Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently The Life You Want, On Giving Up and On Getting Better. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

[Reading The Life You Want] is like having a deep chat with your brainiest friend . . . Writing like this opens things up, broadens life out - it is the antidote to scrolling through endless January wellbeing advice. Go on, I dare you: pick it up and take your brain for a spin

Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently The Life You Want, On Giving Up and On Getting Better. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

[Reading The Life You Want] is like having a deep chat with your brainiest friend . . . Writing like this opens things up, broadens life out - it is the antidote to scrolling through endless January wellbeing advice. Go on, I dare you: pick it up and take your brain for a spin