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.
In two brilliant essays, Adam Phillips reveals what is at the heart of psychoanalysis--how it can be practiced so that analyst and patient might live more fully, more creatively. In the first essay,... (more)
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)
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 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)
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)
'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)
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)
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)
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)
On the Introduction of Narcissism/Remembering, Repeating and Working Through/Beyond the Pleasure Principle/The Ego and the Id/Inhibition, Symptom and Fear
In Freud’s view we are driven by the... (more)
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)
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)
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)
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)
New Introductory Lectures (1932) and An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938).
No discovery has done more to shape modernity than Freud’s theory of the unconscious and the part it plays in determining... (more)
Freud was fascinated by the mysteries of creativity and the imagination. The major pieces collected here explore the vivid but seemingly trivial childhood memories that often screen far more... (more)
One of the founding texts of psychoanalysis, this work presents accounts of case histories of hysterics and three theoretical essays on hysteria. (more)
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)
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)
Building on the crucial insight that jokes use many of the same mechanisms he had already discovered in dreams, Freud developed one of the richest and most comprehensive theories of humor that has... (more)
Here are the essential ideas of psychoanalytic theory, including Freud's explanations of such concepts as the Id, Ego and Super-Ego, the Death Instinct and Pleasure Principle, along with classic case... (more)
A collection of Freud's major texts on love, human relations and loss, including: "The Taboo on Virginity"; "On Female Sexuality"; "A Child is Being Beaten"; "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality"... (more)
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)
This is a collection of essays that sets out to make and break the links between psychoanalysis and literature. It gives insights into anorexia and cloning, the work of Tom Stoppard and A.E. Housman,... (more)
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)
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)
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)
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)