Books by Adam Phillips
“Adam Phillips is our finest writer about (and with) psychoanalysis. His Freud biography is scintillating, in part because it’s an anti-biography…Adam Phillips takes on Freud’s suspicions of the biographical project and yet writes this wonderful biography of the early Freud. He gives us a two-page summary of Freud’s entire life—that’s it, those are the facts…He ruminates on Freud’s Jewishness, the ways in which migration at the early age of four from a small town in Moravia to Vienna played into Freud’s sense of the world, his ability to penetrate and conjugate marginality…Adam Phillips’s own position is that the most interesting part of psychoanalysis lies with younger Freud, that period of dreams and adventure and a kind of radicalism which doesn’t allow itself to be institutionalized.” Read more...
The best books on Sigmund Freud
Lisa Appignanesi, Novelist
Interviews where books by Adam Phillips were recommended
The best books on Sigmund Freud, recommended by Lisa Appignanesi
Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Moravia in the Austro-Hungarian empire, Sigmund Freud spent most of his life in Vienna, until fleeing to London just before his death in 1939. Using his classical education to illustrate his points, he introduced the idea that we have an ‘unconscious’ that plays an important role in our actions. For his sessions when patients talked freely to him about their thoughts in a one-on-one setting, he coined the term ‘psychoanalysis.’ Freud expert Lisa Appignanesi talks us through books that shed light on his life as well as his work.
