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Adam Phillips's On Flirtation is less a study of the psychology of coquetry than it is a delightful glimpse into the pleasures of uncertainty. Flirtation is Phillips's metaphor of playing with stimulating ideas so that we can explore anew their complexity without fear of adhering to stultifying orthodoxy or succumbing to overearnestness. “In the terms of this book flirtation is among other things a way of acknowledging the contingency of our lives—their sheer unpredictability, how accident-prone we are—without at the same time turning this unpredictability itself into a new kind of master-plot” (p. xii).
Phillips, Chief Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross, London, and author of On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, also published by Harvard University Press, proves to be an engaging flirt, and readers will find themselves irresistibly attracted to his passionate advances. Lest there be any doubt about the seriousness of its scholarship, On Flirtation examines some of the most important themes imaginable, including love, loss, memory, and the self. Philipps is a teaser (of the truth) but never a heartbreaker; he toys with ideas but never trifles with them.
On Flirtation consists of a series of lectures, book reviews, and previously published essays appearing in nonpsychoanalytic magazines and journals. Avoiding technical and theoretical jargon, Phillips writes to be understood. He has structured his book into three sections. Part I, “The Uses of the Past,” explores the postmodern fascination with contingency, Freud's attitude toward remembering and forgetting, and the relationship between psychoanalysis and autobiography. Part II, “Psychoanalysis Reviewed,” focuses on selected figures in the history of psychoanalysis, including Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, and Erich Fromm, as well as key subjects: depression, perversion, cross-dressing, guilt, and the future