Phillips’s looping lines of inquiry strike some of his critics as troubling, exasperating or simply annoying ... But eliciting such frustration is perhaps part of the point ... Phillips doesn’t try to prevent us from thinking whatever it is that we want to think; what he does is repeatedly coax us to ask if that’s what we really believe, and how we can be sure.
This is a wise, generous book. Phillips has a mild, expansive way of explaining the insights that psychoanalysis offers into our everyday drama, its glimpses of differently shaped problems behind the ones we thought we had ... But a book about psychoanalysis is not an analysis. There is no program here, no self-help regimen. These essays won’t cure us, but they may make us curious.
By the book’s final pages, Phillips has rendered the term "giving up" spacious and flexible, having woven together psychology and literature to reveal suggestive points of contact. Even so, it’s a lot of material to fit under one terminological umbrella, and it can be challenging to grasp how exactly Phillips wields the term in discrete essays—much less to make those individual definitions cohere ... Phillips’s model is most compelling when grounded in the mechanics of literary characterization.
Some readers may find the author’s tendency to speak in high-culture abstractions not to their taste. However, those who enjoy heady engagement with ideas from the upper registers of literature, philosophy, and psychology will undoubtedly find this book exhilarating.
