On Flirtation

by Adam Phillips

People tend to flirt only with serious things - madness, disaster, other people's affections. So is flirtation dangerous, exploiting the ambiguity of promises to sabotage our cherished notions of commitment? Or is it, as Adam Phillips suggests, a productive pleasure, keeping things in play, letting us get to know them in different ways, allowing us the fascination of what is unconvincing?

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis, Essays, Love, Philosophy, Theory

252 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1994

About the author

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.

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."

Reviews

[Buck · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I make my way through this rambling indie drama called life, it becomes increasingly clear to me that I don’t know shit about shit. Here I am, practically middle-aged, and I still can’t distinguish between my flabby white ass and a hole in the ground. Frustrating, that.

And so I read, compulsively, you might almost say desperately, hoping to pick up some wisdom on the cheap. Which is incredibly dumb. Books are written by, and for, clever buggers, and being clever with words doesn’t make you wise: just take a look at the biography of any great writer. At best, books can only bring out, through some quasi-Platonic midwifery, what was already obscurely present in us. The rest is just factoids.

For what it’s worth, On Flirtation articulated a bunch of stuff I sort of already knew, but didn’t know that I knew. I’d describe it as self-help for people who think they’re too smart for self-help. The author, Adam Phillips, is a practicing psychoanalyst and an honest-to-goodness Freudian (how quaint is that?) But his is a groovy, pragmatic Freudianism: in effect, he’s saying, “Hey, I have no idea how much of this shit is “true”, but I find it pretty persuasive, and it helps me make sense of the chaos of existence. Maybe it can help you too.” An engaging line of argument, I think, and if you objected that the same claims could be made for astrology or Christian Science, he’d probably shrug, take another toke and say, “Yeppers.”

Whatever your thoughts on Freud—and I’m agnostic myself—you’ll find some smart obsevations in here—not super-profound observations, mind you, but good, sensible ones, elegantly expressed. Here he is on success: “People can go to remarkable lengths to avert the catastrophe of their own success.” (I now have a new excuse.) He’s even better, or just more sobering, on love:

...The fluency of ‘idealization’…is replaced by the haltings of ambivalence. After all the excitement, there are the revelations of dismay. Frustration is the aura of the real.

Frustration is the aura of the real. Who can’t relate to that?

I’m not wise, not by a long shot, but I have this idea that wisdom must be melancholy. Not joyless, not bitter, just melancholy. Even if Freud was wrong about everything else, I sense that his tragic view of life was fundamentally right. He recognized that we’re all wounded, all incurable, and that being human is a chronic condition. You can treat it, you can manage it, but good luck getting over it.

[A. Raca · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Flörtün avantajlarından biri, hem bizi kölece, gözü kör bir tutkudan -ve onun tam tersinden- koruması, hem de böyle büyük mutlaklıklann gücünü teslim etmesidir. Bir başka deyişle flört, çoğunlukla bilinçdışı bir kuşkuculuktur. Oysa inanmışlık durumu, aralıksız bir fikir değiştirme/karar verme sürecinde olduğumuz gerçeğini gizler."

[M. Sarki · Rating 2 out of 5]

I flirted long enough with this. Nothing instrumental found to enlighten me or add to my life. For the most part, a reading disappointment.

[Atakanozcan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Psikanaliz anlaşılmak için oluşmuş bir dal değil gibi sanki. Kendi cehaletimle beraber bu kadar kompleks kavramlar ve alakasız bulduğum/hakim olmadığım kültürel göndermeler yüzünden kitapta kayboldum. Boğularak yüzmeye çalışmak gibiydi; bata çıka okudum

[Ahmet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yazarımızın diğer kitabında olduğu gibi psikoanaliz yöntemi ve onun ilk uygulayıcıları olan Freud ve Winnicott tan bolca bahsettiği alıntılarla açıkladığı bir kitap,
Flört üzerinde çok durmadan psikoanaliz nedir nasıl yapılır nerelerde işe yarar ve yeni teknikler ele alınmış, yine psikoloji ile ilgilenmemiş kişilere hitap etmeyecek bir kitap,
Okuması çok kolay değil, meraklısına diyelim

[Meltem · Rating 5 out of 5]

The collection of research in this book show the worth of playing with ideas. Phillips tosses out questions, pick on and drops marks about psychological development which reveal possibilities you might not have considered before. The subject matter of the essays is generally geared towards those with some background in psychoanalytic theory, but is accessible to a general audience. The end result, like other forms of flirtation, is that you find yourself wanting more.

[Jesse Summers]

I lost this book for a while—or did I hide it from myself? Psychoanalytic writing is fun.

[Daria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not, strictly speaking, a book about flirtation, but instead a series of essays on subjects and texts relating to psychoanalysis. The flirtation theme weaves in and out, but Phillips isn't fussed about it having tie everything together. There's some Phillips musing on or regurgitating the Big Questions - short essays such as "On Love" and "On Grief" appear, but there's also book reviews (how biographers have encountered the seminal figures of psychoanalysis) and some absolutely smashing literary criticism (John Clare chapter). All throughout there's Phillips the psychoanalyst chiming in with yet another make-of-it-what-you-will observation, punctuated by the usual of course: "Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders."

Delightful.

[Musab · Rating 4 out of 5]

The end was a bit hard to get through but it’s worth it.


“Old tree, your whole life has been condemned to oblivion—as blank and unrecorded as the summer breeze that once rustled your first leaves.

Back when you were only one year old, the wind fanned those baby leaves—and who now can trace where those leaves ended up?

To a thinking mind, your story looks just as trackless.

I stare at your sheltering branches. You grew unnoticed until you flourished, leaving all that unremembered past behind you.

So many years—maybe centuries—lie buried there that even the ewe dozing in your shade (or the fly that’s just landed on a leaf) knows almost as much of your past as I do: practically nothing.

Thus blank oblivion reigns, even amid Earth’s most sublime creations.”

[Shaun · Rating 3 out of 5]

By now I’m quite familiar with the combination of essays as the format of Phillips’ books. Some appeal and others don’t.

The two key concepts here that stood out and had a an impact on me were on flirtation (with life) for the value of being playful and contingency as opposed to always being busy for the sake of it.

The other essays were interesting and taught me something new about individuals or books. Lots about poetry that I don’t really connect with.

[Gokce Zora · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Flört Üzerine" olan herkesin okumasını tavsiye edeceğim, her cümlesi iki kere ve üzerinde dura dura okunması gereken bir kitap.

[Zeynep Özmen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Birkaç bilgi dışında çok da okunası bir kitap değil

[ica]

more circuitous than anticipated/advertised but nonetheless (all the more so for it?) a banger

[Nathanael Booth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Flirtation, for Phillips, is the art of non-committedness—and is, of course, the core of psychoanalysis proper. Rather than being a way to discover The Truth of matters, Phillips sees psychoanalysis as a way of opening up possibilities. This collection of essays—which ranges from a discussion of morality to 19th C poets—attempts to put into practice what Phillips describes in theory early on: to enter into a series of reflections that do not resolve, do not argue, simply play with ideas and then move on. It can be dry at times, it can be a slog (particularly if one is not familiar with the authors Phillips is riffing on) but it can also be exhilarating, as when Phillips lets loose with observations like this: “Disciples are people who haven’t yet got the joke” (162) or “Righteous indignation is always a sign that we are in need of a new description” (152).

Worth dipping into, certainly—especially given its thesis of “flirtation,” an organizing principle that virtually ensures that there will be something different for every reader.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the earlier review that called Phillips "dreamy." The writing does move like in a dream, poetically, sometimes obtusely. Also, as with a dream, at times I doubted the ideas being presented to me—they were too tidily witty, and reminded me of Phillips' constant reaching toward literature from the foothold in psychoanalysis.

[Mina-Louise]

I especially enjoyed 'Freud and the Uses of Forgetting,' 'On Love' and 'The Telling of Selves' in the first part of the book (also found 'On Success interesting), and in the second part I liked the review of cross-dressing, Erich Fromm, perversion, and freud's circle a lot.

If I ever win the lottery I'm getting myself several years of psychoanalysis.

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

the title is somewhat misleading... a lot of psychotherapy theory, which i thought was going to be boring... but this book showed me quite a few things about liminal thinking/being - what it means to transgress certain boundaries and live fully in doubt.

[m · Rating 3 out of 5]

also good.

[Eddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

He's so dreamy!

[Abby Hagler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Writing- impenatrable and pedantic.
Chapters - nonsensical except for the first one.
Maybe I just wasn't in the mood to read this, but it certainly wasn't my pail of blueberries.

[Frank Karioris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as flirtatious as I was hoping for. Super full of insights though.