Attention Seeking

Description

A short, fascinating introduction to the concept of attention, from Britain's pre-eminent psychoanalyst 'Everything depends on what, if anything, we find interesting- on what we are encouraged and educated to find interesting, and what we find ourselves being interested in despite ourselves. There is our official curiosity and our unofficial curiosity (and psychoanalysis is a story about the relationship between the two) . . .' Based on three connected talks on the subject of attention, this pocket-sized book from Adam Phillips is a fascinating and memorable introduction to the nature and the uses of our attention.

Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently Attention Seeking, In Writing and Unforbidden Pleasures. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

The best living essayist writing in English The Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis . . . brilliantly amusing and often highly unsettling * The Times * One of those writers whom it is a pleasure simply to hear think * Sunday Telegraph * Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored * Observer * Adam Phillips is that rarest of phenomena, a trained clinician who is also a sublime writer Playfully digressive style... He is the finest living decipherer of affective life the Bob Dylan of psychoanalysis * Daily Telegraph *