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“... may mean, there’s only one person doing the writing. Not the death of the author then, but as Adam Phillips shrewdly said in these pages (17 July 1997), we do see a writer who was ‘acutely aware of how the author got in the way of the writing’. Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and died there in 1935. He spent much of his childhood in ...”

“... Tom Phillips, who was born in 1937, is a painter, printmaker and collagist, and the creator of ‘A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel’, which was reviewed by Adam Smyth in the issue of 12 October 2012. The following conversation took place on 16 September 2011 at the South London Gallery, between Phillips (TP), Smyth (AS) and Gill Partington (GP ...”

“... rules apply, the unconscious mind goes into hiding. In his introduction to Wild Analysis, Adam Phillips remarks on the provisional, improvisatory quality of Freud’s theorising: ‘His "technique", after all, was something he had to make up, with help from other disciplines, as he went along.’ Like children uncertain of ourselves in a new and ...”

“... On a Saturday morning in November 1966, Tom Phillips picked a book at random from a pile of novels at a house-clearance sale in Peckham Rye. Phillips had never heard of W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document (1892), but he liked the title and the yellow cover and handed over threepence ...”

“... is too diverse for coherence, too multiple for definition. No single theory will suffice. If Adam Phillips is right when he observes that ‘we should speak not of boredom, but of the boredoms,’ then perhaps the most remarkable thing about the subject is that we regard it as one at ...”

“... the hoarder’s. ‘All psychoanalyses are about mess and meaning, and the links between them,’ Adam Phillips writes in ‘Clutter: A Case History’. ‘If our lives have a tendency to get cluttered, apparently by themselves but usually by ourselves, most accounts of psychoanalysis have an inclination to sort things out.’...”

“... a new life brings. Lilith is the exemplary cradle-snatcher in Judaic legends; she was spurned by Adam when she refused to lie down underneath him to make love and was supplanted by the fertile Eve. Barren and spiteful, Lilith preyed on children; amulets, posies, charms and lullabies warded off her malign spells. The coral branch often worn by the child Jesus ...”

“... psychoanalysis, I kept nothing but the works of Freud, Klein, Bion, Winnicott and Lacan, alongside Adam Phillips, John Forrester and some André Green and Laplanche. All the other history and commentary and penumbra went, along with books on psychical research, including the two fat volumes of Frederic Myers’s Human Personality and Its Survival of ...”

“... their own and their partner’s behalf and move on. ‘We may deplore humiliation, or claim to,’ Adam Phillips writes in his new book Equals, but we cannot help but enjoy what we cheerfully call making fun of people. We are always reassured when people can, as we say, laugh at themselves. There is a violence we do to ourselves and others that is both ...”

“... led to madness, sickness and death. Like infantile sexuality, which terrified readers of Freud (as Adam Phillips argued in these pages), not so much because it belied innocence but because it suggested the possibility of pure, purposeless, pleasure-seeking, masturbation represented a desire that was antithetical not just to this or that social vision but ...”

“... and spicy is the stuff little girls are made of. If kissing can be ‘aim-inhibited eating’, as Adam Phillips has suggested in his essay ‘Plotting for Kisses’, then Carroll’s tea parties and jam tarts, his jaws that bite, babies that turn into pigs and get their faces peppered, his old men devouring little oysters, can be seen as moves in his ...”

“... unconscious psyche, in all its Grand Guignol drama and profanity. Fantasies of annihilation, as Adam Phillips argues in Going Sane, are intrinsic to adolescent sexuality. Every child, as she matures and separates from her parents, unconsciously experiences this as an act of violence, a ‘slow murder . . . a protracted killing off’ of parental ...”

“... to conclude that the disposition to torture is the rule, not the exception. The title of Joshua Phillips’s book is a quote, not an assertion. Those who find themselves acting as torturers really do think, when they speak about their actions, that they underwent some radical change of personality. It would have been possible to write a book entirely given ...”

“... artefact, with editorial interventions both at the time and subsequently, when it is written down. Adam Phillips in Darwin’s Worms (1999) looks at the way Freud’s death is narrated in biographies by Ernest Jones and Peter Gay. There are plenty of differences, but both biographers need to see Freud as ‘the master of self-mastery’. Jones in ...”

“... different ways, once in an essay titled ‘Silences Noises Voices’ and again in an LRB review of Adam Phillips.* First it’s put this way:In philosophy I have to recognise the arrogance with which I arrogate the right to speak universally, for all other possessors of language; in psychoanalysis I have to recognise the disgrace that I do not so much as ...”