Books by Adam Phillips

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 want, of our version of a good life, come from or come out of what we have already experienced. (We write the sentences we write because of the sentences we have read.)How can we talk differently about how we might want to change, knowing that all change precipitates us into an uncertain future?In this companion book to On Wanting to Change, Adam Phillips explores how we might get better at talking about what it is to get better.

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 conversation. The essays combine literary and philosophical commentary with clinical vignettes.

Volumes have been dedicated to madness, but sanity is rarely mentioned. 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 questions that we rarely ask about ourselves, taking us on an engrossing journey in which we learn many things - including some of what it takes to be happy in the modern world.

Clear, engaging text allows kids to learn facts in an accessible and entertaining way.

This book presents a day long symposium with Adam Phillips and includes two brilliant essays that reveal what is at the heart of psychoanalysis.

This book is a chronicle of the all-too-human terror that drives us into the arms of experts, and of how expertise, as psychoanalysis, addresses our fears, turning our terror into meaning. Characteristically engaging and challenging, charming and maddening, Phillips teases out the complicity between desire and the forbidden, longing and dread.

A discussion of ways in which we may be terrorized by experts, and of the idea of expertise itself. The author challenges the conventional idea of the "self" as something to be known, and sets out to show how self-knowledge is the problem rather than the solution.

In this absorbing and provocative new book from one of Britain's most elegant and original prose stylists, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips addresses a variety of urgent concerns - many centred around the idea of balance. When might we know that enough is enough? Does the road of excess ever lead to the palace of wisdom? What is the role of the parent, the teacher and of psychoanalysis itself in the development of children's minds? Should we be happy, or is there something better we can be? And what can we learn from the tales of Jack and the Beanstalk or Cinderella?With his trademark combination of open-minded enquiry and exhilarating argument, drawing primarily on the twin worlds of literature and psychoanalysis, Adam Phillips will delight readers old and new in this much anticipated new book.

The pleasures of kindness have been well known since the dawn of western thought. Kindness, declared Marcus Aurelius, was mankind's 'greatest delight' - and centuries-worth of thinkers and writers have echoed him. But today many people seem to find these pleasures literally incredible. Instead of embracing the benefits of altruism, as a species we seem to be becoming deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each other, with motives that are generally self-seeking. This book explains how and why this has come about, and argues that the affectionate life - a life lived in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others - is the one we should all be inclined to live.'We mutually belong to one another,' as the philosopher Alan Ryan writes, and the good life is one 'that reflects this truth'. What the Victorians called 'open-heartedness' and the Christians 'caritas' remains essential to our emotional and mental health, for reasons both obvious and hidden, argue the authors of this elegant and indispensable exploration of the concept of kindness.

D.W. Winnicott s remarkable books, including The Piggle, Home Is Where We Start From and The Child, Family and the Outside World (all published by Penguin) are still read, valued and argued with over thirty years after his death. Adam Phillips's short book, now issued with a new preface, is an elegant, thoughtful attempt to get to grips with a writer, paediatrician and psychiatrist whose work with children and mothers (and the wider implications their relationship has for all of us) continues to be profoundly relevant and fascinating.

Why are we all so spellbound by ideas of escape - and yet so dismissive of mere escapism? Houdini's Box explores four different escape artists. There is the case history of a little girl who is oddly committed to playing her own wayward version of hide and seek. There is Harry Houdini, the 'Greatest Magician the World has Ever Seen', who electrified the world through a series of death-defying escapes, compulsively re-inventing and re-enacting his own confinement. There is a man who, Jonah-like, is always arriving at the place he was escaping from, who thinks it is his destiny to be in flight, whether from women or from his analyst. And finally the poet Emily Dickinson, who for the last twenty years of her life finds freedom in self-imposed solitary confinement. In this, his most captivating book to date, Adam Phillips reminds us why people often feel most alive in the very moment of escape. But whether we are getting away from something, or getting away with something - as Icarus, or Oedipus, or Narcissus; as victims or tyrants - we cannot describe ourselves without also describing what we need to escape from, and what we want to escape to.

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 telling about our unconscious lives. Phillips also intends for us to question our conscious pursuit of happiness, explaining that, in refusing to admit and explore life s down sides, we can only be living half lives. And through his unique and incisive exploration of literature, Phillips also demonstrates what the great novelists have to tell us about ourselves. Both illuminating and fascinating on literature as well as life, Side Effects maps our edges as human beings, and, in doing so, goes some way to helping give shape to our lives.

Adam Phillips uses the idea of flirtation to explore the virtues of being uncommitted - to people, to ideas, to methods - and the pleasures of uncertainty. These buoyant essays promote a psychoanalysis with a light touch, a psychoanalysis for pleasure and curiosity.'In On Flirtation, he has again deployed all his erudition and perception to beguiling effect . . . Adam Phillips may well be one of our greatest contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers.' Independent on Sunday

Has psychoanalysis failed to keep its promise? What are psychoanalysis and literature good for? And what, if anything, have they got to do with each other? Promises, Promises is a delightful new collection of essays which sets out to make and break the links between psychoanalysis and literature. It confirms Adam Phillips as a virtuoso performer able to reach far beyond the borders of psychoanalytic discourse into art, drama, poetry and history. This collection gives us insights into anorexia and cloning, the work of Tom Stoppard and A.E. Housman, the effect of the Blitz on Londoners, Nijinsky's diary and Martin Amis's Night Train, and provides a case history of clutter. In a final essay, the author turns to the question - why sign up for analysis when you could read a book?Promoting everywhere a refreshing version of a psychoanalysis that is more committed to happiness and inspiration than to self-knowledge or some absolute truth, Promises, Promises reaffirms Adam Phillips as a writer whose work, in the words of one reviewer, 'hovers in a strange and haunting borderland between rigour and delight.'

In a style that is writerly and audacious, Adam Phillips takes up a variety of seemingly ordinary subjects underinvestigated by psychoanalysis--kissing, worrying, risk, solitude, composure, even farting as it relates to worrying.