“On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored” by Adam Phillips

Phillips, in this collection of essays, attempts to examine the “unexamined” life through modern psychoanalysis. It is Freud for the 21st century. He looks beneath the surface at commonplace occurrences within the human experience, from the frivolous to the significant. In “On Tickling” he posits that tickling is such an exclusive sensation because “the child who will be able to feed himself, the child who will masturbate, will never be able to tickle himself.” In “On Risk and Solitude” he discusses going to and over the edge to see what we truly desire, “we create risk when we endanger something we value, whenever we test the relationship between thrills and virtues. So to understand, or make conscious, what constitutes a risk for us- our own personal repertoire of risks- is an important clue about what it is that we do value.” Some essays delve into his actual clinical cases, while others meander around everyday themes. A few essays expound upon the previous work of Freud, Klein, and Winnicott, while most do not include any formal psychoanalytic babble at all. All the essays, however, have the clinical method lurking somewhere in the background. After all, for Phillips “psychoanalysis is a story- and a way of telling stories- that makes some people feel better… Psychoanalysis in this version cannot help people, because there is nothing wrong with anybody; it can only engage them in useful and interesting conversations.”