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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 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)
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 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)
Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)