The Group, led by the distinguished Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips will conduct the close reading of a series of classic papers in the psychoanalytic tradition, especially the a movement in British psychoanalysis known as the ‘Independent Group’. Areas of focus will include the tradition’s investments in the significance of aesthetic experience and literature, in democratic relationships, in teaching, and in conceptions of the private and the public – and public service.
About Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips is a practicing psychoanalyst and a visiting professor of English at the University of York. He was formerly chief psychologist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. Both the New Yorker and Le Monde have described Adam Phillips as ‘Britain’s foremost psychoanalytic writer’, and John Banville has praised him as ‘one of the finest prose stylists at work in the language, an Emerson of our time.’ He has been a regular writer for The London Review of Books, the Observer, and the New York Times for many years, and is the author of several books, including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (1994), On Flirtation (1995), The Beast in the Nursery (1998), Darwin’s Worms (1999), Houdini’s Box (2001), Going Sane (2005), Side Effects (2006), On Balance (2010), Missing Out (2012), Becoming Freud (2014) and Unforbidden Pleasures (2015).
Seminar Format and Schedule
The Interdisciplinary Psychoanalysis Reading Group takes place three times a year. Each seminar lasts one and a half to two hours. Attendance is free and open to everyone, but there is a small amount of required reading, which will be uploaded to this page a few weeks in advance of each meeting. At each seminar Phillips will introduce the paper and lead the discussion.
Organisers: Professor Jaś Elsner, Professor Constanze Güthenke, Professor Marion Durand and Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby.
Enquiries: please contact Professor Jaś Elsner at jas.elsner@ccc.ox.ac.uk.