Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

unconscious that combine the spiritual and the sexual aspects of aliveness of being in the
presence of another that shares such an encounter (Sheldrake 2002; Ind 2003).
Adam Phillips (AP)
Adam Phillips is a child and adult psychotherapist with an enduring interest in Freud and
psychoanalysis. His personal analysts were Masud Kahn and Christopher Bollas, both
vitally engaged in the interface between psychoanalysis and literature. Phillips has
published and edited over twenty books, many as collections of essays. ‘Phillips has
virtually invented the essay as a suitable form for penetrating psychological enquiry’ (Frank
Kermode, undated) where he returns to the themes of psychoanalysis again and again. He
writes regularly for the London Review of Books, the Observer and the New York Times,
and is General Editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations. 376
Meeting Adam Phillips
AP is a well know literary figure whose provocative and playful writings on psychoanalysis
belie an underplayed but significant scholarship and compassionate observation on being
human. AP was due to give a lecture to the West Midlands Institute of Psychotherapy and I
wrote introducing my research and asking for an interview. His fascinating lecture, on the
origins of fundamentalism in the human psyche, was delivered in a sound-deadening wood-
panelled lecture hall with inadequate amplification making it enormously difficult to hear all
he said. This raised paradoxical feelings as AP communicated that words are clearly very
376 Instead of translation by a single editor, as in Strachey’s Standard Edition, each book is translated by
individual authors, none of whom are psychotherapists or psychoanalysts. With no indexes, no footnotes and
no attempt to standardize the translation from one volume to the next this allows each to become a literary text
that gives fresh insights into Freud. Kirsner applauds this development in his article ‘Fresh Freud. No longer
lost in translation’ (Kirsner 2007).
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