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.
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)
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)
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 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)
Studies in Hysteria
The tormenting of the body by the troubled mind, hysteria is among the most pervasive of human disorders - yet at the same time it is the most elusive. Freud's recognition that hysteria stemmed from... (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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia
These works were written against a background of war and racism. Freud sought the sources of conflict in the deepest memories of humankind, finding clear continuities between our 'primitive' past and... (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)
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)
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)
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)
On Balance
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)
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)
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)
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)