By Adam Phillips
Psychoanalytic exploration of attention and shame
Subject
Themes
Attention defines how we engage with life itself. What captures our interest, what we choose to notice, and what we pursue reveals who we are and shapes the lives we lead. From infancy onwards, human beings are fundamentally creatures of attention, driven to seek it from others and to pay it to the world around them.
Attention defines how we engage with life itself. What captures our interest, what we choose to notice, and what we pursue reveals who we are and shapes the lives we lead. From infancy onwards, human beings are fundamentally creatures of attention, driven to seek it from others and to pay it to the…
Adam Phillips's Attention Seeking appears within a rich tradition of psychoanalytic writing that engages literary criticism, philosophy, and cultural analysis to explore fundamental questions about human psychology and experience. Phillips, a practicing psychoanalyst and former Principal Child…
Human attention operates in two distinct registers that shape how we engage with the world. Official curiosity represents the attention we are taught to pay, the interest sanctioned by authorities and institutions. This form of notice comes wrapped in obligation, directing us towards approved…
Freud's theory of dreams revolutionises understanding of how attention operates. During what he calls the dream-day, the day before a dream occurs, we gather material unconsciously for the dream we will construct whilst asleep. This process happens without our awareness or intention. We notice…
Shame profoundly affects our capacity to attend to the world and to ourselves. When we feel shame, our attention contracts dramatically, focusing inward on the self as object of disapproving scrutiny. We become hyperaware of being seen, of eyes upon us judging and finding us wanting. This…
Every culture establishes regimes of attention, prescribing what deserves notice and how properly to observe. Education, religion, politics, morality all function as systems for organising and promoting certain kinds of attention. They tell us where to look and who to listen to, what about ourselves…
Human relationships depend fundamentally on patterns of mutual attention. We recognise and create ourselves through the attention we receive from others and the attention we give in return. From earliest infancy, the quality of attention we are paid shapes our developing sense of self, our capacity…
Everything depends on what we find interesting, on what we are encouraged and educated to find interesting, and what we find ourselves being interested in despite ourselves. Two forms of curiosity shape our engagement with the world. Official curiosity represents obedience to authorities,…
Contemporary culture shows great concern about modern technology's effect on attention, particularly attention spans of the young. Unlike qualities of attention, spans can be measured, providing apparent objectivity to anxieties. One philosopher laments that our attentional environment has not…
In Freud's description of dreaming, attention becomes a word for multiplicity of competing aims and wants. Freud gives us an account of a new form of attention, unknowing attention, in which we take in the world around us in ways and for reasons we are unaware of. Dreaming gives us a picture of how…
Shame represents a fundamental constraint on attention and desire. When we feel shame, our capacity to attend to the world contracts dramatically. We become hyperaware of being seen, of eyes upon us judging and finding us wanting. This self-consciousness makes losing ourselves in experience…
The performance of attention-seeking, disguised and undisguised, reveals much about how shame operates in social life and personal psychology. We live under constant pressure to manage how we appear to others, to control what they notice about us and how they interpret what they see. This pressure…
The quality of attention parents pay to children profoundly shapes psychological development, establishing patterns that persist throughout life. Children learn what deserves notice by observing what captures parental interest and what parents ignore or dismiss. A child whose expressions of feeling…
Attention need not always be focused, directed, purposeful in the ways we typically imagine or value highly. Vacancies of attention, moments when focus loosens and attention becomes less determined, create space for different kinds of noticing and unexpected discoveries. These vacant states, far…
Despite elaborate efforts to regulate and direct attention, no one can actually predict the consequences of the attention they pay and are paid by others. As education, propaganda, advertising, and sexuality continually reveal, people's attention can be exploited, manipulated, and directed to…
We have to back our interests to find out what they are, trusting that following curiosity will reveal something worth discovering even when outcomes remain uncertain. Ideally our earliest environments should allow for and encourage certain of our interests, what John Stuart Mill called experiments…
By Adam Phillips
Subject
Themes
Attention defines how we engage with life itself. What captures our interest, what we choose to notice, and what we pursue reveals who we are and shapes the lives we lead. From infancy onwards, human beings are fundamentally creatures of attention, driven to seek it from others and to pay it to the world around them.