L. Sigmund Freud Lecture by Adam Phillips on the occasion of Sigmund Freud's birthday, 06.05.2023
Using Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus as some kind of context for Freud's work during the catastrophic cultural disillusionments of the First and Second World Wars, the lecture explores how psychoanalysis – and Freud's work in particular – addresses questions about the nature of belief, and what it might be about so-called human nature that we can go on believing in after such global destructiveness.
Adam Phillips was formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London, and is now a psychoanalyst in private practice in London and a writer. He is the author of over twenty books on psychoanalysis and literature, most recently On Getting Better and The Cure for Psychoanalysis. He is a Visiting Professor in the English Department at the University of York, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.