[Phillips’s] therapeutic thesis is that each of us carries a story of the life we should have lived, the life we missed out on, and, according to Phillips, the life we’ve already lived, to a degree, psychically. . . Phillips’s way to perform these sleights of compositional magic is via style . . . I’m drawn to this aphoristic disentanglement of idioms in the language as it lets loose the playfulness sentence-making allows us.”
—Thomas Larson, The Rumpus
“A wise, generous book. Phillips has a mild, expansive way of explaining the insights that psychoanalysis offers into our everyday drama, its glimpses of differently shaped problems behind the ones we thought we had.”
—Dennis Duncan, The Washington Post
“[Phillips is] like a flashlight in that his illuminating beam heightens my awareness of the dark . . . I drank [his] words like a tonic.”
—Dan Piepenbring, Harper’s Magazine
“Phillips has rendered the term ‘giving up’ spacious and flexible, having woven together psychology and literature to reveal suggestive points of contact . . . Phillips makes an ambitious case: that giving up is as important to our psychological well-being as hope and love are . . . The best form of giving up, it seems, may just be to take up a book.”
—Sarah Moorhouse, Los Angeles Review of Books
“One of the most arresting things about Adam Phillips’s work is how it resists easy summary, dissolving into a trace memory the moment you try to describe it. . . . Phillips doesn’t try to prevent us from thinking whatever it is that we want to think; what he does is repeatedly coax us to ask if that’s what we really believe, and how we can be sure.”
—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times (An Editors' Choice)
“Phillips continues to find inspiration in Freud—not only the provocative concepts, but the allowances for speculation in Freud’s language . . . The connectivity between his observations carries a certain charge, an impetus to be curious rather than strictly determined about and by our wants.”
—Ron Slate, On the Seawall
“If this collection marks the beginning of Phillips’ late style, we have a lot to look forward to.”
—Booklist
“A thought-provokingly cerebral meditation.”
—Kirkus Reviews
02/19/2024
“We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can’t,” observes psychoanalyst Phillips (On Wanting to Change) at the outset of this intermittently insightful analysis. Though he touches on the subject of suicide—the “ultimate giving up”—Phillips writes from the assumption “that life is by definition always worth living,” and characterizes giving up as “sacrificing something in the service of something deemed to be better.” The book’s eight chapters interrogate what this notion might mean for death, wanting, exclusion, intellectual nihilism, loss, and censorship (for instance, what are “censors”—whether external or mental—attempting to protect through exclusion?). Unfortunately, Phillips’s discussions are often weighed down by esoteric considerations of Freud and Lacan, as well as his own Freudian interpretations of literary masterpieces. He’s at his best when distilling such ideas as psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s concept of “narrow attention” versus “wide attention,” the former an example of the mind as “questing beast” focusing on “what serves its immediate interests” and ignoring the rest, the latter showing how, without the drive of want, “it became possible to look at the whole at once.” Many chapters evolved from previously published essays, which may account for the narrative’s jagged feel. It’s a scattershot exploration of an original and arresting idea. Agent: Amy Rennert, Amy Rennert Agency. (Mar.)
2024-01-18
A British psychoanalyst examines the “essential and far-reaching ambiguity of a simple idea.”
Phillips, author of Unforbidden Pleasures, Becoming Freud, and Attention Seeking, premises his latest book on the notion that giving something up—or giving up on something—is based on beliefs about change. “We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we can’t,” he writes. Underlying that assumption is that life itself is always worth living, an assumption many are questioning at a time when the planet is in dire social, political, and ecological crisis. Turning to writers and thinkers like Kafka for illumination, Phillips suggests the two-sided nature of giving up: “defeatedness and sacrifice, or failure and compromise, or weakness and realism.” At the same time, he also suggests what few discuss. In giving up, humans can take “sadistic pleasure” in such possibilities as suicide, what Camus would call the most “serious” of all philosophical problems. Yet most will choose to carry on, which leads Phillips to ask, “What is worth surviving for?” Darwin would suggest that survival itself is the endgame, while Freud would suggest that it is pleasure. Yet Phillips finds these “answers” to be as reductive as they are problematic. He offers a partial “answer” of his own by building on Freud’s ideas about loss, which is itself at the heart of all forms of giving up. Loss—being forced to reckon with it—is perhaps a catalyst needed to spur both transformation and inventiveness, which is perhaps the one great hope that remains for humankind. Some readers may find the author’s tendency to speak in high-culture abstractions not to their taste. However, those who enjoy heady engagement with ideas from the upper registers of literature, philosophy, and psychology will undoubtedly find this book exhilarating.
A thought-provokingly cerebral meditation.
