He went on to study English at St John's College, Oxford, graduating with a third class degree. As a child, his first interest was the study of tropical birds and it was not until adolescence that he developed an interest in literature. He grew up as part of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins and describes his parents as "very consciously Jewish but not believing". Phillips was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954, the child of second-generation Polish Jews. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. Since 2003 he has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. Phillips concludes by speculating what psychoanalysis might have become if Freud had died in 1906, before the emergence of a psychoanalytic movement over which he had to preside.Īdam Phillips is a British psychotherapist and essayist. So as well as incorporating the writings of Freud and his contemporaries, Becoming Freud also uses the work of historians of the Jews in Europe in this significant period in their lives, a period of unprecedented political freedom and mounting persecution. Psychoanalysis was also Freud’s way of coming to terms with the fate of the Jews in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this biography, Adam Phillips, whom the New Yorker calls Britain’s foremost psychoanalytical writer,” emphasizes the largely and inevitably undocumented story of Freud’s earliest years as the oldest-and favored-son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and suggests that the psychoanalysis Freud invented was, among many other things, a psychology of the immigrant-increasingly, of course, everybody’s status in the modern world. Freud invented a psychological treatment that involved the telling and revising of life stories, but he was himself skeptical of the writing of such stories. Becoming Freud is the story of the young Freud-Freud up until the age of fifty-that incorporates all of Freud’s many misgivings about the art of biography.
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