Balancing acts," writes Adam Phillips, "are entertaining because they are risky, but there are situations in which it is more dangerous to keep your balance than to lose it." In these exhilarating and casually brilliant essays, the philosopher and psychoanalyst examines literature, fairy tales, works of art, and case studies to reveal the paradoxes inherent in our appetites and fears. How do we know when enough is enough? Are there times when too much is just right? Why is Cinderella's biggest problem not the prince but other women? What can Richard III's furious sense of his own helplessness tell us of our own desires? On Balance shows Phillips's bravura gift for linking disparate ideas and the dreamers that dreamed them into something beautiful, revelatory, and essential.
On Getting Better is a thoughtful and compact book about self-improvement from Britain’s leading psychoanalyst, author of Missing Out and On Kindness. To talk about getting better—about wanting to change in ways that we might choose and prefer—is to talk about pursuing the life we want, in the full knowledge that our pictures of the life we want, of our version of a good life, come from what we have already experienced. (We write the sentences we write because of the sentences we have read.) How can we talk differently about how we might want to change, knowing that all change precipitates us into an uncertain future? In this companion book to On Wanting to Change, Adam Phillips explores how we might get better at talking about what it is to get better.
This book is a chronicle of the all-too-human terror that drives us into the arms of experts, and of how expertise, in the form of psychoanalysis, addresses our fears - in essence, turns our terror into meaning.
Much has been written of the forbidden pleasures. But what of the "unforbidden" pleasures? Unforbidden Pleasures is the singular new book from Adam Phillips, the author of Missing Out, Going Sane, and On Balance. Here, with his signature insight and erudition, Phillips takes Oscar Wilde as a springboard for a deep dive into the meanings and importance of the unforbidden, from the fall of our "first parents," Adam and Eve, to the work of the great psychoanalytic thinkers. Forbidden pleasures, he argues, are the ones we tend to think about, yet when you look into it, it is probable that we get as much pleasure, if not more, from unforbidden pleasures than from those that are taboo. And we may have underestimated just how restricted our restrictiveness, in thrall to the forbidden and its rules, may make us. An ambitious book that speaks to the precariousness of modern life, Unforbidden Pleasures explores the philosophical, psychological, and social dynamics that govern human desire and shape our everyday reality.
From acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, a meditation on what we must give up to feel more alive. To give up or not to give up? The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple. Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable. There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment—an attempt to make a different future. In On Giving Up, the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up and helps us to address the central question: What must we give up in order to feel more alive?
This is a book about the possibilities of flirtation, its risks and instructive amusements - about the spaces flirtation opens in the stories we tell ourselves, particularly within the framework of psychoanalysis.
From the leading psychoanalyst Adam Phillips comes Missing Out, a transformative book about the lives we wish we had and what they can teach us about who we are All of us lead two parallel lives: the one we are actively living, and the one we feel we should have had or might yet have. As hard as we try to exist in the moment, the unlived life is an inescapable presence, a shadow at our heels. And this itself can become the story of our lives: an elegy to unmet needs and sacrificed desires. We become haunted by the myth of our own potential, of what we have in ourselves to be or to do. And this can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short. But what happens if we remove the idea of failure from the equation? With his flair for graceful paradox, the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips suggests that if we accept frustration as a way of outlining what we really want, satisfaction suddenly becomes possible. To crave a life without frustration is to crave a life without the potential to identify and accomplish our desires. In this elegant, compassionate, and absorbing book, Phillips draws deeply on his own clinical experience as well as on the works of Shakespeare and Freud, of D. W. Winnicott and William James, to suggest that frustration, not getting it, and and getting away with it are all chapters in our unlived lives—and may be essential to the one fully lived.
As an essayist, Adam Phillips combines the best of two worlds: a mastery of psychotherapy as both practitioner and theorist, and a reputation as one of the best literary writers around. In this collection of essays, he brings these two gifts to bear upon each other, speculating on the relative merits of psychoanalysis and literature and on the connections between them. In his quirky, epigrammatic style, Phillips shows us how psychoanalysis and literature at their best share the goal of shedding light on human character, the most fascinating of disorders. Promises, Promises reveals Phillips as a virtuoso performer able to reach far beyond the borders of psychoanalytic discourse, into art, novels, poetry, and history. This collection gives us insights into Martin Amis's Night Train, Nijinsky's diary, Tom Stoppard and A. E. Housman, Amy Clampitt, the effect of the Blitz on Londoners, and a case history of clutter. It confirms Phillips as a writer whose work, in the words of the Guardian, "hovers in a strange and haunting borderland between rigour and delight.
Psychotherapist Adam Phillips focuses on a variety of subjects rarely investigated by psychoanalysis--such things as kissing, worrying, risk, and solitude. Phillips rejects the common notion that only the examined life is worth living, asserting that one's psychic health depends on establishing a realm of life that successfully resists interpretation.
A provocative and elegant defense of the art of kindness in a selfish age, "On Kindness" argues that a life lived in instinctive, sympathetic identification with others is the one societies should allow themselves to live.
If you are disturbed by the idea that to grow up is to learn to live with disillusionment, if you are fascinated by the perplexity of child-rearing, or if you fear you were more creative as a child, The Beast in the Nursery offers an illuminating and possibly life-changing experience. In four interrelated essays, Adam Phillips arrives at startling new insights into issues that preoccupied Freud, showing in the process that far from having lost its relevance, psychoanalysis is still one of our most incisive tools for the exploration of the human psyche and its possibilities. Phillips transforms the genre of the essay into an instrument for intellectual investigation of the most absorbing kind.
Psychoanalysis works by attending to the patient's side effects, "what falls out of his pockets once he starts speaking." Undergoing psychoanalytic therapy is always a leap into the dark—like dedicating our hearts and intellect to a powerful work of literature, it's impossible to know beforehand its ultimate effect and consequences. One must remain open to where the "side effects" will lead. Erudite, eloquent, and enthrallingly observant, Adam Phillips is one of the world's most respected psychoanalysts and a boldly original writer and thinker—and the ideal guide to exploring the provocative connections between psychoanalytic treatment and enduring, transformative literature. His fascinating and thoughtful Side Effects offers a valuable intellectual blueprint for the construction of a life beholden to no ideology other than the fulfillment of personal promise.
From the UK's foremost literary psychoanalyst, a dazzling new book on the universal urge to change our lives. We live in a world in which we are invited to change - to become our best selves, through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy. We change all the time - growing older and older - and how we think about change changes over time too. We want to think of our lives as progress myths - as narratives of positive personal growth - at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks. So there are the stories we tell about change, and there are the changes we actually make - and they don't always go, or come, together . . . This sparkling book is about that fact.
Adam Phillips has been called "the psychotherapist of the floating world" and "the closest thing we have to a philosopher of happiness." His style is epigrammatic; his intelligence, electric. His new book, Darwin's Worms, uses the biographical details of Darwin's and Freud's lives to examine endings-suffering, mortality, extinction, and death. Both Freud and Darwin were interested in how destruction conserves life. They took their inspiration from fossils or from half-remembered dreams. Each told a story that has altered our perception of our lives. For Darwin, Phillips explains, "the story to tell was how species can drift towards extinction; for Freud, the story was how the individual tended to, and tended towards his own death." In each case, it is a death story that uniquely illuminates the life story.
Adam Phillips has been called the 'psychotherapist of the floating world' and 'the closest thing we have to a philosopher of happiness'. In this extraordinary book he takes a look, via Freud and Darwin, at endings - at mortality, extinction and death. Darwin and Freud took God out of the big picture, leaving nothing between mankind and nature. Their ideas were met with righteous indignation. But today, whether or not we read Darwin and Freud, we speak a version of their languages. Most of us think of childhood and sexuality as sources of suffering, and we picture ourselves as animals struggling competitively for survival. Yet, as Adam Phillips argues, we are not merely trapped in a world of continuous loss. Taking as his examples Darwin's life-long fascination in lowly earthworms, and Freud's life-long antipathy to grubbing biographers, he unexpectedly finds much to celebrate. For both of these writers are interested, above all, in how destruction conserves life. They take their inspiration from fossils or from half-remembered dreams, and show how life is about what can be done with these humble remnants from the past. Darwin and Freud render ageing, accident and death integral, not alien, to our sense of ourselves. They teach us the art of transience.
Becoming Freud is the story of the young Freud—Freud up until the age of fifty—that incorporates all of Freud’s many misgivings about the art of biography. Freud invented a psychological treatment that involved the telling and revising of life stories, but he was himself skeptical of the writing of such stories. In this biography, Adam Phillips, whom the New Yorker calls “Britain’s foremost psychoanalytical writer,” emphasizes the largely and inevitably undocumented story of Freud’s earliest years as the oldest—and favored—son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and suggests that the psychoanalysis Freud invented was, among many other things, a psychology of the immigrant—increasingly, of course, everybody’s status in the modern world. Psychoanalysis was also Freud’s way of coming to terms with the fate of the Jews in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So as well as incorporating the writings of Freud and his contemporaries, Becoming Freud also uses the work of historians of the Jews in Europe in this significant period in their lives, a period of unprecedented political freedom and mounting persecution. Phillips concludes by speculating what psychoanalysis might have become if Freud had died in 1906, before the emergence of a psychoanalytic movement over which he had to preside.
The authors give you all you need to know to create the most commonly requested and popular Flash visual effects and movies on the web with fast and fun examples.
Can rats learn to surf? How fat was the fattest cat? How many Lego bricks would it take to reach the Moon? Find out the answers to these questions and many, many more in this fascinating fact book. With clear, engaging text and vibrant illustrations, kids can discover the world's fastest, biggest, oldest, and weirdest in an accessible and engaging way. Perfect for children aged 7+. ABOUT THE SERIES: Big Ideas! is a dynamic, educational "fun fact" series for children aged seven and up, illustrated throughout with humorous cartoons. Packed with surprising facts, stats, and records that kids will just love to share, it revels in all things weird, unexpected, mind-blowing, funny, and gross!
This is a collection of essays that sets out to make and break the links between psychoanalysis and literature. It gives insights into anorexia and cloning, the work of Tom Stoppard and A.E. Housman, the effect of the Blitz on Londoners, Nijinsky's diary and Martin Amis' Night Train.
Twenty years in Human Resources have pushed Chuck Restic into an existential crisis. Only when he sets out to find a missing employee from his L.A. firm does he feel alive again. Applying his HR skills and wit to his detective work, Chuck unravels a web of crooked real estate deals and three murders, staving off a fourth: his own.
Want to create studio-quality work and get noticed? Just coming off Flash and looking for a Toon Boom intro? Are you a traditional pencil-and-paper animator? From scene setup to the final render, learn how to navigate the Toon Boom interface to create animation that can be published on a variety of platforms and formats. Animate to Harmony guides you through Toon Boom’s Animate, Animate Pro and Harmony programs, teaching you how to create high-quality 2D animation of all complexities. The main text focuses onfeatures that are common across all three programs while "Advanced Techniques" boxes throughout the book elaborate on Pro and Harmony features, appealing to all levels of experience with any of the three main Toon Boom products.
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