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Human individuality has a conflictual status in psychoanalysis. On one hand, successful treatment fosters the emergence of the
analysand's unique, personal idiom. On the other hand, when analysts subscribe too rigidly to preset, normative narratives of development and the nature of the self, an analysand's individuality can be unwittingly compromised as it is assimilated into someone else's a priori version of the good life.
Adam Phillips's Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored is a playful, provocative, and passionate defense of human uniqueness. Animated by a Freudian recognition of the centrality and unpredictability of unconsciousness and an Emersonian view of the unfinalizability of self, Phillips values skepticism rather than certainty, unfinalizable theories as opposed to finished systems of thought, stories about selves-in-process rather than The Truth about a Subject.
In a style that is literate, epigrammatic, jargon free, evocative, and audacious, his disparate essays challenge the idols analysts often worship (including science and psychoanalysis itself) and raise questions about and illuminate subjects often neglected by psychoanalysis: from the composure we seek (that can foster self-constriction and inauthenticity) to the worries that plague us (and that could teach us).
Phillips is interested not in fashioning a complex (and closed) theoretical edifice, but in entertaining and edifying the reader. The essays are united not by a single thematic focus, but by a concern not to stifle curiosity, doubts, and questions that might enlighten us. In his hands, the psychoanalytic essay becomes a provocation for self-enrichment, a tool to explore and foster human authenticity and freedom.
I find Phillips one of the most interesting and freshest voices in psychoanalysis today. He raises suggestive questions and displays an admirable openness, flexibility, and breadth. He pinpoints important tensions in psychoanalysis that deny human complexity and limit human opportun