Unforbidden Pleasures
ISBN10: 1250131871
ISBN13: 9781250131874
Trade Paperback
208 Pages
$17.00
CA$22.50
In Unforbidden Pleasures, Adam Phillips takes Oscar Wilde as a springboard to take a deep dive into the function of taboo in society, beginning with the fall of our “first parents,” Adam and Eve, and progressing through the work of the great psychoanalytic thinkers. Forbidden pleasures, he argues, are the ones we tend to think about, yet when we look into it, we may get as much gratification, if not more, from unforbidden pleasures—those things that are easy to attain and socially sanctioned. And we may have underestimated just how restricted our restiveness, in thrall to the forbidden and its rules, makes us.
Reviews
Praise for Unforbidden Pleasures
"It is a real pleasure to glide through philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis with Adam Phillips. Through his fine essays, one finds oneself paying attention to things that repay reflection without demanding allegiance to a new set of principles."—Michael S. Roth, The Washington Post
"Phillips is . . . a bit like an Oliver Sacks of psychoanalysis, both affable and unalarmed."—Gail Caldwell, The Boston Sunday Globe
"[Phillips] writes playfully and suggestively on a topic that tends to get written about in the most unliterary of languages. This attractive quality in his work—its inviting (and mildly paradoxical) combination of the provocative and the ambivalent—is evident from the very beginning of his new collection, Unforbidden Pleasures."—Mark O'Connell, The New York Times Book Review
"There is a prismatic quality to Adam Phillips's thought. Pour in some Oscar Wilde or Emerson, Kafka, or, most often, Freud, and watch the British writer and psychoanalyst's refractions multiply, mesh, and twist in kaleidescopic considerations"—Chris Wallace, Interview Magazine
"A dense, challenging, provocative meditation on morality and identity."—Kirkus Reviews
“This slim volume is rich in psychological, philosophical, and literary insight.”—Publishers Weekly
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
Laying Down the Law
We seem never to ask ‘Why do you know?’ or ‘How do you believe?’
J. L. Austin, ‘Other Minds’
I
When Oscar...