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Adam Phillips is a leading psychoanalyst and author. Phillips was educated at Clifton College and studied English Literature at Oxford University. He trained to be a psychoanalyst at the Institute of Child Psychology. Across the course of his professional career, he has worked at Guys Hospital, with a school for 'maladjusted children', at Camberwell Child Guidance Clinic and at Charing Cross Hospital in the Department of Child Psychiatry. He now works in private practice. Phillips is the author of many works, including Terrors and Experts (1997), In Writing: Essays on Literature (2016), Attention Seeking (2019) and his most recent book, The Cure for Psychoanalysis (2021). He also served as the General Editor of the New Penguin Classics Translations of the works of Sigmund Freud. The conversation begins by exploring the way mental health has become a topic of public interest as a result of the COVID‐19 pandemic. The opportunities and challenges in Phillips's experience working with schools and for young people's mental health services during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s are then discussed. Questions about the nature of psychoanalysis are introduced, and the discussion turns towards the relationship between philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis. There is a brief discussion of connections between Phillips's work and the philosophy of Stanley Cavell. Phillips's essays on schools and education are explored in connection with ideas of omniscience, sadomasochism and 'experiments in living'. The conversation ends with a glimpse of school as a place to cultivate one's interest and one's sociability with others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of Victorian nonsense poet Edward Lear in the creation of a tradition of British psychoanalysis by pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott. Topics cited include similarities between psychoanalysis and Lear's nonsense poetry, Winnicott's use of a Freudian account of free association in his nonsense and the characteristics of nonsense in his version of psychoanalysis.

The phrase “wild analysis” is evaluated with a view to understanding something about the conditions and constraints on psychoanalytic theory and practice. Muriel Dimen’s paper is also read as a prologue for new, less restrictive stories about the nature of psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents the author's insights on the lecture on psychoanalysis. He states that the needs of the audience must be considered in organising conferences. He mentions that the idea on whether psychoanalysis attains progress should not create worries. He adds that psychotherapies only need good sentences and do not need more research, better diagnostics, or clinical vignettes.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including adolescents, self-images of masculinity and femininity and psychoanalytic language.

This paper considers the analyst's participation or otherwise in being idealized by his patients. The virtues and vices of disillusionment are reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the psychoanalytic word for getting away with it. He discusses getting away with it as a wishful fantasy. He notes that all psychoanalytic theorizing now considers for whom they will be pertinent or useful. He cites the significance of psychoanalysis in which the possibilities and what they might have led to are considered. The author describes getting away with it as a way of discussing unexpectable experience.

This article examines the psychoanalytic theory of the object of desire. The desire that apparently leads a person toward other people can lead that person away from them. What a person calls desire can be evoked by details, by signs, by gestures. That person fall for a smile, or a tone of voice, or a way of walking, or a lifestyle, but not exactly for what he has learned to call a whole person. The evocation, the stirring of desire, releases the person rather more into his own deliriums of fear and longing than into realistic apprehension of the supposed object of desire.

Psychoanalysis has always been about time and what it is, about time that matters. There is more or less scientific time that development takes and more or less conjectural timelessness of the unconscious. There is the insistence of the repetition compulsion that is nominally beyond the pleasure principle and there is the recurring question of when the pleasure will start and when the pain will stop. It is subjection to time that psychoanalysis prefers to describe, the time that is given tends to be privileged over the time one makes. So when psychoanalysts talk about the length of treatment or indeed the timing of interpretations, they are caught between the determinism that they must abide by and choices they think they can make. To believe in good and bad timing is either to depend on luck, which is the kind of dependence that dare not speak its name or it is to assume a knowledge of how time works, which tends to be the talent of a god. To write about timing in psychoanalysis is to write about omniscience.

Focuses on how psychoanalysis shows fear as a constructed reaction. Sufi story about a man throwing corn; Linking of fear with dependence in the writings of Sigmund Freud; Fear as a form of knowledge and intelligence.

Expounds on the preconditions for recognizing an obstacle. Understanding of fantasies of continuity; Use of obstacle to conceal an unconscious desire; Interpretation of dreams; Removal of obstacles to make the scene in the dream possible.

The article traces the development of D.W. Winnicott's work and his evolving description of the mother-infant relationship. His work was devoted to the recognition and description of the good mother, and the use of the mother-infant relationship as the model of psychoanalytic treatment. He has a fundamental belief in the decisive importance of the earliest stages of development. His use of the concept of Self, his writing style, and his relationship with the psychoanalytic tradition are also discussed.