On flirtation
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
On flirtation
Harvard University Press, 1994
- : pbk
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Note
Bibliography: p. 218-220
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
-
ISBN 9780674634374
Description
People tend to flirt only with serious things - madness, disaster, other people's affections. So is flirtation dangerous, exploiting the ambiguity of promises to sabotage our cherished notions of commitment? Or is it, as Adam Phillips suggests, a productive pleasure, keeping things in play, letting us get to know them in different ways, allowing us the fascination of what is unconvincing? This is a book about the possibilities of flirtation, its risks and instructive amusements - about the spaces flirtation opens in the stories we tell ourselves, particularly within the framework of psychoanalysis.
- Volume
-
: pbk ISBN 9780674634404
Description
People tend to flirt only with serious things--madness, disaster, other people's affections. So is flirtation dangerous, exploiting the ambiguity of promises to sabotage our cherished notions of commitment? Or is it, as Adam Phillips suggests, a productive pleasure, keeping things in play, letting us get to know them in different ways, allowing us the fascination of what is unconvincing? This is a book about the possibilities of flirtation, its risks and instructive amusements--about the spaces flirtation opens in the stories we tell ourselves, particularly within the framework of psychoanalysis.
Phillips looks at life as a tale to be told but rejects the idea of a master plot. Instead, he says, we should be open to the contingent, and flirtation shows us the way. His book observes children flirting with their parents, our various selves flirting with one another, and literature flirting with psychoanalysis. As Phillips explores the links between literature and psychoanalysis--ranging from Philip Roth to Isaac Rosenberg, Karl Kraus to John Clare--psychoanalysis emerges as a multi-authored autobiography. Its subjects are love, loss, and memory; its authors are the analyst and the analysand, as well as the several selves brought to life in the process. A passionate and delightfully playful defense of the virtues of being uncommitted, On Flirtation sets before us the virtue of a yet deeper commitment to the openendedness of our life stories.
Table of Contents
Preface Acknowledgements On Flirtation: An Introduction I. The Uses of the Past 1. Contingency for Beginners 2. Freud and the Uses of Forgetting 3. On Love 4. On Success 5. Besides Good and Evil 6. The Telling of Selves II. Psychoanalysis Reviewed 7. Depression 8. Anna Freud 9. Perversion 10. Freud and Jones 11. Cross-Dressing 12. Erich Fromm 13. Guilt 14. Freud's Circle 15. Futures III. Writing Outside 16. Philip Roth's Patrimony 17. Isaac Rosenberg's English 18. Karl Kraus's Complaint 19. John Clare's Exposure Bibliography Index
by "Nielsen BookData"