Devorah Baum— In his amazingly pleasurable new book, In Writing, psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips describes writing, in his experience, as an “amazing pleasure.” Lucky him. He sits down to write, he says, and the writing just happens—he’s never “trying” to write and meeting some sort of internal resistance or
“Biographers, Freud knew even as a young man, spoke on other people’s behalf—like parents, doctors, rabbis, and politicians. Psychoanalysis was to be a medical treatment which enabled people to speak on their own behalf.”—Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud In his biography of Sigmund Freud’s early life, Becoming Freud: The Making of
There is no American novel with a success story more contentious than that of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. First published in 1969 amid scathing condemnations, it sold over three million copies in its first six years. Even more remarkable is that after four decades, the novel’s commercial and critical success
With heavy hearts and minds, we said good-bye to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl at the beginning of December, who, over her career as a psychoanalyst, writer, biographer, and philosopher, contributed immensely to our understanding of humanity and modern social conscience. In the Chronicle Review, Peter Monaghan wrote a poignant tribute to her
We at Yale University Press are very sad to report the untimely passing of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl last Thursday, December 1, at age 65. As a psychoanalyst and philosopher, Young-Bruehl brought her interest in the ideologies of prejudice to her many books, including her YUP biographies of Anna Freud and mentor
Follow @yaleSCIbooks Everyone has to grow up sometime. The always accompanying question is: how? From birth, we are set on different developmental paths, most outwardly distinguished by gender. But somehow this idea seems overly simplified to explain individual experience. Boys will be boys; girls will be girls, but does that