Unforbidden Pleasures

by Adam Phillips

Overview

AN AMBITIOUS BOOK THAT EXPLORES THE PHILOSOPHICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, AND SOCIAL DYNAMICS THAT GOVERN HUMAN DESIRE AND SHAPE OUR EVERYDAY REALITY

A great deal has been written, by psychoanalysts and many others, about the pleasures that are forbidden to us. But what of the pleasures that are unforbidden and freely available to all?

Using Oscar Wilde as a springboard, Phillips takes a deep dive into the function of taboo in society, beginning with the fall of our “first parents,” Adam and Eve, and progressing through the work of the great psychoanalytic thinkers. Forbidden pleasures, he argues, are the ones we tend to think about, yet when we look into it, we may get as much gratification, if not more, from unforbidden pleasures—those things that are easy to attain and socially sanctioned. And we may have underestimated just how restricted our restiveness, in thrall to the forbidden and its rules, makes us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250131874
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	05/09/2017
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	677,286
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

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

CONTENTS


1. Laying Down the Law 1
2. Tricks of Obedience 48
3. Against Self- Criticism 84
4. Unforbidden Pleasures 122
5. Life Itself 163

Coda 194

Acknowledgements 197

Editorial Reviews

"Britain's foremost psychoanalytic writer."—The New Yorker

"The most interestingly subversive meditation on modern life I have read for many years. . . . A book that can be read again and again."—New Statesman (Books of the Year: The Essential NS Reading List)

"Reading Adam Phillips on the ways in which we think, act, and behave is among the most . . . enlivening things I can think of."—Interview magazine

"A dense, challenging, provocative meditation on morality and identity."—Kirkus Reviews

"Phillips is . . . a bit like an Oliver Sacks of psychoanalysis, both affable and unalarmed."—The Boston Sunday Globe

"Phillips gives an illuminating account."—The Times Literary Supplement

"[Phillips] writes playfully and suggestively on a topic that tends to get written about in the most unliterary of languages. This attractive quality in his work—its inviting (and mildly paradoxical) combination of the provocative and the ambivalent—is evident from the very beginning of his new collection, Unforbidden Pleasures."—New York Times Book Review

"This slim volume is rich in psychological, philosophical, and literary insight."—Publishers Weekly

"Curiously addictive."—The Millions

"It is a real pleasure to glide through philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis with Adam Phillips. Through his fine essays, one finds oneself paying attention to things that repay reflection without demanding allegiance to a new set of principles."—The Washington Post

From the Publisher

02/29/2016
Phillips (On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored), a British psychoanalyst, explores the tension between ”forbidden” and “unforbidden” pleasures in this dense, erudite book. Going back to the story of Genesis and to Milton’s retelling of it in Paradise Lost, he argues that modern Western culture remains constrained by the association between the pleasurable and the taboo. In reality, Phillips asserts, people often draw more pleasure from the ordinary things in life—a morning cup of coffee, one another’s company, kindness—than from forbidden acts. He goes on to name more unforbidden pleasures, including self-criticism and obedience, noting about the latter that “whom we obey and how we obey—and what we are doing when we obey—will be the defining factors in our lives.” Philips suggests that people can become less judgmental about permissible types of pleasure by changing their moral vocabulary. In this, he draws inspiration from the writings of Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, each of whom, he shows, recommended the replacement of certain words with others—“beauty” rather than “goodness,” “delight” rather than “duty”—in order to reshape people’s underlying ideas. Digressive and often paradoxical, this slim volume is rich in psychological, philosophical, and literary insight. Agent: Amy Rennert, Amy Rennert Agency. (May)

Publishers Weekly

03/15/2016
Traditionally, "forbidden fruit" has been viewed as a harmful but supreme lure for humanity. Psychoanalyst and visiting professor Phillips (English, Univ. of York, UK; Going Sane) examines the effects of this outlook on psychology and the social order. Beginning with Oscar Wilde but dense with other classic references, the author discusses the concepts of forbidden and unforbidden pleasures. The former can be understood as a reflection of the Ten Commandments and includes transgressions against other moral principles. Phillips notes how psychoanalysis itself focuses on the forbidden. Less-intuitive notions of pleasures such as obedience and self-criticism are then discussed. Drawing on British psychoanalytic work, he details life-enhancing forms of unforbidden pleasure to include affection, friendship, and imagination, which are considered as necessary antidotes to the tyranny of forbidden pleasure on social life. The book concludes with a discussion of the meaning of life and its enjoyment. The author intimates that modern Western society would benefit from more emphasis on unforbidden pleasure in morality and social organization but provides no easy pathway to such a change. VERDICT An abstract but bold social critique and meditation that may require a humanistic background to appreciate fully.—Antoinette Brinkman, formerly with Southwest Indiana Mental Health Ctr. Lib., Evansville

Library Journal

2016-02-18
What would society look like if it did not promote the idea "that we are primarily a danger to ourselves and others"? In his latest philosophical exploration of mind, selfhood, and desire, prolific British psychoanalyst Phillips (Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, 2014, etc.) asks how the idea of forbidden pleasures shapes thought and behavior. "This book," he writes, "is about whether the unforbidden pleasures have something more to tell us, or at least something else to tell us, about pleasure than the forbidden ones." The "tyranny of the forbidden," he maintains, "is not that it forbids, but that it tells us what we want—to do the forbidden thing." What is forbidden, then, "narrows our minds, narrows our picture of ourselves"—in short, it circumscribes our freedom to know ourselves. Phillips draws on wide-ranging sources from literature (Shakespeare, Milton, Wilde), philosophy (Nietzsche, Jonathan Lear, Stuart Hampshire), and psychology (Freud, of course, and also Jacques Lacan, D.W. Winnicott, and neuropsychologist Brenda Milner) in his discussions of obedience, self-criticism, sexual taboos, and the concept of the superego. "The Freudian superego," writes Phillips, "is a boring and vicious soliloquist with an audience of one," a "made-up voice" distinct from the religious and cultural legacy of conscience. The patient undergoing analysis "discovers he is the casualty of forgotten obediences," not all of which he may want to discard. Psychoanalysis encourages a conversation about the forbidden, allowing the patient a chance to make choices "about which rules he believes are worth following, and which rules he has merely been following, consciously or unconsciously, for fear of punishment." Finding pleasure in the unforbidden, Phillips suggests, means "finding new kinds of heroes and heroines (or dispensing with them)" and redefining what we mean by satisfaction. A dense, challenging, provocative meditation on morality and identity.

Kirkus Reviews