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Freud Olmak: Bir Psikanalistin Gelişimi
Psikanalizin yanı sıra edebiyat ve yayıncılık alanındaki çalışmalarıyla tanınan Adam Phillips sıra dışı bir Freud biyografisi sunuyor okura. Kişinin hayat hikâyesini temel alan bir tedavi yöntemi olan psikanalizin kurucusu olan Freud'un, doğumundan 50 yaşına kadarki hayat hikâyesi, Freud'un nasıl Freud olduğunun hikâyesi aynı zamanda.
Böylece Freud'dan sonra onu kendi bakış açısından değerlendireceksek, onun ya da herhangi bir başkasının yaşamına dair bilgimize ve aslında onun yaşamını bilme arzumuza- biraz ironi katmalıyız. Çünkü Freud'un sorguladığı ve bize farklı okumayı öğrettiği tam da yaşamlarımız ve başkalarının yaşamlarıyla ilgili kendi kendimize anlattığımız hikâyelerdir.
Böylece Freud'dan sonra onu kendi bakış açısından değerlendireceksek, onun ya da herhangi bir başkasının yaşamına dair bilgimize ve aslında onun yaşamını bilme arzumuza- biraz ironi katmalıyız. Çünkü Freud'un sorguladığı ve bize farklı okumayı öğrettiği tam da yaşamlarımız ve başkalarının yaşamlarıyla ilgili kendi kendimize anlattığımız hikâyelerdir.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
62 people are currently reading
1125 people want to read
About the author
Adam Phillips
125 books681 followersAdam 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.
Adapted from Wikipedia.
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."
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.
Adapted from Wikipedia.
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."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
February 7, 2017
4 puanı öncelikle Adam Phillips'in akıcı ve açıklayıcı diline veriyorum. Psikolojiye, psikanalize ve Freud'a ilgisi çok az olan biri olarak benim için çok doyurucu bir çalışmaydı. Dönemin siyasi, toplumsal özelliklerini görmek ve psikanaliz oluşum sürecine bu pencereden bakmak son derece keyifliydi.
December 21, 2014
Becoming Freud by Adam Phillips is an exceptionally interesting biography about a man whom I had put aside some time ago, having read most of his work and discussed him sufficiently to think I was done with him. Phillips, a psychoanalyst and writer/editor, takes a uniquely thoughtful approach to Freud, however. He recognizes that Freud himself had little time for biography in the sense that biography is something we all choose about ourselves. We have many biographies and decide which one works best, discarding irrelevant material and highlighting what we take to be the essential. This gives us the birth of today’s trope “the narrative,” as in Obama’s narrative and Oprah’s narrative and so forth.
As a practitioner and man of letters, Phillips homes in on Freud's rich contradictions. Yes, sexuality plays a determinative role in Freudian thought, but beyond that we enter a world of representations, diversions, symptoms, jokes and dreams, all of us struggling with two fundamental things: need and desire. In a sense this is the human evolution of Darwinian evolution, the way we humans do it. Freud struggled early in his career to be part of what we now call “hard science,” the process of discovering universal facts that can be reconfirmed through subsequent experimentation. He became a doctor for this reason, but late in his life, he wryly commented that he hadn’t much use for his medical degree and hadn’t been much of a doctor.
The problem with Freud (and Jung and many others) is that he saw relatively few patients, each of whom was incomparable, so he had no way of testing his findings except through observation. And then he stopped trying to test findings because his observations proved sufficient for the enveloping theories he constructed.
Phillips deals with this issue head-on. We’re a hundred years into true brain science, but the matter of a human body is easier to confirm than interpret, and here is where Freud excelled, using language (“the talking cure”) to probe what language conceals . . . or letting the patient achieve that end.
Phillips writes subtly. Sometimes he is so subtle and precise that the book is slow going, but always interesting. He spends time on “the dog that didn’t bark.” Freud wrote little about his wife, for example. That’s a dog that didn’t bark. Or his six children, six puppies who didn’t bark. But he was a man so focused on his work that he not only paid them as little attention as possible but also played no role in the intellectual/artistic world of Vienna, sticking to his patients and his writing.
For me one of the key sentences in the book is Freud’s view that we don’t live so much in culture as culture lives in us—and therefore each of us has problems fitting culture’s demands within our needs and desires. Culture is a generality. We are specific. Our lives, shorn of overarching religious interpretation in a secular world, therefore require multiple forms of narrative construction, sometimes contradictory, and our narratives inevitably change somewhat as we move through the life cycle. The fact that our awareness is greater than our immediate consciousness is obvious to us; we pick up more than we know. Thank Freud for that. When we joke, we are attempting to make unacceptable views acceptable. Thank Freud for that. When we dream, we are redescribing the previous day’s events and also demonstrating, though our fantastic imagery and bizarre stories, tremendous artistic powers, hard to understand and harder to access and employ when we are awake. Thank Freud for that.
Phillips follows Freud through his most productive psychoanalytic phase up to age fifty. After that Freud began applying his interpretations to broader life matters—“Civilization and Its Discontents,” for example. Phillips makes the canny point, however, that if Freud had died at fifty, he’d still be a foundational thinker. And he was—a thinker, a philosopher, a mind in search of meaning more than facts.
If you’re still interested in Freud, this is a good book to read. If you’re not still interested in Freud, it’s also a good book to read. I’d like to know Adam Phillips. The quotes he places at the head of his chapters, for example, demonstrate exceptional breadth of knowledge and wide reading. They alone would merit a few hours discussion.
As a practitioner and man of letters, Phillips homes in on Freud's rich contradictions. Yes, sexuality plays a determinative role in Freudian thought, but beyond that we enter a world of representations, diversions, symptoms, jokes and dreams, all of us struggling with two fundamental things: need and desire. In a sense this is the human evolution of Darwinian evolution, the way we humans do it. Freud struggled early in his career to be part of what we now call “hard science,” the process of discovering universal facts that can be reconfirmed through subsequent experimentation. He became a doctor for this reason, but late in his life, he wryly commented that he hadn’t much use for his medical degree and hadn’t been much of a doctor.
The problem with Freud (and Jung and many others) is that he saw relatively few patients, each of whom was incomparable, so he had no way of testing his findings except through observation. And then he stopped trying to test findings because his observations proved sufficient for the enveloping theories he constructed.
Phillips deals with this issue head-on. We’re a hundred years into true brain science, but the matter of a human body is easier to confirm than interpret, and here is where Freud excelled, using language (“the talking cure”) to probe what language conceals . . . or letting the patient achieve that end.
Phillips writes subtly. Sometimes he is so subtle and precise that the book is slow going, but always interesting. He spends time on “the dog that didn’t bark.” Freud wrote little about his wife, for example. That’s a dog that didn’t bark. Or his six children, six puppies who didn’t bark. But he was a man so focused on his work that he not only paid them as little attention as possible but also played no role in the intellectual/artistic world of Vienna, sticking to his patients and his writing.
For me one of the key sentences in the book is Freud’s view that we don’t live so much in culture as culture lives in us—and therefore each of us has problems fitting culture’s demands within our needs and desires. Culture is a generality. We are specific. Our lives, shorn of overarching religious interpretation in a secular world, therefore require multiple forms of narrative construction, sometimes contradictory, and our narratives inevitably change somewhat as we move through the life cycle. The fact that our awareness is greater than our immediate consciousness is obvious to us; we pick up more than we know. Thank Freud for that. When we joke, we are attempting to make unacceptable views acceptable. Thank Freud for that. When we dream, we are redescribing the previous day’s events and also demonstrating, though our fantastic imagery and bizarre stories, tremendous artistic powers, hard to understand and harder to access and employ when we are awake. Thank Freud for that.
Phillips follows Freud through his most productive psychoanalytic phase up to age fifty. After that Freud began applying his interpretations to broader life matters—“Civilization and Its Discontents,” for example. Phillips makes the canny point, however, that if Freud had died at fifty, he’d still be a foundational thinker. And he was—a thinker, a philosopher, a mind in search of meaning more than facts.
If you’re still interested in Freud, this is a good book to read. If you’re not still interested in Freud, it’s also a good book to read. I’d like to know Adam Phillips. The quotes he places at the head of his chapters, for example, demonstrate exceptional breadth of knowledge and wide reading. They alone would merit a few hours discussion.
August 23, 2014
This is a fantastic book. It is certainly no conventional biography - more a meditation on biography and an account of Freud that says as much about Phillips as about Freud. Phillips believes that there are aspects of what he discovered that even Freud found disturbing and that some of his post-1906 writings were a rowing back or a covering up. He certainly thinks that the institutionalisation of psychoanalysis turned it from something that sought to recognise and release the paradoxical nature of our wishing to a new form of distorting and reassuring knowledge that promised to make sure that even the unconscious was kept within proper boundaries. Whatever one thinks of this view, Phillips is a pleasure to read and deeply thought-provoking. It is certainly the best book of his I have read and one I think he will have difficulty surpassing.
February 13, 2021
Öncelikle bu kitabı bir biyografi olarak ele almak doğru mudur bilemiyorum. Biyografi adı altında bir Freud incelemesi desek daha doğru sanırım ya da benim biyografi deyince beklentim direkt hayatını okumak olduğu için arada kaldım.
Ayrıca Freud'u ilk kez okuyacaklara da önermem bu kitabı. İlk kez Freud okumak isteyenlere Serol Teber'in Bilimsel Bir Peri Masalı'nı önerebilirim, çok daha keyifli ve merak uyandırıcı.
Bu kitabın artılarına gelecek olursak, Freud'un neden psikanalize yöneldiğini okuyoruz. Dönemin koşulları, siyasi sorunları Freud'la birlikte işlenmiş ve psikanaliz yolculuğunda etkilerini görüyoruz. Freud'un hayatındaki dönüm noktalarını, bu önemli zamanlarda çevresindeki kişileri okuyup psikanalizi ortaya koyarken onu nasıl etkilediğini de okuyoruz.
Kitabın ilk bölümü özellikle beklentiniz benim gibi Freud'un kişisel hayatını okumaksa hayal kırıklığına uğratabilir, üstüne okurken sizi yorabilir de. Diğer bölümlerde kitabın içine daha rahat girebiliyorsunuz, dili daha sadeleşiyor. Ayrıca orijinali nasıldır bilememekle birlikte çeviri konusunda sıkıntılar var gibi hissettim ya Adam Phillips'in dili böyle ya da cümleler anlaşılır çevrilmemiş.
Okumak isteyenlere önerebileceğim bir kitap oldu kesinlikle bir şeyler öğreniyorsunuz size değişik bir bakış açısı katan bir okuma sadece başlangıç için değil.
Ayrıca Freud'u ilk kez okuyacaklara da önermem bu kitabı. İlk kez Freud okumak isteyenlere Serol Teber'in Bilimsel Bir Peri Masalı'nı önerebilirim, çok daha keyifli ve merak uyandırıcı.
Bu kitabın artılarına gelecek olursak, Freud'un neden psikanalize yöneldiğini okuyoruz. Dönemin koşulları, siyasi sorunları Freud'la birlikte işlenmiş ve psikanaliz yolculuğunda etkilerini görüyoruz. Freud'un hayatındaki dönüm noktalarını, bu önemli zamanlarda çevresindeki kişileri okuyup psikanalizi ortaya koyarken onu nasıl etkilediğini de okuyoruz.
Kitabın ilk bölümü özellikle beklentiniz benim gibi Freud'un kişisel hayatını okumaksa hayal kırıklığına uğratabilir, üstüne okurken sizi yorabilir de. Diğer bölümlerde kitabın içine daha rahat girebiliyorsunuz, dili daha sadeleşiyor. Ayrıca orijinali nasıldır bilememekle birlikte çeviri konusunda sıkıntılar var gibi hissettim ya Adam Phillips'in dili böyle ya da cümleler anlaşılır çevrilmemiş.
Okumak isteyenlere önerebileceğim bir kitap oldu kesinlikle bir şeyler öğreniyorsunuz size değişik bir bakış açısı katan bir okuma sadece başlangıç için değil.
September 6, 2014
Reading this book made me realize how Freud was so glossed over in my college classes and how his ideas are so consistently presented as outdated and wrong minded. What I realized in reading this book is that what psychoanalysis really tries to get at is what lies at the basis of our humanity below all the trappings we hide ourselves in so that we can function in our modern civilization.
The author also makes the point that psychoanalysis in the Freudian sense is by its nature a counter-cultural interest as it is concerned with what lies behind and below society rather than of it.
I found this fresh view of Freud to be very fascinating.
The author also makes the point that psychoanalysis in the Freudian sense is by its nature a counter-cultural interest as it is concerned with what lies behind and below society rather than of it.
I found this fresh view of Freud to be very fascinating.
August 8, 2017
Cory Taylor first introduced me to Adam Phillips in her outstanding memoir titled Dying: A Memoir. Now having read several titles by Adam Phillips I have become enamored of his writing and personality. Unfortunately this book was more in the spirit of scientific history, specifically psychoanalysis, and he left me out in left field disappointed. Early on in the book Phillips teased me with the idea that Freud, though having six children with his perpetually parturient wife, was possibly more interested in the young men he gathered around him. But nothing more was noted and I question why Phillips suggested homoerotic behavior and then proceeded to never touch on the subject again. Not only did Phillips leave me hanging he also managed to bore me almost to death.
June 19, 2014
A dense, complex look at early Freud. At times frustratingly repetitive & convoluted, but for the most part this is a fascinating study, not for the beginner, but for the reader with genuine interest in Freud (and some experience of his writings).
October 20, 2014
I was interested in this book because of my belief that unawareness of psychology—in many cases, tantamount to ignorance of it—along with at best bare knowledge or acknowledgement of history accounts largely for the weakness and decline of the U.S. Failure to recognize psychology and history so as to govern decision-making for shaping action results in madcap activities little different from antics—but one characterization of the decade-long U.S. commotion in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I was interested in this book to see if or how the author might make Freud relevant to today's miasmas and as some idea or answer whatever its angle or content for reintroducing the factor—unavoidable factor—of psychology to today's society and its politics and policies.
The book did not disappoint, and in fact exceeded by a good deal expectations I had of it, expectations raised by its author's longtime interests and credentials. As well as the general editor of new translations of Freud's works as a part of the Penguin Modern Classics, Phillips has worked as a hospital and private psychoanalyst in England and is a visiting professor of English at the University of York. He does recurringly imply or to a lesser extent, state the relevance of psychology to the contemporary world while following and analyzing the early years of Freud's career, up to 1906. "If Freud had died in 1906, we would...have been left with...the rudiments of, rather than prescriptions for, the practice of psychoanalysis."
As for insights into what Freud was doing in this stage of his career—as opposed to the illuminating commentary exemplified in the foregoing quote—Phillips writes, "Psychoanalysis was becoming in Freud's writing in these years the artful science of our false senses of security. Freud was discovering how modern people endangered themselves by the ways in which they protected themselves. Each of the so-called mechanisms of defense was an unconscious form of self-blinding; ways of occluding a piece of reality." Such insights could apply to the conflicts of the First World War as to the US thrashing about in the Middle East which has spawned manifold threats and countless enemies in the name of security. Psychology is permanent in Humankind.
Another insight regarding psychoanalysis as developed by Freud reads, "[W]hat Freud was interested in in these crucial years was not just the all-too-familiar, all-too-human imperious urgency of sex, but how the body becomes...its language; how culture is the translation...of the body's unconscious, forbidden desire, the desire a person believes he can't afford to acknowledge. Freud was not returning sexuality to its 'rightful share,' but working out what that share might be." This quote relates to the correct, but limited view of Freud as moving from the sexual repressions of the Victorian age, which is to a considerable degree what the movement of modernism is. But it also plainly takes in LGTB, fashion, advertising, sexting, agitation on college campuses concerning rape, and other explicitly and inherently sexual phenomena and issues of today.
The content of the book progresses cumulatively with Freud taking on both depth and dimension. How Freud individually and to some extent idiosyncratically pursues and develops his interests melds with interaction with various friends and associates and with different places, notably Paris. Key writings, particularly "Studies on Hysteria" written with Josef Breuer, are looked into as both summations and entrances. Origins of theory are recognized, and clinical activity described. But even more important than all this in Freud becoming Freud, the author tenders, was his experiences and observations as a father and husband. "Freud had six children in eight years" between his formative years of 1886 to 1900. Being married and being a father of several young children while endeavoring to establish himself as a psychoanalyst and earn a reputation cannot but make an impression and create effects. That all the case studies of "Studies on Hysteria" were women and the Oedipus complex is a major, central tenet of the field of psychology go to support Phillips' idea that Freud's family life was the source of psychoanalysis. Freud's education, friendships, professional associations, social environment, and other areas of his life brought embellishments or refinements to Freud's insights and concepts derived largely from his family life.
Referring to these years of the first period of his married life with six young children, Phillips relates, "It is, perhaps, unsurprising that in these years Freud was beginning to really think about people's connections with each other, about what they exchanged, and wanted to exchange and failed to exchange with each other; about, in short, sexuality and development and loss." The light the author casts on Freud's family life makes perfect sense when you think about it. The family life accounts more than anything else for Freud's general orientation and also for the genesis and to a considerable extent the scenarios and specifics of the psychology Freud worked out.
One could go on. Nearly every page and many paragraphs of the book merit thought, study, and reflection. Phillips' "Becoming Freud" reaffirms the value of psychology; and for ones who tend to dismiss or ignore it, the book conveys psychology's irreplaceable relevance and inestimable worth. The book is an outstanding knowledgeable and sympathetic comprehension of the towering, pervasive Freud who more than any other individual reflects and influences the culture of modernism.
(The reviewer is the author of MASSACRE IN NEWTOWN - ADAM LANZA'S DARK PASSAGE TO MADNESS.)
The book did not disappoint, and in fact exceeded by a good deal expectations I had of it, expectations raised by its author's longtime interests and credentials. As well as the general editor of new translations of Freud's works as a part of the Penguin Modern Classics, Phillips has worked as a hospital and private psychoanalyst in England and is a visiting professor of English at the University of York. He does recurringly imply or to a lesser extent, state the relevance of psychology to the contemporary world while following and analyzing the early years of Freud's career, up to 1906. "If Freud had died in 1906, we would...have been left with...the rudiments of, rather than prescriptions for, the practice of psychoanalysis."
As for insights into what Freud was doing in this stage of his career—as opposed to the illuminating commentary exemplified in the foregoing quote—Phillips writes, "Psychoanalysis was becoming in Freud's writing in these years the artful science of our false senses of security. Freud was discovering how modern people endangered themselves by the ways in which they protected themselves. Each of the so-called mechanisms of defense was an unconscious form of self-blinding; ways of occluding a piece of reality." Such insights could apply to the conflicts of the First World War as to the US thrashing about in the Middle East which has spawned manifold threats and countless enemies in the name of security. Psychology is permanent in Humankind.
Another insight regarding psychoanalysis as developed by Freud reads, "[W]hat Freud was interested in in these crucial years was not just the all-too-familiar, all-too-human imperious urgency of sex, but how the body becomes...its language; how culture is the translation...of the body's unconscious, forbidden desire, the desire a person believes he can't afford to acknowledge. Freud was not returning sexuality to its 'rightful share,' but working out what that share might be." This quote relates to the correct, but limited view of Freud as moving from the sexual repressions of the Victorian age, which is to a considerable degree what the movement of modernism is. But it also plainly takes in LGTB, fashion, advertising, sexting, agitation on college campuses concerning rape, and other explicitly and inherently sexual phenomena and issues of today.
The content of the book progresses cumulatively with Freud taking on both depth and dimension. How Freud individually and to some extent idiosyncratically pursues and develops his interests melds with interaction with various friends and associates and with different places, notably Paris. Key writings, particularly "Studies on Hysteria" written with Josef Breuer, are looked into as both summations and entrances. Origins of theory are recognized, and clinical activity described. But even more important than all this in Freud becoming Freud, the author tenders, was his experiences and observations as a father and husband. "Freud had six children in eight years" between his formative years of 1886 to 1900. Being married and being a father of several young children while endeavoring to establish himself as a psychoanalyst and earn a reputation cannot but make an impression and create effects. That all the case studies of "Studies on Hysteria" were women and the Oedipus complex is a major, central tenet of the field of psychology go to support Phillips' idea that Freud's family life was the source of psychoanalysis. Freud's education, friendships, professional associations, social environment, and other areas of his life brought embellishments or refinements to Freud's insights and concepts derived largely from his family life.
Referring to these years of the first period of his married life with six young children, Phillips relates, "It is, perhaps, unsurprising that in these years Freud was beginning to really think about people's connections with each other, about what they exchanged, and wanted to exchange and failed to exchange with each other; about, in short, sexuality and development and loss." The light the author casts on Freud's family life makes perfect sense when you think about it. The family life accounts more than anything else for Freud's general orientation and also for the genesis and to a considerable extent the scenarios and specifics of the psychology Freud worked out.
One could go on. Nearly every page and many paragraphs of the book merit thought, study, and reflection. Phillips' "Becoming Freud" reaffirms the value of psychology; and for ones who tend to dismiss or ignore it, the book conveys psychology's irreplaceable relevance and inestimable worth. The book is an outstanding knowledgeable and sympathetic comprehension of the towering, pervasive Freud who more than any other individual reflects and influences the culture of modernism.
(The reviewer is the author of MASSACRE IN NEWTOWN - ADAM LANZA'S DARK PASSAGE TO MADNESS.)
March 29, 2021
I have been reading the books in this Jewish Lives series, and this is one that I really enjoyed. Freud has some discrediters but he really carved a whole professional out of his own creativity. Psychoanalysis is just part of our national jargon now, and it is fascinating to read the relationship between Judaism and analysis, as we celebrate Yom Kippur which is a whole day of self-reflection. To practice Judaism, you are required to reflect on your behavior and accept the ways you must improve your actions. Freud was concerned that psychoanalysis would be seen as a Jewish science, when he was thinking in broader terms as to how immigrants fit into society and as well as how any outsider fits into society. This is actually a Jewish thought process as well as we were once strangers in a stranger land ourselves. Anyway, great book if you are looking for a biography to read.
Read
February 5, 2024For seminar but interesting
November 25, 2014
More detail than I was looking for, but Phillips can always be counted on for thought provoking quotes and epigrams:
“Becauses we want to like our facts we are always tempted to simplify them.”
“There is nothing we want to protect ourselves from more, in Freud’s view, than our personal and family histories.”
“What Freud increasingly found most difficult to cure in his patients was their (mostly unconscious) wish not to be cured.”
Freud’s believed psychoanalysis could only “transform hysterical misery into ordinary human unhappiness.”
“All history, for Freud, is the rewriting of history because the past is something we rewrite to make a future for ourselves.”
“...people grow into their past, Freud realized, more than they grow out of it.”
“Childhood was a story adults make up about themselves.”
“Just as he was starting a family himself [Freud] was discovering….that childhood was a cumulative trauma loop in which the child has to make her appetites at once known and compatible with family life.”
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January 14, 2024Öncelikle bu kitap biyografi değil. Sonralıkla bu kitaba YKY ve çevirmeni yüzünden puan vermek imkansız. Çeviri o kadar kötü ki asla okunmuyor. Editörlük desen, o da yok. Böyle bir kitap YKY’den nasıl çıkabilmiş?
December 5, 2021
Çeviri çok kötü!
October 15, 2021
At this point, I've been reading psychoanalytic texts for about a year, and no longer have any sense as to whether this would be an enjoyable read for someone who hasn't, but here's my take:
What a cool way to write a biography. I really appreciated Phillips's meta-ification of biography--of writing a biography which kind of started by explaining Freud's disdain for biographers and why... and an exploration of what could be known about Freud, and what couldn't, based on Freud's theoretical writings (as in, both *applications* of his theory, and what his theory revealed about him) as well as his letters.
The meta-meanderings of what Freud believed when he founded psychoanalysis... applied to his own life and the biographical details of it were also really interesting to consider. (For instance, the importance of the mother and early childhood in psychoanalysis... and yet, somehow, the absence of knowledge about Freud's own mother and childhood in terms of what we know. And based on the very little that we *do* know, how that might have affected Freud later.)
I think it was really interesting to be able to get a sense of how his Jewish identity also really informed a lot of how he perceived the world (and theorized about it) as an outsider, and get a real concrete sense of that and why was also enlightening.
I remember watching the documentary Black Psychoanalysts Speak, and some people noting that Freud himself seemed to have a blindspot about race within his psychoanalytic theory, perhaps out of necessity (understanding likely very correctly, that to be perceived as a "Jewish science" would not get psychoanalysis to the place that he wanted it to be as a groundbreaking new framework of seeing the world and helping people).
This book, I think, felt like an intricately woven puzzle, which sought to tell the story of Freud, as very much informed by the ideas of the theory of psychoanalysis that he created... while also explaining various ideas that he had in psychoanalysis as well.
In as far as this book is really a collection of thoughts which may reveal a lot more about Adam Phillips than about Freud (according to Freud, hater of biographers), I still feel like this biography helped me widen my understanding of who he was as a person.
I really loved the Epilogue, in which Phillips boldly calls out Ernest Jones for "bending over backwards" to defend Freud's credulity re: Freud's (not secret) personal interest in telepathy... and instead gets curious: why is it so bad for the founder of psychoanalysis to be interested in telepathy? And what might it say about his character if he were? And more...
Anyways. I felt Phillips approached Freud with curiosity, and also, with the tools that Freud himself started to fashion, and I enjoyed the meandering exploration of the early life of an ambitious and complex young Freud.
I can't really do this book justice in a review. I may be back to post some of my favorite quotes.
"And partly because Freud was discovering that we obscure ourselves from ourselves in our life stores; that that is their function. So will will often find that the most dogmatic thing about Freud as a writer is his skepticism. He is always pointing out his ignorance, without ever needing to boast about it. "
So with THAT as a base of theory from this man, what can we actually glean from a biography of Freud, or the stories he tells others in his letters and writings? Anyways. A fun and disorienting ride.
What a cool way to write a biography. I really appreciated Phillips's meta-ification of biography--of writing a biography which kind of started by explaining Freud's disdain for biographers and why... and an exploration of what could be known about Freud, and what couldn't, based on Freud's theoretical writings (as in, both *applications* of his theory, and what his theory revealed about him) as well as his letters.
The meta-meanderings of what Freud believed when he founded psychoanalysis... applied to his own life and the biographical details of it were also really interesting to consider. (For instance, the importance of the mother and early childhood in psychoanalysis... and yet, somehow, the absence of knowledge about Freud's own mother and childhood in terms of what we know. And based on the very little that we *do* know, how that might have affected Freud later.)
I think it was really interesting to be able to get a sense of how his Jewish identity also really informed a lot of how he perceived the world (and theorized about it) as an outsider, and get a real concrete sense of that and why was also enlightening.
I remember watching the documentary Black Psychoanalysts Speak, and some people noting that Freud himself seemed to have a blindspot about race within his psychoanalytic theory, perhaps out of necessity (understanding likely very correctly, that to be perceived as a "Jewish science" would not get psychoanalysis to the place that he wanted it to be as a groundbreaking new framework of seeing the world and helping people).
This book, I think, felt like an intricately woven puzzle, which sought to tell the story of Freud, as very much informed by the ideas of the theory of psychoanalysis that he created... while also explaining various ideas that he had in psychoanalysis as well.
In as far as this book is really a collection of thoughts which may reveal a lot more about Adam Phillips than about Freud (according to Freud, hater of biographers), I still feel like this biography helped me widen my understanding of who he was as a person.
I really loved the Epilogue, in which Phillips boldly calls out Ernest Jones for "bending over backwards" to defend Freud's credulity re: Freud's (not secret) personal interest in telepathy... and instead gets curious: why is it so bad for the founder of psychoanalysis to be interested in telepathy? And what might it say about his character if he were? And more...
Anyways. I felt Phillips approached Freud with curiosity, and also, with the tools that Freud himself started to fashion, and I enjoyed the meandering exploration of the early life of an ambitious and complex young Freud.
I can't really do this book justice in a review. I may be back to post some of my favorite quotes.
"And partly because Freud was discovering that we obscure ourselves from ourselves in our life stores; that that is their function. So will will often find that the most dogmatic thing about Freud as a writer is his skepticism. He is always pointing out his ignorance, without ever needing to boast about it. "
So with THAT as a base of theory from this man, what can we actually glean from a biography of Freud, or the stories he tells others in his letters and writings? Anyways. A fun and disorienting ride.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 25, 2024
Anyone familiar with Phillips' writing, in the London Review of Books, etc, will know that he is a great prose stylist, but not the type to write a straightforward, factual bio. He owns this early on, arguing that Freud's life resists the form. But there are cartloads of books on Freud, including many biographies: Peter Gay's 1988 Freud: A Life for Our Time (pro-) and Frederick Crews' Freud: The Making of an Illusion (anti-) are good starting points. Freud is, in Auden's words
- The child develops before language, and so our earliest feelings predate our ability to express them. The analyst tries to draw out things that exist below the level of language. Everything we do is "overdetermined", i.e. there are multiple meanings for each action or saying.
- Dreams are a space where the latent desires are manifest. The analyst can interpret the words the dreamer uses to tell them.
- Freud's great teacher Charcot said (about the treatment of hysteria) toujours, toujours la chose génitale (it's always, always the genital thing). Very influential on Freud's views of child sexuality and neurosis as repressed childhood desire/sexual abuse.
- In 1937 the analyst René Laforgue travelled to Vienna to urge Freud to leave and was shocked by Freud’s attitude toward the Nazis. "The Nazis? I am not afraid of them. Help me rather to combat my true enemy". Astonished, LaForgue asked what that enemy was: "religion, the Roman Catholic Church".
- (Not in the book, but I read recently that around the same time, when finally allowed to leave Nazi Austria for London, Freud was asked to sign a statement swearing that he had not been treated poorly. He did, and added: "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to everyone.")
no more a personThis - part of Yale's Jewish Lives series - is just Phillips being Phillips, and it's great. (He has apparently also written a Winnicott bio, which I must assume is similar.) He describes Freud's writing as a mixture of scientist and performing artist. Some stray notes:
now but a whole climate of opinion
under whom we conduct our different lives
- The child develops before language, and so our earliest feelings predate our ability to express them. The analyst tries to draw out things that exist below the level of language. Everything we do is "overdetermined", i.e. there are multiple meanings for each action or saying.
- Dreams are a space where the latent desires are manifest. The analyst can interpret the words the dreamer uses to tell them.
- Freud's great teacher Charcot said (about the treatment of hysteria) toujours, toujours la chose génitale (it's always, always the genital thing). Very influential on Freud's views of child sexuality and neurosis as repressed childhood desire/sexual abuse.
- In 1937 the analyst René Laforgue travelled to Vienna to urge Freud to leave and was shocked by Freud’s attitude toward the Nazis. "The Nazis? I am not afraid of them. Help me rather to combat my true enemy". Astonished, LaForgue asked what that enemy was: "religion, the Roman Catholic Church".
- (Not in the book, but I read recently that around the same time, when finally allowed to leave Nazi Austria for London, Freud was asked to sign a statement swearing that he had not been treated poorly. He did, and added: "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to everyone.")
May 16, 2024
After much deliberation I have decided to critique this book which I downloaded with much hope of understanding the man whose name is synonymous with erudition, a few day back I thought of dabbling in philosophy, especially Sigmund Freud and I chose to read 'Civilization and it's discontents' believing it to reinforce my non materialistic predilection, thereby gaining satisfaction derived by the conformity of my outlook with a figure of scientific authority, but to my ironic discontent I could not get the gist of what Freud intimated. I reasoned that I needed to know the man before I read his works and this 'knowing' will give me some perspective and make my reading lighter, that what made me chose this book 'Becoming Freud', It's my belief that, in the process of penning 'Becoming Freud' the author unbeknownst to him internalized Freud and used the kind of verbose prose that is typical of Freud, this did not avail me from my quest of understanding Freud, the author's language was obscuringly vague and repetitive, he throws a veil on Freud and then describes the opaque picture that he can make through this veil that he himself cast upon Freud. The author has a vexing proclivity to use the word 'ineluctable' in virtually every other page, and despite reading pages of the book, all I gain from it was a few snippets of Freud's life, I don't recommend this book to someone who is trying to understand Freud but this is only my opinion, and I assume that this book will be just as enlightening to the more advanced reader as it was harrowing for me. For now I have skipped reading books on psychoanalysis, maybe this is something that I would resume in the future.
January 6, 2022
As the first biography I’ve read on Freud, it is hard to know what to compare this with. Honestly, it was a frustrating read at times. In his writing, Adam Phillips betrays his own training as a psychoanalyst, delving into question after question of what this event or that statement signifies about Freud’s childhood, memory of childhood, or adult wants or desires.
From the outset, Phillips admits that Freud was critical of the biographer’s ability to truly reconstruct a life. And quite often throughout the book, Phillips attempts to illustrate this tension. For me, it was overdone and took away from the sketch of Freud’s younger life. Discussions that resulted from this tension disrupted the flow of the book and caused more confusion than clarity.
On a positive note, the author appeared to have a solid grasp of Freud’s thought and contributions. More than anything, this was the bright spot of the book. The development of Freud’s mind and novel therapeutic techniques was a story well-told.
From the outset, Phillips admits that Freud was critical of the biographer’s ability to truly reconstruct a life. And quite often throughout the book, Phillips attempts to illustrate this tension. For me, it was overdone and took away from the sketch of Freud’s younger life. Discussions that resulted from this tension disrupted the flow of the book and caused more confusion than clarity.
On a positive note, the author appeared to have a solid grasp of Freud’s thought and contributions. More than anything, this was the bright spot of the book. The development of Freud’s mind and novel therapeutic techniques was a story well-told.
September 11, 2021
It was different from the previous biography books I have read. It was not created with only normal life of Freud, but also focused what might pushed Freud to create the theories and methods he made. Therefore, it wasn't a dull reading.
The problem I had was the translation. The sentences were all over the place without any bond between. I trusted the translation cause I always liked the work of this publisher but I was pretty much disappointed. You know, when someone tells something they are not quite knowledgeable of, you can sense that even they don't know what they are talking about. That was the feeling I had when reading. Really, it was the first for me. Might find the book in its original language and read again.
The problem I had was the translation. The sentences were all over the place without any bond between. I trusted the translation cause I always liked the work of this publisher but I was pretty much disappointed. You know, when someone tells something they are not quite knowledgeable of, you can sense that even they don't know what they are talking about. That was the feeling I had when reading. Really, it was the first for me. Might find the book in its original language and read again.
August 22, 2018
Adam Phillips, XIX. ve XX. yüzyılların en tartışmalı dahilerinden biri olan Sigmund Freud’un en az bilinen hayat kısmının sislerini aralıyor. Freud’un hayatının ilk 50 yılını (1856-1906) anlatan Phillips, okuyuculara Freud’un hislerini, isteklerini ve yaşamında olanların Psikanalizin oluşmasıyla nasıl bir simbiyoz kurduğunu mufassal bir biçimde aktarıyor. E.Brücke’den tutun da J. Breuer’le olan ilişkisine kadar onunla alakalı hiç duyulmamış enstantaneleri akıcı bir dille yazmış. Böylesi önemli bir eseri dilimize kazandıran Şahika Tokel ve Yapı Kredi Yayınlarına da teşekkür etmek lazım. İyi okumalar
July 31, 2021
A micro-biography with a heavy emphasis on the theoretical implications of Freud’s foundational period from around 1886 to 1906 and the role of storytelling in his practice. What would psychoanalysis be today if Freud had stopped writing in 1906 is a very interesting proposition. Made me want to return to those five key, heady books, which is a good thing. And is psychoanalysis essentially a migrant’s art/science? If so, it is likely to become more, not less, significant in future. Or maybe I’m projecting. A nimble, thoughtful study.
September 18, 2021
This is a splendid volume. Though part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series, and attentive to the role of Judaism in Freud’s thinking, it is by no means limited to that theme. Phillips is, well…Phillips. Strikingly intelligent, and not averse to letting us know that. A magnificent writer, and prone to perfectly constructed, gratuitously complex sentences. And utterly independent, and quite happy to have us know that, as well. This is not the place to first encounter Freud, but for those with some acquaintance with the Freudian corpus and biography, this is an insightful, wise, and moving next step.
September 4, 2025
Freud's opinions on biographies may be the most interesting part of this book... And we should revisit the fact that Freud used women subjects to speculate about men's mental health and the subconscious, then put them down with one of the most sexist perspectives on psychology I have seen in my life... At least he was a Romantic, not like Lacan. He shifted his perspective from cells to people, which makes him much less of an incel than most people would like to admit. Solid, to be honest. I just don't like Freud. Try Kristeva, people.
August 25, 2020
An intellectual biography of Freud.
January 10, 2022
Neskutočne oničom kniha. Prežila som 82 strán, viac sa nedalo.
December 30, 2024
Extremely readable, a fascinating overview of the young Freud. Phillips unpacks many of Freud's ideas and conveys them in a very understandable manner. Brilliant read.
June 15, 2022
While this was an interesting approach to biography, I found the writing and the overall discussion unsatisfying.
October 5, 2016
"a catalogue of modern griefs"
November 30, 2016
"Freud begins to tell his story about psychoanalysis -- a story, as we have seen, that begins to crystallize in the 1880s -- by describing the child's ambition for survival as a quest for pleasure. And pleasure involved the regulation of feelings that always threaten to overwhelm." (122)
Phillips' book is a thick description, but every time he uses this tendentious phrasing -- "his story about psychoanalysis" -- you'd think he's bucking for a Ken Burns-type of popular mausoleum-ization of Freud's contribution to modern life. Phillips thinks psychoanalysis was a science for outsiders, which means no kind of science at all. Nor does he think psychoanalysis should be a science -- he's very plain about that. But to re-domesticate what psychoanalysis was to the literary tradition seems not quite right either. It seems, like so much of the book, an over-determinate reading. Phillips focuses on the Freud of Interpreting Dreams [1899], a strange translation from the German title, and one that I've not seen on either of the two English translations I'm familiar with, nor does Phillips use it consistently throughout the book.
Nits aside, the reading is scrupulously historicized, and Phillips gets that everything from life-writing to the counter-culture is implied by Freud's critique of Catholic deployment of the sexual. Phillips is not telling the story of Freudianism so much as telling the story of Freud's early work in a highly self-conscious, Freudian way. This will not be a book for those who look to inter Freud in contemporary theory. I'm still amazed at the cultural cut in The Interpretation. In trying to recuperate their dream lore, Freud offered a spiritual integrity to his (typically Jewish) patients' inner lives. I don't see how such an investment in the vernacular and its speakers can be over-estimated. For me it makes Freud one of the few enough heroes of the modern.
Phillips' book is a thick description, but every time he uses this tendentious phrasing -- "his story about psychoanalysis" -- you'd think he's bucking for a Ken Burns-type of popular mausoleum-ization of Freud's contribution to modern life. Phillips thinks psychoanalysis was a science for outsiders, which means no kind of science at all. Nor does he think psychoanalysis should be a science -- he's very plain about that. But to re-domesticate what psychoanalysis was to the literary tradition seems not quite right either. It seems, like so much of the book, an over-determinate reading. Phillips focuses on the Freud of Interpreting Dreams [1899], a strange translation from the German title, and one that I've not seen on either of the two English translations I'm familiar with, nor does Phillips use it consistently throughout the book.
Nits aside, the reading is scrupulously historicized, and Phillips gets that everything from life-writing to the counter-culture is implied by Freud's critique of Catholic deployment of the sexual. Phillips is not telling the story of Freudianism so much as telling the story of Freud's early work in a highly self-conscious, Freudian way. This will not be a book for those who look to inter Freud in contemporary theory. I'm still amazed at the cultural cut in The Interpretation. In trying to recuperate their dream lore, Freud offered a spiritual integrity to his (typically Jewish) patients' inner lives. I don't see how such an investment in the vernacular and its speakers can be over-estimated. For me it makes Freud one of the few enough heroes of the modern.
February 13, 2024
The Psychoanalyst and English professor Adam Philips’s 2014 biography of Sigmund Freud, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst is a biography of Freud up until the year 1906 when Freud was fifty years old (Philips 145). I read the book on my Kindle. Philips believes by 1906, Freud had developed the basic framework and philosophy of the field of psychoanalysis. Philips is a Professor of English at the University of York in the United Kingdom. Philips’s biography of Freud is for Yale University Press and the Leon D. Black Foundation's Jewish Lives series. Philips’s biography explores Freud’s philosophy of writing of biographical writing. Freud was skeptical of biographical writing (Philips 22). Freud believed that a writer of biographies reveals more about themselves than about their biographical subjects (Philips 22-23). Phillips writes that Freud believes that psychoanalysis unlike biographical writings allows a person to understand their truth in a way that biographical writings could never hope to uncover (Philips 23). Philips writes that Freud viewed biographical writings as writings on behalf of “other people: parents, doctors, rabbis, and politicians. Psychoanalysis was to be a medical treatment which enabled people to speak on their own behalf.” (Philips 29). Philips’s biography of Freud is both a biography of Freud's early life and an examination of Freudian philosophy regarding biographical writings.
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