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Title: The Ways of the Will: Selected Essays, Expanded Edition by Leslie H. Farber, Robert Boyers, Ann Farber ISBN: 0-465-02358-4 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 20 November, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Gorgeous Stuff
Comment: Farber's essays, which have inspired Adam Phillips's elliptical and allusive style, are the real thing: tough, poetic, realistic. Farber has that kind of American density, but it's matched by a more European fluency and erudition, and the result is a delight. This is rigorous thinking, effortlessly expressed (though not easily digested).
Rating: 5
Summary: Thirteen great essays
Comment: This is an "expanded edition" of a collection of thoughtful, wholly original and thrilling essays published in the 1960's. Several additional and valuable pieces appear in this new edition.
Leslie Farber was a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst (not, as the blurb on the back of the book says, a psychologist) with a private practice, professional affiliations, and a passion for thinking and writing about the ways of the psyche, culture, art and literature, and a variety of other concerns. In his life as in his practice he was nonconformist, original, thoughtful, deeply humane - and well-loved by many. He died of a heart condition in 1981. (Unmentioned in this book.)
His essays are unusual and wholly original - not just for the playful and deeply creative ways that he writes about psychic matters, but for his radical departure from the prevailing language and comparative abstruseness of most psychoanalytic writing of his time. It can be said that Farber began a trend (that Adam Phillips most of all, continues) of pleasurable and readable psychoanalytic essays that embrace literature, history, popular currents, and are intended to thrill with their elegance, their psychic playfulness (and rigor - at once) and their process - as well as for their conclusions.
Some of his writing appeared in the popular press (Harper's, Commentary, The New Republic, and others). There is a compelling playfulness to his method. Some of his pet themes are jealousy, envy, lust, sex, despair, suicide, lying and truth-telling, love and its attendant difficulties. Some titles of his essays: "I'm Sorry, Dear" - - on the expectations that the sexology movement engendered; "O Death, Where is Thy Sting-a-Ling?" - on death and dying; "He Said, She Said" - more on the life of couples. Henry Stack Sullivan, schizophrenia, will and anxiety - are additional subjects.
There are thirteen essays. To read them is to get a good picture of Farber's amazing mind and method. "Lying on the couch," first published in 1975, begins by noting that deliberate lying - as psychopathology or just bad form - has historically been ignored in the psychoanalytic literature. Freud, however, expelled a member of his inner circle for just this vice. Farber quotes the text of that pink slip, and then proceeds with a discussion on lying, on "dubious revelation," on the panoply of reasons, justification, and excuses for lying. It's a great read.
The big topic of 'will' (its predecessor is Victorian 'will power') was one of Farber's large concerns. Sexuality - its freight of complexities ("the failure of dialogue") and complications, as well as the transformational power of its full expression - are explored in several essays. "He Said, She Said" is one of many gems.
Of Farber's compelling style and substance, Adam Phillips has written: "Out of languages at odds with each other, if not actually at war with each other - the languages of Freud, of Sullivan, of Buber; of autobiography, of existentialism, of phenomenology, of a too-much-protested-against romanticism - Farber has found a way of being at once easily accessible to his readers, and surely but subtly unusually demanding of them." These essays, along with Robert Boyer's excellent Introduction and Anne Farber's Afterword (an essay that is also a tender remembrance) show us how he did it.
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Title: Mockingbird Years: A Life in and Out of Therapy by Emily Fox Gordon ISBN: 0465027288 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 10 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Monogamy by Adam Phillips ISBN: 0679776176 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 April, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Lying, despair, jealousy, envy, sex, suicide, drugs, and the good life by Leslie H Farber ISBN: 0465042937 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 1976 List Price(USD): $11.50 |
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