Adaptations: Disquisitions on Psychoanalysis

by Dr. Phillip Freeman

I have heard audio cassette versions of a few of these astonishing speeches, because bootleg tapes of a few of them have circulated in my circles. The speeches are a literary genre invented by Phillip Freeman, compounded out of the spirit Freud's essays, the most brilliant style of university lecture, the most subtle and savage standup comedy I have ever heard, and, perhaps oddly, the most moving and protracted of wedding toasts. But maybe not so oddly, for these addresses are a marriage of love, wit, great learning and immense intelligence. I know nothing remotely like them. It is a fantastic stroke of luck that they have found their way into print.Fredric Paul Smoler, Sarah Lawrence CollegeThese brilliant, nonlinear annual disquisitions on the state of psychoanalysis, gild their philosophic pills in marvelous comic displays of their author’s erudition. Charming the reader as they illuminate the multiple problems currently facing psychoanalysts, they can provide profit and pleasure to a much wider readership than the local celebrants to whom they were originally addressed.Anton Kris, MD, Boston Psychoanalytic InstitutePsychoanalysts tend to take themselves much too seriously…but Phillip Freeman has an antidote… he holds up a fun house mirror … ruthlessly surveying the field, mocking every sacred cow he can find and puncturing any balloon that has gotten overinflated. This he does with deadpan psychotic humor and irresistible charm. Lucky Boston! Phillip is the Shakespearean fool who illuminates, and thereby ameliorates, the tragedy.Owen Renik, MD, San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute… a running critique of the state of the discipline, more accurately, a critique of the state of Discipline itself in our time… Dr. Freeman has produced brilliantly creative, psychoanalytically informed satire. He has permitted himself, as Freud wrote of the social satirist Heine, "to give expression—jokingly, at all events—to psychological truths that are severely proscribed." In taking this hallowed liberty, Dr. Freeman has produced a work that deserves reading by the widest possible audience. Peter Wohlauer, MDBoston Psychoanalytic Institute

91 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 21, 2009