The Beast In the
Nursery is not, despite its gently lurid title, a
horror story. Or perhaps it is. The beast Adam
Phillips refers to is not a dastardly child-snatcher
but in fact the child himself, an imperious
creature who will not be ignored. The real
child-snatchers in this story are Sigmund Freud
and his followers. The central story of
psychoanalysis is the story of the beastly child --
and the story of adults putting away childish
things, rejecting infantile fantasies of
omnipotence, accepting their inevitable defeat in
the Oedipal struggle. In many ways, Phillips notes
in his new collection of essays, contemporary
psychoanalysis is a profession devoted to
disenchantment.
Phillips (author of Kissing, Tickling, and Being
Bored and Monogamy) understands all too
well the dangers of narcissistic fantasy. But at the
same time he wonders if, in curing us from our
overactive imaginations, contemporary
psychoanalysts aren't also making life a little
grayer. And so Phillips gently nudges us toward a
more expansive view of human possibility --
rejecting the "kitsch seriousness" of many of his
colleagues and offering "two cheers for what
psychoanalysts call 'omnipotence.'"
The child, as Freud himself observed, is a
"virtuoso of desire." Like Freud, Phillips seeks a
sort of inspiration in what Freud called the
"sexual theories of children," those vaguely daft
hypotheses children conjure up to explain the
mysterious but compelling world of adult
sexuality. Unlike, say, most parents, Freud didn't
simply dismiss such theories as nonsense -- kids
say the darndest things! "Although they go astray
in a grotesque fashion," he wrote of children's
sexual "theories," "each one of them contains a
fragment of real truth." Indeed, Freud went on to
liken the child's overheated imaginings to the
"strokes of genius" of adults attempting to
uncover the secrets of a universe.
From Freud's observation, Phillips builds his
book. Children may be narcissistic, impossible
and vaguely deranged, but they have more life
than the rest of us. In putting away childish
things, Phillips suggests, we need to be careful
not to toss away what is most valuable in life, the
mad passions that animate us and make life worth
living in the first place.
As always, Phillips prefers not to be too direct. In
a chapter on hinting, Phillips suggests that vague
and indirect hints are more valuable than outright
orders, for hints allow us more room for
imagination and improvisation. In another
chapter, he writes about our childhood acquisition
of language -- and what we lose in the process.
Like Freud in his most optimistic moments,
Phillips urges us "to be suspicious of clarity and
to value what catches our attention, to find the
plausible always slightly absurd, and to be in awe
of the passions." Phillips' own writings are prime
examples of what we can achieve if we put aside,
at least for a moment, the overly sensible -- and
set out to discover what really moves us. -- Salon
[A] lively and intelligent book.
—The New York Times Book Review
Exactly what child psychotherapist Phillips is trying to say here is rather a puzzle. With Freud as his mentor, he seems to be exploring the ramifications of repressed sexuality, adaptation to civilized norms, and subsequent loss of delight and interest in life. He states that "as we grow up, we become the sophisticated antagonists of our own pleasure." To counteract this diminution of pleasure, there needs to be "a continual transfiguring of the facts of life by the fantasies of life." Phillips focuses mainly on the loss of appetites and little on the process of restoring them. This rehashing of Freud's ideas is done with a great deal of circumlocution, rhetorical questions, parenthetical asides, and word manipulation. The result is a rather plodding presentation that does little to arouse our pleasure or curiosity.Ilse Heidmann, San Marcos, Tex.
Cerebral and beautiful...Mr. Phillips' authority once again rings loud and true. [He is] a prophet of originality.
The restoration of a vigorous, wide-ranging interest in life is an admirable goal, and Phillips addresses himself to the task with wit, humane intelligence and . . . sensitivity." —The New York Times Book Review
"Elegantly contentious. . . . There is no one writing better than [Phillips] about desire in all of its complexity, with all of its dark secrets and dark possbility, its necessity and compulsion and satiability. The Beast in the Nursery is a difficult, cerebral and beautiful book." —New York Observer
"[Phillips is] a writer with a unique voice, a gadfly permissive to his own curiosity. His stylistic feints startle us into sympathy with the unexpected." —The Washington Post
"[The] Oliver Sacks of Psychoanalysis. . . . Adam Phillips writes with far-sighted equanimity. " —The Boston Globe
