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Words picture the world for us, words remember the world for us, words expand our vision at the same time that they, of necessity, confine it. Adam Phillips uses words lyrically, evocatively, and persuasively, but his vision, in this work, is confusing. The first section of this short text gives a lively rewording of Freud's theories of childhood sexuality/sensuality, presented as the definitive bedrock for understanding us humans. Arguing that childhood curiosity and interest in the world, particularly the world of our bodies, is a refindable experience through psychoanalysis, Phillips summons Blake, Keats, and Henry James, among others, to evoke poetically the goal and need for curiosity in our lives. Yet the reader is never sure whether Freudian psychoanalysis is being praised or condemned, whether it has given birth to an invigorating understanding of human appetites by way of an appreciation of our primal sexuality or whether it is a dogmatic exercise awaiting Phillips's own reading, in order to have any contemporary cogency.
When Phillips writes of “the various hobbyhorses of contemporary psychoanalysis—myths of development, the perverse romance of ‘emotional nurture,’ the fetishization of language, the obsession with ‘relationship’—all of them in their different ways drift toward a disavowal of the sensuous pleasures of childhood” (p. 132),