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Overview
In this sparkling, provocative collection of meditations on coupledom and its discontents, Adam Phillips manages to unsettle one of our most dearly held ideals, that of the monogamous couple, by speculating upon the impulses that most threaten it—boredom, desire, and the tempting idea that erotic fulfillment might lie elsewhere. With 121 brilliant aphorisms, the witty, erudite psychoanalyst who gave us On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored distills the urgent questions and knotty paradoxes behind our mating impulse, and reveals the centrality of monogamy to our notions of marriage, family, the self—in fact, to everything that matters.
The only truly monogamous relationship is the one we have with ourselves.
Every marriage is a blind date that makes you wonder what the alternatives are to a blind date.
There's nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage.
Synopsis
All the present controversies about the family are really discussions about monogamy. About what keeps people together and why they should stay together. In this book of one hundred and twenty-one aphorisms, Adam Phillips asks why we all believe in monogamy, and why we find it so difficult to think about it. Everyone knows that most people, however much they may love their partner, are capable of loving and desiring more than one person at a time. It may be reassuring, but it is in fact very demanding (and often cruel) to assume that only one other person can give us what we want. At least in sexual matters, sharing seems to go deeply against the grain. Monogamy is so much taken for granted as the foundation of the family and of family values that, as with anything that seems essential, we are very wary of being critical of it. But as Phillips suggests, it is surely worth wondering why the faithful couple has such a hold on our imagination, and how it has come to be such an ideal.
David Futrelle
Adam Phillips is one of those writers who is best read slowly ù not because his writing is opaque (it isn't) but because it is so rich in implication. Phillips, in books such as his 1994 essay collection On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, is able to tease the most extraordinary insights from the seemingly mundane. Each essay is a finely wrought example of psychoanalytic thinking in practice. Each paragraph, sometimes each sentence, is enough to send the reader off on a new trajectory of thought, and it is almost impossible to emerge from one of his essays without some old patterns of thinking permanently unsettled.
Phillips' new book, Monogamy, is unsettling in a different way. It is not his writing that perplexes so much as its peculiar form. The book consists of 121 miniature essays (if they can be called that), ranging in length from a single sentence to several paragraphs spread over a page or two ù a collection of psychoanalytic fortune cookie messages bound up in a book. The effect, alas, is more jarring than enlightening. Phillips is an epigrammatic writer, to be sure, but in his longer essays his flashes of insight are located securely within larger trains of thought. Here you merely get his conclusions, without any of the reasoning that led to them. It's like hearing the punchlines to 121 unknown jokes. "We have couples because it is impossible to hide alone," he writes, and you suspect he may be right ù but you want more. "Most infidelities aren't ugly, they just look as though they are," he tells us, and we wonder what on earth he could mean.
Perhaps his essays are not so much punchlines as riddles. Perhaps in the months ahead I will compulsively come back to this book to ponder over Phillips' enigmatic epigrams. In the meantime, I am merely puzzled ù not only by Phillips but by his publishers. This is a book seemingly designed to defeat itself. It's too honest, too understanding of the impulses toward infidelity, to be an anniversary gift. Yet the title itself will be enough to frighten off the curious libertine. It's a pity, because it is clear there is something real at the heart of this book; too bad Phillips has decided to hide it from us. -- Salon
Editorials
David Futrelle
Adam Phillips is one of those writers who is best read slowly ù not because his writing is opaque (it isn't) but because it is so rich in implication. Phillips, in books such as his 1994 essay collection On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, is able to tease the most extraordinary insights from the seemingly mundane. Each essay is a finely wrought example of psychoanalytic thinking in practice. Each paragraph, sometimes each sentence, is enough to send the reader off on a new trajectory of thought, and it is almost impossible to emerge from one of his essays without some old patterns of thinking permanently unsettled.
Phillips' new book, Monogamy, is unsettling in a different way. It is not his writing that perplexes so much as its peculiar form. The book consists of 121 miniature essays (if they can be called that), ranging in length from a single sentence to several paragraphs spread over a page or two ù a collection of psychoanalytic fortune cookie messages bound up in a book. The effect, alas, is more jarring than enlightening. Phillips is an epigrammatic writer, to be sure, but in his longer essays his flashes of insight are located securely within larger trains of thought. Here you merely get his conclusions, without any of the reasoning that led to them. It's like hearing the punchlines to 121 unknown jokes. "We have couples because it is impossible to hide alone," he writes, and you suspect he may be right ù but you want more. "Most infidelities aren't ugly, they just look as though they are," he tells us, and we wonder what on earth he could mean.
Perhaps his essays are not so much punchlines as riddles. Perhaps in the months ahead I will compulsively come back to this book to ponder over Phillips' enigmatic epigrams. In the meantime, I am merely puzzled ù not only by Phillips but by his publishers. This is a book seemingly designed to defeat itself. It's too honest, too understanding of the impulses toward infidelity, to be an anniversary gift. Yet the title itself will be enough to frighten off the curious libertine. It's a pity, because it is clear there is something real at the heart of this book; too bad Phillips has decided to hide it from us. -- Salon