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“... 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 own words. Much of it consists of a flow of sparkling apophthegms: the effect on the reader is not unlike being hit repeatedly on the head by a small, pointed hammer ...”

“... 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 which maps certain of his own directions in his recent collection of psychoanalytic essays, Terrors and Experts. Winnicottwould also enjoy playing off a language of common-sense against a language of professional expertise ...”

“... never described in terms of the differences between the sexes. In his elegant biographical essay, Adam Phillips characterises Winnicott as ‘disingenuous’ in his efforts to disguise his differences with the father of psychoanalysis. His differences with Melanie Klein, his mentor and supervisor, were equally profound. Here, Winnicott’s efforts to ...”

“... be released from his hospital in Washington). For D.W. Winnicott and people who share his views, Adam Phillips writes in his new book, ‘the distinction between sanity and madness always has a question-mark over it.’ Phillips doesn’t want to get rid of the question-mark, but he thinks it helps give sanity a bad ...”

“... become the site of The Concise Dictionary of Dress, a collaboration between the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the exhibition maker Judith Clark. The project was commissioned by Artangel, which has had a hand in other transformative events – for example, Francis Alÿs’s CCTV footage of a fox exploring the National Portrait Gallery at night. On ...”

“... and that, of course, would in no way rob the drives of their mythic power, or their importance. Adam Phillips quotes Wittgenstein’s remark about the mythology and its inducement at the head of his introduction to the Penguin Freud Reader, a very rich selection of Freud’s writing, long and short, which includes the letter to Romain ...”

“... Is psychoanalysis flirtation, as Adam Phillips has suggested? Even when not sexually charged, psychoanalysis liberates longing from a deadening fidelity to the past. It lets dreaming off the hook – and provides a vacation from the ego – by declaring a moratorium on action. Freud famously told his patients not to make any major decisions while in treatment with him ...”

“... having some independent knowledge of the life of their author. In his foreword to the book, Adam Phillips cannot resist making a reference to Proust. I do not find it very apt, since the dominant element in Proust is the weaving together of narrative and lyric, of story and image. But the two books do have one characteristic in common, something ...”

“... they remain in turn unilluminated by the intensity of morbid feeling shone at them. According to Adam Phillips, the phobic person ‘submits to something akin to possession, to an experience without the mobility of perspectives’. It is a secular, bodily possession: ‘A phobia, like virtually nothing else, shows the capacity of the body to be gripped ...”

“... too much to the imagination’s freedom. To think of gender as performative is ‘exhilarating’, Adam Phillips writes. But rather than the freedom to perform inventively, what Butler describes may be the compulsion to ‘act out’. Take away Freud’s sense of the heavy constraints on human identity, as revealed for example by the process of ...”

“... the kind of psychoanalysis he developed – a ‘master-plot of human development’, according to Adam Phillips – is incompatible with Freud’s, and it certainly came to differ critically from that of Melanie Klein, from whom he nevertheless learned a great deal. Indeed Phillips says that his work ‘cannot be ...”

“... Among other books by the author of this study is one called Boredom, hailed by the paradoxophile Adam Phillips as ‘spry’, a description that would just about serve for the style of Privacy, which, though redolent of the privacies of the seminar, is public in the sense that it is reasonably free of jargon and won’t mind much if non-professors choose to read it ...”

“... wistfully about the better times they might be having at yoga, or in bed with a lover. She quotes Adam Phillips on the value of learning to live ‘somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like’. Parenthood curtails the pursuit of certain kinds of pleasure, she observes, but it also puts those pleasures in perspective, by revealing ...”

“... of his poetic activity became clear only after his death: two blazing unfinished verse dramas, Adam and Eve and Dipsychus and the Spirit; a fantastically spiky novel in verse, Amours de Voyage (in his lifetime published only in America); a Chaucerian collection of verse tales told by the passengers on a transatlantic steamer, Mari Magno; and a welter of ...”

“... may mean, there’s only one person doing the writing. Not the death of the author then, but as Adam Phillips shrewdly said in these pages (17 July 1997), we do see a writer who was ‘acutely aware of how the author got in the way of the writing’. Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and died there in 1935. He spent much of his childhood in ...”