Adam Phillips’s most recent books are On Giving Up and, with Stephen Greenblatt, Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud.
Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously. In 1941, Larkin refers to Thomas coming to the English Club at Oxford:...
What is now called trauma theory informs contemporary biography as much as it does the academic practice of literary history. Belief in trauma as a kind of agency, as a cultural force – in events as the real heroes and heroines in life stories – turns up historically when people are beginning to lose faith in God and character and cause and effect. Despite the fact that the...
“The big secret about sex isn’t quite that most people don’t like it, it’s that most people don’t like it because they are with people they aren’t really excited by or with people they are too excited by (which is why most relationships end in either boredom or pathological jealousy).”
Asking what animals are like if and when they are not like us is also a way of asking what we are like if we are not as we describe ourselves.
One walks about the street with one’s desires, and one’s refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches.
T.S. Eliot to Conrad Aiken, 31 December 1914
Writing a London Letter for the Dial in September 1922, T.S. Eliot suggested that there were ‘at present . . . three main types of English novel’. There was the ‘old narrative...
Adam Phillips reads an extract from his essay on tantrums.
Adam Phillips talks to Devorah Baum about his latest book, 'Attention Seeking', which argues, among other things, that attention seeking is the best thing we do.
Adam Philips reflects on the ways we hate ourselves, in his 2015 LRB Winter Lecture.
Adam Phillips talks about his new book Unforbidden Pleasures to psychotherapist Chris Oakley.
In 1936 Freud wrote a letter to Romain Rolland, offering him a speculation about a particular memory as a 70th birthday gift. The memory concerned a trip Freud took to Athens with his brother,...
‘It is, and is not,’ Ezra Pound wrote in a short poem called ‘Sub Mare’, ‘I am sane enough.’ What ‘is, and is not’ is the eerie landscape of the...
‘What on earth would possess you to do that?’ This, more or less, is the question anyone who hasn’t ever been in analysis asks of those who have.
William Sherlock’s Practical Discourse concerning Death, published in 1689 and known familiarly as Sherlock on Death, was a bestseller in its day and long after. Dr Johnson commended...
Early in his lovely and useful book on D.W. Winnicott, published in 1988, Adam Phillips gives a sketch of certain aims and fates of that increasingly treasured figure of British psychoanalysis...
This collection of essays by the psychotherapist Adam Phillips is a peculiarly difficult book to review because it reviews itself as it goes along and is hardly to be described in other than its...
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was published on 1 November 1790. By then, Burke had long ceased to be the dominant intellectual influence in the Whig Party. He hoped the...
All his life Donald Winnicott took great pains to present himself as an orthodox Freudian. Yet few ‘Freudians’ have been more radical in their departures from orthodoxy.
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