ECEC presents – Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips
“Freud’s Impossible life, an introduction”

May 12, 2012
10am-12pm

Brower Center
2150 Allston Way
Berkeley, CA

Freud’s life is of great interest partly because, as the inventor of psychoanalysis he was preoccupied with the way people tell the stories of their lives.  In a version of the first chapter of a new biography of Freud that he is the process of writing, Phillips will talk both about Freud’s remarkable life, and about what Freud had to say about the larger art of biography.

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and writer, in private practice in London. Formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, he is a Visiting Professor in the English Department at York University.  The author of numerous books and General Editor of the new Penguin Classics translations of Freud, Phillips has been described as one of the finest prose stylists in the language. HIs thought-provoking and often unsettling books include the Beast in the Nursery, On Flirtation, Monogamy, and Intimacies. A gifted essayist who is able to discuss complex psychoanalytic ideas in a lively and jargon-free manner, he is known for such pithy aphorisms as: “Psychoanalysis is what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.” and “From a psychoanalytic point of view love is always the problem, and only apparently the solution. And whatever else it is, it is always a boundary violation.”

Register at Acteva.