The Pleasures of Censorship

This lecture explores, partly through the work of Franz Kafka and Sigmund Freud among others, censorship as an opportunity and a resource for both pleasure-seeking and the constitution of subjectivity.

Adam Phillips is possibly our era’s most scintillating, stimulating, intoxicating, and thoughtful writer of non-fiction.  Living and working in London, he is also a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst and infuses all of his writing with a psychoanalytic sensibility, that is, an attunement to the inner life.  His two dozen books include, most recently, On Wanting to Change, and also: On Flirtation: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Uncommitted Life; Equals: On Inhibition, Mockery, Hierarchy, and the Pleasures of Democracy; Winnicott; Unforbidden Pleasures; and On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life.  Of the latter book, another superb writer of non-fiction, Robert Coles, observed: “A childlike freshness of vision informs these essays, which are at once compact, sophisticated, sharply knowing, yet almost provocatively casual, relaxed, amusing.  Phillips is strikingly original and suggestive as a wry observer of many phenomena, including psychoanalysis.  A telling, engaging, brilliantly amusing, and unsettling book.”  We have long been wanting to have interaction with Adam Phillips, and we look forward to February 9 finally having an opportunity to enjoy his unique insights into the world around and within us.

After attending this session, participants should be able to:
 
1. Describe the function of censorship and how it can produce pleasure.
2. Describe the role of censorship in the constitution of subjectivity.