Adam Phillips – författare

‘Every mind-blowing book from Adam Phillips suspends all the certainties we are most attached to and somehow makes this feel exhilarating’ Deborah LevyWhat does it mean to ‘get a life’ in a culture in which there is so much to want?And why do the lives we think we need so often fail to satisfy?With his characteristic curiosity, warmth and perceptiveness, Adam Phillips addresses one of the key perplexities of modern life, which is that we are all the products of the families or social groups we grow up in: they shape us selectively and guide us to their preferred ways of living; but we then spend our lives haunted by the aspects of ourselves that they have ignored.We conform and yet we rebel. So, the lives we want for ourselves are likely to be a difficult mixture of the all too familiar and the experimental. And, necessarily, we all must make things up as we go along.What is to be done? The answer, Adam Phillips suggests, is to pay especially close attention to what interests us, excites us and frightens us; to make an experiment of living; and thereby to discover the life we want – and whether it is viable.'One of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time' John Banville

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, through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy.We change all the time - growing older and older - and how we think about change changes over time too.We want to think of our lives as progress myths - as narratives of positive personal growth - at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks.So there are the stories we tell about change, and there are the changes we actually make - and they don't always go, or come, together . . . This sparkling book is about that fact.

Missing Out is a meditation on reality and opportunity by Adam Phillips, Britain's pre-eminent psychoanalyst.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 to be - that can trouble and even haunt us. In Missing Out acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips delves into the gap between who we are and who we are not, to discover whether not getting what we want may be the unlikely key to the fully lived life.With his trademark combination of open-minded enquiry and exhilarating argument, drawing primarily on the twin worlds of literature and psychoanalysis, Phillips will delight readers old and new in this much-anticipated book.

The author is committed to psychoanalysis as part of a wider cultural conversation, and this unique collection of essays on a wide range of relatively unexplored subjects combines literary and philosophical commentary with vivid clinical vignettes.'Like Chekhov, Phillips writes as well as he doctors, and his fascination with the subtleties of human behaviour makes him a good storyteller.He has a welcome openness to the essential strangeness of every person; this alone is reason enough to read him.' Jane Mendelsohn, Guardian

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 studies like that of the Wolf Man. Adam Phillips's marvellous selection provides an ideal overview of Freud's thought in all its extraordinary ambition and variety. Psychoanalysis may be known as the 'talking cure', yet it is also and profoundly, a way of reading. Here we can see Freud's writings as readings and listenings, deciphering the secrets of the mind, finding words for desires that have never found expression. Much more than this, however, The Penguin Freud Reader presents a compelling reading of life as we experience it today, and a way in to the work of one of the most haunting writers of the modern age.

A powerful exploration of the human capacity for renewal, as seen through Shakespeare and Freud  “A compellingly readable and intelligent book. . . . Both authors write with impressive energy.”—Rowan Williams, New Statesman  In this fresh investigation, Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips explore how the second chance has been an essential feature of the literary imagination and a promise so central to our existence that we try to reproduce it again and again. Innumerable stories, from the Homeric epics to the New Testament, and from Oedipus Rex to Hamlet, explore the realization or failure of second chances—outcomes that depend on accident, acts of will, or fate. Such stories let us repeatedly rehearse the experience of loss and recovery: to know the joy that comes with a renewal of love and pleasure and to face the pain that comes with realizing that some damage can never be undone.  Through a series of illuminating readings, the authors show how Shakespeare was the supreme virtuoso of the second chance and Freud was its supreme interpreter. Both Shakespeare and Freud believed that we can narrate our life stories as tales of transformation, of momentous shifts, constrained by time and place but often still possible. Ranging from The Comedy of Errors to The Winter’s Tale, and from D. W. Winnicott to Marcel Proust, the authors challenge readers to imagine how, as Phillips writes, “it is the mending that matters.”

The biography of Donald Winnicott, a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who spent nearly all of his professional life at Paddington Green Children's Hospital, London. His work and writing about children has been increasingly regarded as an influential contribution to psychoanalysis.

From the author of Missing Out and On Kindness, Britain's pre-eminent psychoanalyst 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. Side effects are things we do not intend. Phillips 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.

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.

'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 psychoanalysis - and these papers [in Wild Analysis] represent his most significant contributions to the subject over three decades of work - it is important to remember that he is talking about what a couple, an analyst and a so-called patient, can do in a room together. For better or worse.' Adam Phillips

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 its point of departure psychoanalysis and its central importance to the modern imagination - though equally important is their shared sense that by misleading us about the importance of self-knowledge and the danger of narcissism, psychoanalysis has failed to realize its most exciting and innovative relational potential. Persuasive and provocative, "Intimacies" is a rare opportunity to listen in on two brilliant thinkers as they explore new ways of thinking about the human psyche.

From the author of Missing Out and On Kindness, Britain's pre-eminent psychoanalyst explores our relationship with balance.'Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored' ObserverIn 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.

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.

'A wise, generous book' Washington PostFrom acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, a meditation on what we must give up to feel more alive.To give up or not to give up?The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple.Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable.There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment - an attempt to make a different future.In On Giving Up, acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up, and helps us to address the central question: what must we give up in order to feel more alive?'One of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time' John Banville'The best living essayist writing in English' John Gray

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 attention to all the unforbidden pleasures freely available to us every day. Could we be gaining just as much reward from these unnoticed, unforbidden indulgences as from the much-glorified forbidden - or even more?Starting with Oscar Wilde, Adam Phillips elegantly unfolds all the meanings and significances of the Unforbidden, from Genesis to Freud and his 20th century colleagues. Unforbidden Pleasures explores the philosophical, psychological and social complexities that govern human desire and shape our reality.

A selection of the most popular and relevant essays from Adam Phillips, the man New Yorker called 'Britain's foremost psychoanalytic writer''Phillips's prose is poetic in the best sense: it is muscular, resonant, and thrums with a dark music that is all its own' John BanvilleIn the twenty essays gathered here, ranging across his entire oeuvre, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips offers a vivid introduction to his discipline as well as his own unique thinking. Investigating subjects as diverse as desire, family, happiness, tickling, forgetting and even boredom, Phillips proves himself to be not only one of our most engaging writers but also a fascinating and provocative guide to our obsessions as human beings.

Acclaimed author of On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored and On KindnessA 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 of his followers - poetry and poets have always held an essential place, as both precursors and unofficial collaborators in the psychoanalytic project. But the same has never held true in reverse. What, Phillips wonders, at the start of this deeply engaging book, has psychoanalysis meant for writers? And what can writing do for psychoanalysis?Phillips explores these questions through an exhilarating series of encounters with - and vivid readings of - writers he has loved, from Byron and Barthes to Shakespeare and Sebald. And in the process he demonstrates, through his own unique style, how literature and psychoanalysis can speak to and of each other.'Adam Phillips is that rarest of phenomena, a trained clinician who is also a sublime writer' - John Banville, author of The Sea'Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored' Observer 'One of those writers whom it is a pleasure simply to hear think' Sunday Telegraph

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 think...'Everything depends on what, if anything, we find interesting: on what we are encouraged and educated to find interesting, and what we find ourselves being interested in despite ourselves. There is our official curiosity and our unofficial curiosity (and psychoanalysis is a story about the relationship between the two) . . .'Based on three connected talks on the subject of attention, this pocket-sized book is a quirky and memorable introduction to the concept of our attention - how we spend it, and what it might tell us about ourselves. From Britain's pre-eminent psychoanalyst, this is an essential new addition to the Adam Phillips canon.'The best living essayist writing in English' - John Gray

An exploration of the role of the handbag in the history of culture, fashion, and material productionThe history of the handbag—its design, how it has been made, used, and worn—reveals something essential about women's lives over the past 500 years. Perhaps the most universal item of fashionable adornment, it can also be elusive, an object of desire, secrecy, and even fear. Handbags explores these rich histories and multiple meanings.This book features specially commissioned photographs of an extraordinary, newly formed collection of fashionable handbags that date from the 16th century to the present day. It has been acquired for exhibition in the first museum devoted to the handbag, in Seoul, South Korea. The project is a commission undertaken by experimental exhibition-maker Judith Clark, whose innovative practices are revealed in Handbags.Essays by leading fashion historians and an acclaimed psychoanalyst investigate the history of gesture, the psychoanalysis of bags, and the museum's state-of-the-art mannequins and archive cabinets. In order to preserve the words that describe the unique qualities of each bag, a terminology of handbags has been compiled.Published in association with the Simone Handbag Museum, Seoul

From one of the world’s foremost authorities on Sigmund Freud comes a strikingly original biography of the father of psychoanalysisBecoming 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 treatment that involved the telling and revising of life stories, but he was himself skeptical of the writing of such stories. In this biography, Adam Phillips, whom the New Yorker calls “Britain’s foremost psychoanalytical writer,” emphasizes the largely and inevitably undocumented story of Freud’s earliest years as the oldest—and favored—son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and suggests that the psychoanalysis Freud invented was, among many other things, a psychology of the immigrant—increasingly, of course, everybody’s status in the modern world.  Psychoanalysis was also Freud’s way of coming to terms with the fate of the Jews in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So as well as incorporating the writings of Freud and his contemporaries, Becoming Freud also uses the work of historians of the Jews in Europe in this significant period in their lives, a period of unprecedented political freedom and mounting persecution. Phillips concludes by speculating what psychoanalysis might have become if Freud had died in 1906, before the emergence of a psychoanalytic movement over which he had to preside.

A powerful exploration of the human capacity for renewal, as seen through Shakespeare and Freud  “A compellingly readable and intelligent book. . . . Both authors write with impressive energy.”—Rowan Williams, New Statesman  In this fresh investigation, Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips explore how the second chance has been an essential feature of the literary imagination and a promise so central to our existence that we try to reproduce it again and again. Innumerable stories, from the Homeric epics to the New Testament, and from Oedipus Rex to Hamlet, explore the realization or failure of second chances—outcomes that depend on accident, acts of will, or fate. Such stories let us repeatedly rehearse the experience of loss and recovery: to know the joy that comes with a renewal of love and pleasure and to face the pain that comes with realizing that some damage can never be undone.  Through a series of illuminating readings, the authors show how Shakespeare was the supreme virtuoso of the second chance and Freud was its supreme interpreter. Both Shakespeare and Freud believed that we can narrate our life stories as tales of transformation, of momentous shifts, constrained by time and place but often still possible. Ranging from The Comedy of Errors to The Winter’s Tale, and from D. W. Winnicott to Marcel Proust, the authors challenge readers to imagine how, as Phillips writes, “it is the mending that matters.”

This book examines the tension, caused by the conflict between poise and catastrophe, in the therapeutic relationship. It emphasizes positive contributions to growth of self made by seemingly pathological or disruptive movements within the therapy situation.