Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips is a practicing psychoanalyst, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations and the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently On Wanting to Change, Attention Seeking and Unforbidden Pleasures.
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
The Cure for Psychoanalysis
This book contains two brilliant essays by one of the foremost thinkers in the field of psychoanalysis. In the first essay, 'The Magic of Winnicott,' Adam Phillips makes clear the subtlety and wisdom... (more)
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings
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)
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)
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)
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)
The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious
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)
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)
An Outline of Psychoanalysis
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)
The Uncanny
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)
The Psychology of Love
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)
Studies in Hysteria
One of the founding texts of psychoanalysis, this work presents accounts of case histories of hysterics and three theoretical essays on hysteria. (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)
The Penguin Freud Reader
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)