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.
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)
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)
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 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)
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)
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)
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)
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)