Wild Analysis

Description

This volume brings together Freud's most significant writings on psychoanalytic method and the question of psychoanalytic technique. The fundamental concern of these works is the complex relationship between patient and analyst. Here Freud explores both the crucial importance and huge risks involved in patients' transference of their emotions on to their therapist. He also shows the ambiguous dangers of "wild analysis" by doctors who are insufficiently trained or offer instant solutions; looks at issues such as the length of a treatment; and offers a trenchant discussion of the controversy surrounding psychoanalysis as a medical discipline. And, in examining the tensions between the practice of psychoanalysis and its central theory - the disruptive nature of the unconscious - Freud asks, can there ever really be rules for analysis?

Adam Phillips was born in Cardiff in 1954. He is the author of numerous works of psychotherapy and literary criticism, including Winnicott, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, Going Sane, Side Effects, On Kindness, co-written with Barbara Taylor, On Balance, Missing Out, One Way and Another and Becoming Freud. Phillips is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, the Observer and the New York Times, and he is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations. His new book, Unforbidden Pleasures, comes out in November 2015 and is published by Hamish Hamilton.