique. It is not that Phillips wants to ignore the present or the future—he's too alive to new ideas for that—he just does not want us to disregard the past, the ground on which psychoanalysis stands. And this ground with its notions of unconscious desire, infantile sexuality, and the never-ending search for pleasure, does not offer easy answers. It leaves us, according to Phillips, fortunately, always a bit muddled, but ever in search of pleasure.
One can read The Beast in the Nursery on many levels—philosophical, educational, political, psychoanalytical. Some may find in Phillips a bit of the preacher: his witty aphorisms and clever unraveling of what we have come complacently to accept. Is he wagging his finger at us from a superior, omniscient position? I, for one, appreciate his gospel of paradox, his piercing intellect, which is always probing and questioning.
What is a good life, and how is it fashioned? What makes life worth living? What conditions how interest is made and how it is lost? What is a good sublimation? What must be given up and what gained in learning to speak? What are the dangers of adaptation to our culture? How do we keep alive our inar