A sophisticated, mind-stretching argument for psychoanalysis as a way of understanding why we want a good life.
You can’t always get what you want.
The British psychoanalyst Phillips recognizes that, while psychotherapy may not be a flawless science, it offers a means of coping with the world and understanding the relationship between desire and happiness. This collection of essays brings together the legacies of Sigmund Freud and the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, both of whom were concerned with integrating human needs into a fulfilling social life. The result is a self-help book of a very high order, rich with quotations and explications of literary and philosophical texts phrased in an aphoristic style. “People always do things for good reasons, even though often they do not know what these reasons are. Psychoanalysis is there to help us work out what our reasons might be, and what we think about them.” The reader will work hard to find such clear statements, though. Much of the book delves deep into the work of thinkers such as D.W. Winnicott and Gilles Deleuze, trying to find concord between those who focus on the unconscious and those who focus on everyday lived life. “The psychoanalyst is an essentialist who believes in the unconscious…the pragmatist is an anti-essentialist, unwilling to believe in determinisms and committed to human agency and choice-making.” Psychoanalysis begins with resistance; pragmatism begins with acceptance. If you take Phillips at his word, you will go into psychoanalysis to struggle with unfulfilled desire while recognizing that the life you want will not be provided by others but found for yourself, both inside your head and outside in the world. Not a book for the casual reader.
A sophisticated, mind-stretching argument for psychoanalysis as a way of understanding why we want a good life.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780374617974
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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