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Bottom of the pile
21
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
24/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Adam Phillips
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
March 26, 2024
Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up.
What The Reviewers Say
Phillips’s looping lines of inquiry strike some of his critics as troubling, exasperating or simply annoying.
This is a wise, generous book. Phillips has a mild, expansive way of explaining the insights that psychoanalysis offers into our everyday drama, its glimpses of differently shaped problems behind the ones we thought we had.
By the book’s final pages, Phillips has rendered the term "giving up" spacious and flexible, having woven together psychology and literature to reveal suggestive points of contact. Even so, it’s a lot of material to fit under one terminological umbrella, and it can be challenging to grasp how exactly Phillips wields the term in discrete essays—much less to make those individual definitions cohere.
If this collection marks the beginning of Phillips’ late style, we have a lot to look forward to..
