Unforbidden Pleasures
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- 9,49 €
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- 9,49 €
Descrição da editora
Unforbidden Pleasures is the dazzling new book from Adam Phillips, author of Missing Out and Going Sane
Adam Phillips takes Oscar Wilde as a springboard for a deep dive into the meanings and importance of the Unforbidden, from the fall of our 'first parents' Adam and Eve to the work of the great twentieth-century psychoanalytic thinkers.
Unforbidden pleasures, he argues, are always the ones we tend not to think about, yet when you look into it, it is probable that we get as much pleasure, if not more, from them. And we may have underestimated just how restricted our restrictiveness, in thrall to the forbidden and its rules, may make us.
Adam Phillips' latest ambitious project explores the philosophical, psychological and social complexities that govern human desire and shape our reality.
Praise for Adam Phillips:
'Britain's foremost psychoanalytic writer' The New Yorker
'Phillips is one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson for our time' - John Banville
'Every mind-blowing book from Adam Phillips suspends all the certainties we are most attached to and somehow makes this feel exhilarating' - Deborah Levy
'Phillips radiates infectious charm. The brew of gaiety, compassion, exuberance and idealism is heady and disarming' - Sunday Times
'The best psychotherapist in Britain and one of our greatest contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers' New Statesman
'Brilliantly amusing and often profoundly unsettling... [he is] the Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis' The Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
