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Biographical note
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 On Giving Up, On Wanting to Change, Attention Seeking, In Writing, Unforbidden Pleasures and Missing Out. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.The best living essayist writing in English
Phillips is a wonderful writer, his prose limpid and exact, and this is a deep and stimulating book
Sunday Times
Intriguing and radical questions about the vital information strong responses and desires provide, and how we might use this to identify what we want
Guardian
His writing is a lively source of provocation, repetition, self-renewal.
Scotsman
Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored
He's brilliant
Phillips radiates infectious charm
Sunday Times
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' Observer
In 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.