Adam Phillips: Thinking Aloud on Pleasure and Frustration

The best lives, like the worst lives, are driven lives.

Adam Phillips, Going Sane (2005)

Thinking Aloud on Pleasure and Frustration is a six-minute documentary short film featuring Adam Phillips, an English psychotherapist/psychoanalyst, literary critic and the author of several well-known books, including: The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites; On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored; Going Sane; On Kindness and most recently, On Balance. Phillips has written widely, from a unique psychoanalytic perspective, on a range of themes central to concepts such as the human condition, human suffering, desire, pleasure and the good life. As a practicing psychoanalyst, he offers a refreshingly subtle analysis of these concepts, grounded in the lives of actual persons. Phillips delivers his thoughts here with an unusually open and rich quality of fluid extemporaneous prose.

Adam Phillips

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Adam Phillips: Thinking Aloud on Pleasure and Frustration

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The Adventures of a Cardboard Box: Humorous Play and Melancholy Loss

The Adventures of a Cardboard Box is a fascinating short film by English illustrator and filmmaker Temujin Doran, which was named a finalist in the 2011 Nokia Shorts Video Contest. Thousands of videos from around the world were submitted and judged over a four month period, and from those seven films were selected as finalists. The seven finalists were screened and judged at the 2011 Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Temujin’s short film has been described rather simply as the story of one boy’s escapades with a large cardboard box, which he uses as a gateway to a multitude of fantasy adventures. The film is, of course, much more than that; it is no accident that Temujin cited the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip as the main inspiration for his film. As with the major underlying theme of Calvin and Hobbes, this film can be viewed as a contemporary narrative about one young boy’s uses of a transitional object in his play and illusions as explorations of ideas about identity and the self. Ultimately, the film becomes a perfect combination of humor and melancholy loss.

The Adventures of a Cardboard Box: Humorous Play and Melancholy Loss

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