In four well-crafted essays, English psychotherapist Phillips again shows that he is to Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis what Stephen Jay Gould is to paleontology and what the late Lewis Thomas was to molecular biology: a scientist of great depth who can write engagingly for the humanist reader. The prolific Phillips (Terror and Experts, 1996, etc.) here deals with the ever-inconclusive struggle between human curiosity, imagination, and the quest for personal gratification (the ``beast,'' or what Freud called the ``pleasure principle'') on the one hand, and the societal focus on order, rules, and conformity to existing moral norms (the ``nursery,'' or ``reality principle'') on the other. While some psychologists drive home an argument, Phillips is an associative writer, drawing on literary as much as psychological texts, and nimbly dancing around his topics, viewing them from many angles. For example, in a wonderful piece entitled ``Just Rage'' (the ``just,'' of course, packs a double meaning), he links fury to one's ideals and their betrayal, the desire for revenge, the humiliation of being unimportant in others' eyes, adaptation to a parent's wishes and values, and the need to express a self-sustaining narcissism. Phillips's book is filled with piquant language, as in his observation that psychoanalysis necessarily involves ``the high art of disillusionment'' (``the modern mythology of enlightened frustration, the comforting ironization of desire'') and that what analysts ``do everyday [is] find useful descriptions of humiliation.'' Perhaps not coincidentally, his most stimulating essay is entitled ``A Stab at Hinting,'' wherein Phillips writes of both the creative and the psychological significance of the hesitant attempt at revelation that he calls a ``hint'' (e.g., a gesture, slip of the tongue, or dream). His own writing is full of such ``hints,'' which sometimes make the direction of his prose difficult to follow, yet which far more often are highly imaginative, richly evocative, and deeply rewarding.
Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-40049-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
One scientist's hopeful meditations on the possibility of a consciousness beyond death. In the Western world, science has largely replaced religion as the means to explain the universe. In this environment, death has become ever more terrifying as rationalists dismiss as naive the idea of a blissful heaven: When the brain dies, that's it. Physicist/astronomer Darling (Equations of Eternity, 1993, etc.) seeks to renew the hope for an eternal soul—to put the ghost back in the machine—without losing an audience of rational, science-minded thinkers. Starting anthropologically, he leads us from the dawn of self-consciousness through the evolution of the self and the concept of that self somehow surviving the death of the body. But, says Darling, ``I,'' the individual who exists in linear time, is a grand illusion, a ``chimera of the brain.'' Individual consciousness is a tiny sliver of the space-time continuum; in fact, the brain is not the source of consciousness but merely a regulator, a processor of consciousness, as lungs process air and stomachs digest food. Our brains make each of us unique, he contends, but they severely restrict the way we experience reality. Darling describes a universal consciousness, ``an integral, irreducible part of reality,'' that exists outside the confines of the human mind. It is to this larger consciousness that we shall return when the body dies and self and time are stripped away. A joyful preview of this transcendent oneness has been granted, according to Darling, to those who have mastered Eastern meditation techniques and those who have had near-death experiences. When we learn to set aside our limiting selves, death will lose its terror. Darling's ideas are comforting, but hardly definitive, and certainly not original. He coats standard, trickle-down mysticism with pseudo-scientific terms, hoping to make it easier for Western skeptics to swallow.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41845-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
A trenchant deconstruction of much-ballyhooed revelations (in Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, by Anthony Summers, 1993) that longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was gay—plus an analysis of Hoover's policies toward sex and crime. Theoharis (History/Marquette Univ., The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition, not reviewed) scores Summers's ``mind-boggling,'' simplistic account of Hoover's ``compromised directorship,'' in which he allegedly suffered Mafia blackmail and pursued politicians' sexual peccadillos out of his own hypocrisy. If Summers is right, asks the author, why haven't former FBI agents or attorneys general come forward to corroborate such charges? Theoharis, who doubts that Hoover was gay, believes the ``wily and cautious'' bureaucrat would never have let himself be compromised; he also finds several weaknesses in the account of Summers's best source, Susan Rosenstiel (wife of a liquor magnate), who said she had seen Hoover in drag at gay orgies. Hoover, the author argues, exploited the ``moralistic concern about personal conduct'' that pervaded the country when he took office in the 1920s. He collected dirt on numerous politicians and public figures, gay and straight, but usually used such information cautiously, relying on Congress and the press rather than blackmail and direct publicity. Hoover seized on WW IIera concerns about fascism and communism to further build the FBI. This politically popular concentration on fighting subversives, Theoharis contends, damaged the FBI's capacity to fight organized crime: ``From 1936 Hoover for the most part abandoned law enforcement.'' Hoover survived, the author concludes, because his politics matched those of our political elite. Only after Hoover died in 1972 did the FBI turn to organized crime, needing to recapture public opinion after embarrassing revelations about its extralegal methods. Students of history and policy should pay heed.
Pub Date: March 10, 1995
ISBN: 1-56663-071-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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