I am almost finish reading excellent new book by Mr Adam Phillips about Sigmund Freud, great man of the mind. As it is not my habit to finish reading books I have decide to write review here in case matter is put off, as usual, very irritating.

This book is lovely, on fine paper with teared edge, like manuscript of many book I see in my own father printing press before war. This press which was of course blow up by Nazi is indelible printing on my mind, in my eye, like a book in itself. A book of many pages, as is this one. Although not too many! Mr Phillips is judicious in his writing length, with several medium-sized chapters. So well-measure in fact I can imagine I may finish book if I get to end of next chapter. This is novelty.

Of what he writes, Mr Phillips, is pictured as like elf-poet on back book cover (indeed there is similarity, which intrigue me between this photograph and my own preliminary sketch of elf from Mars, in science fiction TV series I collaborate with astronomer Patrick Moore in 1960s). An elf of mischief as he turn around and upside down many preconception of what Great Man was like.

I did for example imagine Mr Freud to be a funny man, crack jokes in Vienna bar, with pun and lot of smut. This was not at all the case. Mr Freud was serious individual who investigate fish, eel and various creature when student in laboratory, who work with the Mad at French hospital in Paris, and who was incline to pessimism. He think psychoanalysis not work (although my own personal experience suggest otherwise. I will elsewhere write about my own psychoanalysis with great British psychoanalyst and military hero Wilfred Bion, which work, unlike experience with so-call great French psychoanalyst J. Lacan, which perhaps I will also write about). Freud have dog, many children and important ideas.

Freud with his comrades

I am of course very much drawn to one idea of psychoanalysis as place where life will catch up with us. Or will I catch up with it? Mr Phillips catches a lot of this in his book, for which I award five star out of five.