Her şey, neyi ilgi çekici bulduğumuza bağlıdır (tabii eğer ilgi çekici bulduğumuz bir şey varsa) neyi ilgi çekici bulmak üzere eğitildiğimize ve teşvik edildiğimize, ayrıca kendimize rağmen kendimizi neyle ilgilenir halde bulduğumuza bağlıdır. İki anlamda da -yalnızca çocukken değil, hayatlarımız boyunca- kısmen dikkat çekme arayışındayız, bunun nedeni de ilgiyi ne için istediğimizin ve neye ilgi göstermek istediğimizin her zaman net olmamasıdır: Kendimizde ve kendimiz dışında neyin ilgiye muhtaç olduğu ve aradığımız ilgiyi bulduğumuzda bunun ne gibi sonuçlar doğurmasını umduğumuz konusu belirsizlikler içerir. Adam Phillips ilgi çekici bulduğumuz şeylerin, dikkat çekme arayışımızın kimliğimizi ve yaşamlarımızı nasıl şekillendirdiğini anlatıyor. İlginin, utanç duygusuyla, benlikle ve dikkat dağınıklığıyla arasındaki bağlantılara ışık tutuyor. Yönlendirdiğimiz veya yönlendirmediğimiz ilgimizin kim olduğumuza veya kim olmadığımıza dair neler söylediğini gözler önüne seriyor. )
Adam Phillips is a British psychotherapist and essayist.
Since 2003 he has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.
Phillips was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954, the child of second-generation Polish Jews. He grew up as part of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins and describes his parents as "very consciously Jewish but not believing". As a child, his first interest was the study of tropical birds and it was not until adolescence that he developed an interest in literature. He went on to study English at St John's College, Oxford, graduating with a third class degree. His defining influences are literary – he was inspired to become a psychoanalyst after reading Carl Jung's autobiography and he has always believed psychoanalysis to be closer to poetry than medicine.
Phillips is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. He has been described by The Times as "the Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis" for his "brilliantly amusing and often profoundly unsettling" work; and by John Banville as "one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time."
Quite enjoy reading psychology. This year’s most interesting goes to Adam Phillips’ Attention Seeking. I read this on a long international flight, in August and just read it again. I only wish that it was available in kindle format. Highly recommend it if you enjoy reading psychology.
I first learned about the book from this cool discussion with Devorah Baum, who I really like as well. Too bad Baum doesn't have a twitter account. Would have loved to follow her. Philips' “I think people shouldn’t apologize and they shouldn’t forgive, but that’s just me” at 59:18 mark, is quite thought provoking.
Attention Seeking is marketed as a reflection on attention, but it is actually three psychoanalytic lectures on the desire to be seen. Lots of Freud, shame and elegant aphorisms, little substance for those seeking to understand the mechanisms of attention or something truly new. It reads like an 18th-century essay: well-written sentences, but a void that runs out in a few pages.
This is a very intellectual and sophisticated series of essays, written in beautiful prose. I am no stranger to various schools of psychoanalytic thinking. Nor do I shy away from high-brow literary criticism. However, to this very day, I dare say I have not a slightest clue as to what this book was about, even though I managed to fight through the book, cover to cover, which is a testament to Phillips' superior intellect. For all I know, it could have been written in Chinese.
This is very short, just three three-part essays, plus an epilogue by way of a book review of Stephen Greenblatt. It's about Freud's Drive Theory, itself subject to many revisions and repudiations since it first appeared full -blown in Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality, then in revisions by (most importantly) Reich. Throughout the 19th C psychologists, physicians and philosophers tried to understand will -- what motive was, how observation occurred, and there were theories -- by everyone from Kant, to Schopenhauer, to biologists, William James, etc. Melville's Pierre: Or, the Ambiguities (1853) is a meditation on the title-character's willfulness, and the unknowability of that drive that compels him into further and more juicy renunciations. Finally, Freud in his Dream book is just beginning to reflect on the scenarios that guide our thinking about whatever our dreams give away about us.
Phillips is writing about proverbs here, the "cock and bull stories" that guide people to think about us in a certain way. The essays are full of such stock stories. I knew as I was reading it, I would return to it in even greater pleasure.
A reframing of what it means to pay actual attention to something, covering need, shame, and basic interest. A lot here can be said about the ways we love, but we ciricle and circle on and on about how to divert attention, direct it in our unattention, and clear up those blind spots.
Today I decided to walk to the bus stop without any music. Just the morning bustle. The carts of carboard old men and women gather with their rusted hands. Cars, the amount of weight in every swish they made to scatter the brittle yellow leaves that pitter-pattered under every tired footstep beneath me. A Honda does in fact sound different from a Kia. Yet through all of this, my thoughts and prayers kept under my tongue were louder, incomprehensible to what happened over the weekend in Itaewon (October 29th, 2022). A crush, 150 youths gone, with all intents and purposes of having a good time. The Twitter footage of girls screaming and people laughing, a combutalted circus of joy and terror twitched my heart some notches faster, I could hear it in the heat of my ears, the cries of mothers, of futures, gone from cardiac arrest.
I think of fake solemnity. The Yoon administration has voiced a cold week of mourning with history yet again repeating itself. Think of the same youths crying and screaming for help from a sinking ferry in 2014. Nothing has changed. How many lives must be lost to create simple procedures and protocols.
My ears prick up in anger yet my heart sinks so low in sadness. My attention is everything, hyperactive, listening to all the voices, all the dead dreams with still a bit a song left in them.
Itaewon, I'm paying more attention than ever. I'm truly seeing how broken the system is. The cracks are there and everywhere. There's a shattering, a big bang that will echo and echo sorrows without end. I'm looking at you, Seoul, wtih all my heart.
When we pay attention, we attend. The big takeaway for me here is that in all cases, attention seeking is a love test. Who notices? Sometimes that is the only thing that matters, and it is eye opening to understand that. Just one insight among many in this charming, challenging, counterintuitive book.
Adam Phillips kitaplarını çok severim. Oldukça ufuk açıcı gelir bana. Özellikle Kaçırdıklarımız ve Yasak Olmayan Hazlar en sevdiğim eserlerindendir. Bu aralar ilgisi sürekli bir şeylere ya da kişilere saplanan biri olarak bu kitabından haberdar olunca hemen alıp okumak istedim. İncecik bir kitap ancak yer yer anlamakta çok zorlandığım oldu. Çünkü uzun süredir tümüyle sanat ve sanat kuramına düşmüş olduğum için psikolojik dilden uzak kitaplar okuyordum. Biraz zorlandım bazı yerlerinde. Yine de neyle ilgileniriz ya da nelerle ilgilenmeyiz, kendimizde neyin ilgiye muhtaç olduğu, ilgilendiğimiz şeyler kadar ilgimiz dışında olan seylerinde bizi kimliğimizi tanımladığına dair oldukça düşünmeye değer ifadeleri var. Psikolojik anlatımlarla ilgilenenler için keyifli bir okuma deneyimi olabilir (:
I find the author's writing on different topics quite insightful and thoughtful as well.
It's books like this that actually makes me think about topics which we generally do not discuss but are quite important for our social interaction as well as to understand ourselves.
Well researched and quite elaborate, I find this book quite interesting and easy to read.
I would recommend this book for people who are more interested in science, more specifically, the medical field as much references are made related to medical sciences.
Thank you, author and the publisher, for the advance reading copy.
I found this insightful, although it was a bit unfocused at times. The connection he drew between shame and attention really fascinated me. I really enjoy reading psychology books, I’d like to read more by Adam Phillips.
Adam Phillips is one of my favourite thinkers and writers, even though I might have to take time ro grasp what he's writing about and stop from rime to time to appreciate the way he uses language.E would like to be able to write like this, but of course I have my own way of doing that.
This book, as with his others, is themed on psychoanalysis and literature, the latter not a personal area of exploration, which means i have to accept his interpretation. With the former, the focus is on Freud, sometimes Winnicott and others.
Phillips dances around the ideas he's presenting. Here, Freud is an essentialist, but also not so. Sex is important but not entirely and in a particular way.
"Attention" is the theme here, an interesting word given Jung denied that his ideas were a theory of attention, which surely is a way that his typology is interpreted. But then it depends what you mean, an ongoing conundrum of sorts.
This is a slim text and he wanders around Hane Austen discussing shame, and unpacks a work of Samuel Johnson and also Stern's Tristram Shandy, which made me want to be more familiar with what he was commenting on. He finishes with the psychoanalyst Marion Milner and the paradox of what you should pay attention to, and when you shouldn't. So when listening to someone, are you judging them against a model, or are you actually listening wothout judgement, so paying attention by not paying attention.
That was really interesting and I have to give it some thought.
Lacking hard points. It's as if he recorded himself speaking idly on certain topics and then copied it down into the book. As usual he discusses and quotes, and it's engaging, but lacks the easy takeaways and repetition we usually find in books. Education is the practice of narrowing focus, right? I would have thought so was writing ;) 3.5 stars
Good read. I love his writing but it does goes around in circles - perhaps deliberately to reflect on the author’s ideas about his own and the reader’s attention? Not my favourite of his books. Some fascinating ideas but not quite fleshed out enough. Given the relevance of his insights to the attention economy of our times, I hope to read more of such works in the future.
Not what it was marketed as. I would call this philosophy instead of psychology. Thought it would be about the processes behind attention, but it was all psychoanalysis. However, the writing is good, and it’s a super quick read.
Bana neye ilgi duyduğunu söyle sana kim olduğunu söyleyeyim 13 Herhangi bir şeye veya herhangi birine duyduğumuz ilgi aşırıya kaçma veya yeterince aşırı olmama tehdidi taşır 14 Ve yaşama duyduğumuz ilgi kaybolduğunda ne yapmak durumunda kalırdık veya bize ne olurdu 15 Halbuki bir insan için hiçbir şey kişinin kendisinden daha az ilgi çekici değildir 24 Freuda göre herhangi bir şeyle ilgileniyor olmak için ilimize yeterince ilgi gösteriyor olmamız gerekir 31 Çok yönlü adaptasyon adapte olmak üzere orada bulunan şeylerden zevk almamaktır hatta çok yönlü adaptasyon sonsuz boş bir dikkat dağınıklığı olarak hissedilebilir 121 İlimizin nereye gittiğinden daha iyi biliriz yani bu konuda daha fazla bilgilendirilmişzdir bir yere demir atmamış ilgi tehdittir bir bakıma benlik bir temsil olarak benlik kendini ilgi nesneleri etrafında organize ederek varlık bulur 119 Yalnızca dikkatmiz dağılmış gibi görünür ilgisizliğimizin bile izlediği bir metot vardır ilgi bosluklari başka bir yerlere emailmiş olmaktır şehvet ve eğlence kadar kararlı ve yoğundur ki aslında bunlar da göründükleri kadar birbirlerinden farklı olmayabilir ilgimiz yalnızca aynı şeyin daha fazlasına yönelir o zaman hangi anlamda ilgi göstermeyi seçeriz veya seç seçebiliriz 91 Bana bir insanın ilgisini neyin çektiğini ve emdiğini söyleyin size onun kim olduğunu söyleyeyim ifadesi aynı şeyi söylemenin başka bir yolu olabilirdi 90 Meraklı olmak tam hoş incelikli olana karşı ilgili olmaktır ilgi göstermek zihni bir yere yönlendirmek sabitlemektir 89 İlgisizliğin bizi götürebileceği yerlerden biri psik analizdir 84 İlgisizliklerimizin fark edilmesini isteriz ve ilgisizliğin kendisi de fark edilmeyi istemenin bir yoludur ilgisizlik her çocuğun ve ebeveynin bildiği gibi kendince bir kışkırtmadır eğer Freud bir pragmatist olsaydı ilgisizliğin kullanım şekilleri ile ilgilendiğini söyleyebilirdik 82 Utanma duygusunun kazanılması halinde bedenlerimizi dolayısıyla cinsel bölgelerimizi teşhir etmeye devam edeceğimiz ve başkalarınınkini de veya başkalarını da diyebiliriz tüm kalbimizle merak edeceğimiz Ema edilmiş olur veya en azından bunları kesinlikle cezbedici buluyor olacaktık peki bunun sonu hangi noktada gelebilir utanç yakınlarımız da bizi zorlayan ama yasak bir arzu olduğunda veya bu arzu uzaklaştırılma çalışıldığında hissetmeye yakın olduğumuz şeydir ortaya koyduğumuz direnç oluşturduğumuz barajdır desteklediğimiz ahlaki veya estetik idealdir 71
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Not smart enough to understand this book, read it anyway. I came to Phillips through Marion Milner and then by watching some YouTube videos of him lecturing or talking with an audience. He's intriguing and funny, entertaining to watch. He writes short terse books on limited subjects, and he has a way of turning on his subject that would be contrarian in someone not as thoughtful. This book has to do with our human need to both give and receive attention, and the strange forms that might take, also on the possible wisdom of not assuming intense focus is always the best kind of attention. As Milner first wrote about, there is also "wide" attention, which I'd describe as being open to surroundings, ideas and possibilities, without constantly pinpointing choices or operating with preconceptions. This is something I've been trying to allow myself lately after a demanding career that seemed to call for all my focus relentlessly.
I've seen a couple of videos where he tells the story of his meeting Marion Milner, who came to a talk he gave about DW Winnicott. She had been a close colleague of DWW, and at the time she met Phillips he was about 35 and she was 88. They became friends and she was a great influence on him until she died 10 years later. Phillips is acutely intellectual and intense in manner, but when he talks about her everything about him changes markedly. A tenderness comes over him that's quite lovely to see, as if he were thinking of some sort of angel. I'm not sure I've ever seen someone transform so totally just by saying someone's name. His face opens up, but he also looks like he misses her.
I want to read more of his books, they are on interesting topics. Maybe the next one I'll read is "Kindness," but I think I'm ready for a novel now!
This book tells us We never know why we seek attention? There is a complex nature in everyone in terms of attention. There is a problem in selecting our attention. The moment you decide to give attention, the unattended becomes more important to you because we never know which one is important. Our attention becomes the cause of our dreams and the same dream becomes the cause of our next-day attention. Our attention is always doing the right thing, but other things also get noticed inattentively and get reflected in our dreams. The right thing you felt, may not be the right thing, that's why your unattended things, always communicated in the dream. Your unnoticed noticing is always preserved in mind, and appears in the form of your emotions. This book showing attention is the cause of our desire but the input is so much that our mind cannot consolidate but release it piecemeal in the form of dreams. Assume you are determined to look at certain aspects before making decisions but during nights some reverse will be on your dreams. Why?That is the true nature to be looked into your decisions but we failed to understand coz of unnoticed noticing. It is a small book loaded with tons of wisdom.
ilgi, ilgi boşluğu, rüyalar, süper ego, ideal ego, utanç, ilgisizlik kavramları etrafında geçen kitap. birçok yazardan alıntılar ve freud referanslarıyla dolu olmasıyla hoşuma gitti. giovanni's room ve jane austen kısımlarını sevdim. açıklayıcı dilini ve çevirisini beğendim. birkaç alıntıyı ekliyorum;
"kimliğimiz, kendimize dair belirli fikirlere duyduğumuz saplantıdır. güven duygusunu meraka tercih etmek, deneyim olasılıklarını sınırlamak anlamına gelir. utanç, kendimizle ilgili saklayabildiğimiz şeyler hakkında hissettiğimiz duygu -utancın tüm tanımları görülmekle ilgili bir şeyler içerir- kendinden utanan kişi, topluluğu onaylamış ve doğrulamış olur. -keşke o zaman gerçeği söyleseydin. bunu benim keşfetmemi beklemenin ne kadar büyük haksızlık olduğunu görmüyor musun?- seçiçilik, ilgisizlik tarafından mümkün hale getirilebilir. ilgi, zamana değerini geri kazandırır. zamanı, yaşamaya ve geçirmeye değer hale getirir. sufilerin "öğrenme, dinle!" söyletisi. halihazırda bildiği şeyden başka herhangi bir şey duyamama tehlikesi."
I feel like I might enjoy reading anything Adam Phillips writes. In this book, he analyses the role of attention in our decisions and behaviors, it's relation to emotions like shame in three sub-titles. The first two of them were quite interesting and comprehensible easily. The third subject, Vacancies of Attention is full of also brilliant ideas but I felt like it is more readable for people from psychoanalysis. After all, It is a text that I would definitely recommend for working on emotions and gaining meaningful insight.
"Freud is describing the difference between the kind of attention paid when we know what we want, what we are looking for; and the kind of attention paid when we are finding out what we want when we don't know beforehand what we want or what we are looking for, only that we are in a state of wanting and seeking."
"We need to wonder, then, why we would ever want to accuse anyone of being attention-seeking. Attention-seeking is one of the best things we do, even when we have the worst ways of doing it."
İlgi çekmek denildiğinde insanın aklında beliren ilk şey o kadar "negatif" ki. Özellikle bizim hayatımızın dışında gelişen, sosyal medyada vücut bulan "ilgi arayışı" direkt sanki bir "yardım çığlığı" olarak etiketleniyor. Ardından bu etiketin gerekliliği olan acıma ve burun kıvırma devreye giriyor.
Daha küçük bir çocukken bile yaptığımız resmi tamamladığımızda mutfağa koşup hemen ailemize gösteririz: "Bakın, bakın nasıl olmuş? Ben yaptım!"
"İlgi çekmek" basitçe egosantrik bir şey değil; sosyal ve psikolojik olarak anlamlı bir süreç. Biz başkalarının bizi fark etmesini isterken, aslında bir yönümüzle "değerli olmak", "onay almak", "kendimizi bilmek" istiyor olabiliriz.
My biography!! Well actually, everyone's biography... we are constantly putting our attentions somewhere and our inattentions elsewhere. I found this slightly above my level of understanding & intellect (raise the bar and everyone goes up!) but I found the essay on shame really interesting. Phillips writes that shame can be a way of revealing to ourselves what it is that we really value and desire, within the deep chambers of our unconscious. Maybe it's time to start paying attention to my dreams and my murky inner self again, in this year of self actualisation. Give your shameful shadow-self a hug!
Phillips writes about the many ways attention and distraction shape our identity and our lives. He draws illuminating connections between attention and shame, selfhood, and distraction. He delves into the many ways in which our (un)directed attention (and distraction) is telling of who we are (not), and what we seek. In his usual literary and repetitive style, in which I often cannot decipher the figurative from the literal, this book acts as an ultimately rewarding puzzle that takes a while to set.
Adam Phillips'in ele aldığı konuları ilginç buluyorum, genelde bi hevesle kapıyorum raftan. Daha önce 'Kaçırdıklarımız'ı okumaya çalışmış ve baş ağrısıyla bırakmıştım. İlginç bi şekilde adamın kitaplarından hiçbir şey anlayamıyorum, bana göre çok fazla kendini tekrar ediyor, çok fazla referans kullanıyor ve anlatacağı şeyi bir türlü sade bir şekilde anlatamıyor. İlgi Arayışı oldukça ince bir kitap, belki bu sefer basit yazmıştır diyerek aldım ancak yine bitiremeden sıkıldım yazımından. içerik olarak arada ilginç kafa açıcı şeyler söylediği için bir süre sonra tekrar okumayı denerim belki.
Ya ben “Kaçırdıklarımız”’ı da bu adamın yazdığını unutmuşum, tüm seriyi aldım bir de indirimde görünce. Kitapların kapakları da çok güzel, birine vermeye kıyamıyorum.
Birkaç noktanın altını çizdim, bahsedilen eserlerin bir kısmını okumuştum ama Phillips gibi bakmamıştım, o anlamda farklı bir perspektif kazandım. Ama bu adamın kitaplarını okurken acaba kapakla kitabın içi uyumsuz mu diye düşünüyorum. Sanki kapak başka, kitap başka (ki öyle bir deneyim de yaşamıştım yıllar yıllar önce).
Asla vaad ettiği şeyi anlatmıyor. Ayrıca bu kadar Freud okumak istesem, açar Freud okurdum.
intellectually stimulating read, lightly humorous at parts though hard to get through at times if you're not focused. essays on psychoanalysis and desire for attention— not about the attention economy as you might be led to believe by the title. admittedly i was a little thrown off at first by how academic the book was (compared to other aforementioned attention economy reads that have been distilled into lay language) but i ended this book wanting more from this author. well researched and exploratory in a way that challenged me to think in ways i haven't thought before.
It's a really challenging read if you don't know Freud, Greeblatt... it can be difficult to understand. It is compiled from many seminars and articles given by the author.
I actually liked it a lot, I hadn't thought about many concepts in these aspects or etymology: attention, paying attention, growing or shrinking... if you pay attention to yourself, then it is easier for you to understand the path of life.
Me prohibí leer libros de lo mío porque me distraían, valga la redundancia, de leer lo que no era académico y se entrometían y entorpecían mi reto lector. Es posible que estuviera usando ese otro objeto de deseo como distracción. Me ha gustado mucho el libro. Corto, interesante y no ha causado daños al reto. Me deja ahora con la certeza de que necesito distraerme con algo de poesía. ¿EE. Dickinson? ¿Uno de los dos de Glück que me quedan por leer 🥲🥲 o ¿Le doy una oportunidad a Mary Oliver?
This book takes an empathetic approach and gives bite size approaches and allows you to have kindness and patience with yourself when dealing with life. This is so necessary for everyone to read in life. Highly recommend. Especially loved the reflection to true life to humanize my feelings and relate. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Well! I always enjoy reading Adam Phillips. So many interesting layers of complexity, at the same time as many many moments when it all connects into my lived experience and leaves me mulling, wondering, exploring it in my head (and trying to explain why this is so exciting to my poor husband, lol).