Live from the NYPL Goes Live from MBF!

Adam Phillips is former Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London. He is a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York and was the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. He is the author of One Way and Another: New and Selected Essays. His most recent book, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Yale University Press) is the story of the young Freud—Freud up until the age of fifty—that incorporates all of Freud’s many misgivings about the art of biography. Phillips emphasizes the largely and inevitably undocumented story of Freud’s earliest years as the oldest—and favored—son of Jewish immigrants, and suggests that the psychoanalysis Freud invented was, among many other things, a psychology of the immigrant. Psychoanalysis was also Freud’s way of coming to terms with the fate of the Jews in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As well as incorporating the writings of Freud and his contemporaries, Becoming Freud uses the work of historians of the Jews in Europe in this significant period in their lives, a period of unprecedented political freedom and mounting persecution.

Paul Holdengräber, interviewer, curator and writer, is known for organizing literary conversations for the New York Public Library's public program series Live from the New York Public Library. Since February 2012, he has hosted The Paul Holdengräber Show on the Intelligent Channel on YouTube.