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Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape
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Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape
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by Adam Phillips
Sales Rank : 213455
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Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage August 13, 2002
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375706232
ISBN-13: 978-0375706233
Product Dimensions:
7.8 x 4.9 x 0.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 7 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
"We cannot describe ourselves without also describing what we need to escape from, and what we believe we need to escape to," argues psychoanalyst Phillips (Promises, Promises; On Monogamy; etc.). He explores literature and mythology from Adam and Eve to Icarus to Emily Dickinson for allegories of escape, but dubs Houdini, the great escape artist, as "the modern role model," for having transformed escape into mass entertainment. Phillips interweaves his meditations on these lofty characters with therapy-couch snippets from a rather annoying patient of his, who never knows what he wants until he escapes from it. Escape, Phillips suggests, is the life project of those contemporary Houdinis, "the neurotics, and their more fervent risk takers, the perverts." But unlike Houdini, they are "driven by a daunting misapprehension. They don't realize that we don't always flee from something because it is unacceptable; sometimes it is unacceptable to us because we flee it." Although Phillips writes elegantly, and is capable of provocative analytic insights, he sometimes lapses into banal aphorisms or puzzling digressions. This isn't an account of Houdini's career or the details of his tricks so much as a catalogue of the showman's obsessions. Phillips follows up pronouncements like "Houdini was to escapism what pornography is to sex" with discourses on how porn averts the "death of desire." At one point Phillips tells his patient, "I don't know if you've changed the subject or not"; it's a confusion readers may also share. Agent, Kimberly Witherspoon.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Psychotherapist Phillips explores the concept of escapism in a piquant two-pronged inquiry in which he combines case histories with a vigorous analysis of the master of escapism, Harry Houdini. Phillips believes that the urge to escape is "often linked to a sense of failure," an insight that he applies both to his fresh consideration of Houdini's performances and to his patients, who employ various forms of escape ranging from reading to engaging in sexual fantasies. Arguing that understanding what a person is escaping from is just as crucial as analyzing what they're escaping to, Phillips discusses how avoidance and desire interact to define the self. Noting that Houdini called himself a "self-liberator," Phillips marvels over Houdini's obsession with confinement, strange parodies of madness, the curiously overlooked sexuality, and the "uncanny symbolic resonance" of his over-the-top performances, and how he intuitively tapped into the fears and longings, ambitions and mania of his time. So compelling is Phillips' take on Houdini that the more muted patient portraits pale in comparison. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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