Assessment
What comes across most clearly (to some) in Phillips’ work is his intelligence, his strength of character, his breadth of learning and, most profoundly, his humility; and he has certainly been described as "perhaps the best theorist of the modes and malfunctions of modernist psychology." For his intellectual resources, Phillips "draws from philosophy, literature, politics amongst others. However, whilst this affords Phillips the opportunity to be expansive it also makes him a maverick", and others "suspicious of his work", so that he has been called "ludic and elusive and intellectually slippery." Indeed "To his critics...Phillips is little more than a charlatan about whom an alarming cult of personality is developing" He himself was opposed to 'the idealization that is a refusal to know someone', and even in appraisal of the psychoanalytic greats thought that alongside "thoughtful consideration...puerile consideration would not be the end of the world", in accordance with his enduring scepticism "about psychoanalysis...it should be the opposite, the antidote to a cult." We should therefore perhaps best assess him in the spirit of his own assessment of Freud as 'an interesting writer. Not a figure to idolize, but an interesting writer.'
Read more about this topic: Adam Phillips (psychologist)
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