Terrors and Experts

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by Adam Phillips

Harvard University Press

Due/Published November 1996, 128 pages, paper

ISBN 0674874803

This book is a chronicle of the all-too-human terror that drives us into the arms of experts, and of how expertise, in the form of psychoanalysis, addresses our fears - in essence, turns our terror into meaning. Phillips takes up those topics about which psychoanalysis claims expertise - childhood, sexuality, love, development, dreams, art, the unconscious, unhappiness - and explores what Freud's description of the unconscious does to the idea of expertise, in life and in psychoanalysis itself. If we are not, as Freud's ideas tell us, masters of our own houses, then what kind of claims can we make for ourselves? These questions, so central to the human condition and to the state of psychoanalysis, resonate through this book as Phillips considers our notions of competence, of a professional self, of expertise in every realm of life from parenting to psychoanalysis. Terrors and Experts testifies to what makes psychoanalysis interesting, to that interest in psychoanalysis - which teaches us the meaning of our ignorance - that makes the terrors of life more bearable, even valuable.