Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English Department at the University of York. He is the author of several well-known volumes, all widely acclaimed, including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Going Sane, Side Effects and recently On Kindness, co-written with historian Barbara Taylor, On Balance, Missing Out and One Way and Another.
The Cure for Psychoanalysis
In his first essay, ‘The Magic of Winnicott: Playing and reality, and reality’, Adam Phillips makes clear the subtlety and wisdom of Winnicott’s concept of play. Its inspiration came from a wonderful... (more)
Attention Seeking
A short, fascinating introduction to the concept of attention from Britain's leading psychoanalyst, author of Missing Out and On Kindness.
What we find of interest may tell us more than we... (more)
On Kindness
What is kindness? Does it make us happier? And does it have a place in a selfish world? Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor present an elegant, thoughtful and concise analysis of... (more)
In Writing
A collection of literary essays like no other - exploring the deep connections between literature and psychoanalysis - from Britain's leading psychoanalyst. For Adam Phillips - as for Freud and many... (more)
Unforbidden Pleasures
So much has been written about forbidden pleasures. What about pleasures that are unforbidden? Society is fascinated by taboo - we spend our lives chasing illicit pleasures - but nobody pays much... (more)
Civilisation and Its Discontents
In what remains one of his most seminal papers, Freud considers the incompatibility of civilisation and individual happiness, and the tensions between the claims of society and the individual. We all... (more)
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
This collection of writings is famous for giving us the phrase 'Freudian slip'. It also builds up a strong social history of Vienna and the middle-class social milieu of Freud and his patients.... (more)
The Schreber Case
Freud rarely treated psychotic patients but he had a powerful and imaginative understanding of their condition - revealed, most notably, in this analysis of a remarkable memoir. In 1903, Judge Daniel... (more)
The 'Wolfman' and Other Cases
This collection offers a fantastic opportunity to see Freud in a fresh light. This endlessly beguiling, suggestive, thought-provoking writer can be appreciated nowhere more vividly than in "The Case... (more)
On Flirtation
Building on his previous collection of psychoanalytic essays, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, the author turns his attention to the subject of flirting. (more)
Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
Missing Out is a meditation on reality and opportunity by Adam Phillips. We all have two lives - the life we live and the life of our fantasies. But it is the life unlived - the person we have failed... (more)
Side Effects
Side effects are things we do not intend. And, in this collection of essays, Adam Phillips examines how the things we don't mean, or mean perhaps to forget, prove to be those that are often most... (more)
On Wanting to Change
From the UK's foremost literary psychoanalyst, a dazzling new book on the universal urge to change our lives.
We live in a world in which we are invited to change - to become our best selves,... (more)
On Getting Better
To talk about getting better - about wanting to change in ways that we might choose and prefer - is to talk about pursuing the life we want; in the full knowledge that our pictures of the life we... (more)
Becoming Freud
Becoming Freud 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. Freud invented a psychological... (more)
Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst
Becoming Freud 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. Freud invented a psychological... (more)
Undressing
With a Foreword by Adam Phillips.
When therapist-in-training James O'Neill starts his placement at a therapy centre in west London, his first referral is Abraham, a silent and frightened young... (more)
On Balance
Are we too obsessed with excess? What can childhood teach us about bad behaviour? And should we be happy, or is there something better we might be? In On Balance, acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam... (more)
Intimacies
Two gifted and highly prolific intellectuals, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, here engage in a fascinating dialogue about the problems and possibilities of human intimacy. Their conversation takes as... (more)
On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life
In this collection of psychoanalytic essays on a wide range of relatively unexplored subjects, the author evolves his own distinctive version of psychoanalysis as part of a wider cultural... (more)
Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape
This explores the lives of four different escape artists: a little girl playing her own wayward version of hide and seek; Harry Houdini who electrifies the world through a series of escapes; a man... (more)
The Electrified Tightrope
A collection of exceptional papers by Michael Eigen, selected and assembled by Adam Phillips, that represent 20 years of writing and 30 years of work. The papers examine the tension, caused by the... (more)
Mass Psychology and Other Writings
Freud's religious unbeliefs are too easily dismissed as the standard scientific rationalism of the twentieth-century intellectual, yet he scorned the high-minded humanism of his contemporaries. In... (more)
The Unconscious
One of Freud's central achievements was to demonstrate how unacceptable thoughts and feelings are repressed into the unconscious, from where they continue to exert a decisive influence over our... (more)
On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia
Written against a backdrop of war and racism. Freud sought the sources of conflict in the deepest memories of humankind, finding clear continuities between our primitive past and civilized modernity. (more)
Going Sane
We can define the mad, but how do we classify the sane? In 'Going Sane', psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips delves deep into history, philosophy, literature, and his own experiences to address... (more)
Interpreting Dreams
One of fifteen new translations of Freud's key writings, under the general editorship of celebrated psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, this project reimagines one the modern era's greatest writers.... (more)
Wild Analysis
'Psychoanalytic treatment utilised the patient's capacity to love and desire as a means to an end. The stuff of romance became the stuff of cure. When Freud is writing about technique in... (more)