how does personal change come about? Two new biographies, of Sigmund Freud and Franz Kafka, offer us some tantalizing clues.
The literary critic Harold Bloom declared back in 1986 that Freudian ideas “have begun to merge with our culture, and indeed now form the only Western mythology that contemporary intellectuals have in common.” But nearly thirty years later, that doesn’t ring so true. In a May 2014 review in the New Yorker, book critic Joan Acocella swatted away the topic with a dismissive aside: “Why fuss over psychoanalysis, so seldom practiced today?” The mystique of psychoanalysis seems to have evaporated.
For the British psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips this is a welcome development. A former general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Freud’s texts, Phillips has for years been exploring the ways in which psychoanalysis can help us lead more pleasurable lives — lives rooted in...
