Attention Seeking

by Adam Phillips

Overview

Attention Seeking is a short, fascinating introduction to the concept of attention from Britain’s leading psychoanalyst, author of Missing Out and On Kindness.

Everything depends on what, if anything, we find interesting: on what we are encouraged and educated to find interesting, and what we find ourselves being interested in despite ourselves. There is our official curiosity and our unofficial curiosity (and psychoanalysis is a story about the relationship between the two).

Based on three connected lectures by Adam Phillips, this compact book is a lucid and memorable introduction to the concept of our attention, spanning from interest to obsession, private desire to corporate commodity. What is attention, and why do we seek it? How does our culture moralize attention as a force in need of control? Phillips is one of our brightest and most unusual thinkers, uniquely capable of bringing our deepest impulses and instincts to light.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374722852
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/04/2022
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	504 KB

About the Author

Adam Phillips, formerly a principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practicing psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English Department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including Missing Out, In Writing, and Unforbidden Pleasures. A frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, he is the general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Adam Phillips is one of the foremost psychoanalysts practicing in the world today, and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of many books, including On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored; and On Balance. He is also coauthor, with the historian Barbara Taylor, of On Kindness.

Table of Contents

1 Attention-Seeking 1

2 Shame and Attention 33

3 Vacancies of Attention 67

Appendix: Greenblatt's Distraction 101

Acknowledgements 119