The Writers of Wales Database

PHILLIPS, ADAM

Adam Phillips was born in Cardiff in 1954 and is a world-renowned psychotherapist, literary critic and essayist. He is the author of twelve highly praised books in the fields of literature, history, philosophy, child psychology, biography and psychoanalysis.

Adam went to school in Bristol before gaining a degree in English from Oxford University. He worked for the National Health Service from 1977-1995, becoming principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital. He left to concentrate on both his private practice in Notting Hill and on his writing.

Adam’s psychoanalysis and philosophy is definitively influenced by literature. He regularly contributes to the London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Observer and the New York Times, and has published essays on a variety of literary themes, including the works of Charles Lamb, Walter Savage Landor and William Empson. He has edited a book of Charles Lamb's prose and co-written a critical study of John Clare's poetry, as well as being the general editor of the recent Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations. In his recent collection of essays, Side Effects (Hamish Hamilton, 2006), Adam explores the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis. This is further examined in the subsequent On Balance (Hamish Hamilton, 2010).

Since 2006, Adam has been Honorary Visiting Professor at the English Department, The University of York. He makes regular television and radio appearances.
 

Selected Publications

Literature & Psychoanalsis
Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature (Basic Books, 2000)
Side Effects (Hamish Hamilton, 2006)
On Balance (Hamish Hamilton, 2010)

Biography
Winnicott (Fontana Press, 1997)

Philosophy
Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories (Faber & Faber, 1999)

Psychoanalysis
On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Harvard University Press, 1993)
On Flirtation: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Uncommitted Life (Faber & Faber, 1994)
Terrors and Experts (Harvard University Press, 1996)
Monogamy (Faber & Faber, 1996)
The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites (Faber & Faber, 1998)
Houdini's Box: On the Arts of Escape (Faber & Faber, 2001)
Equals: On Inhibition, Mockery, Hierarchy, and the Pleasures of Democracy (Basic Books, 2002)
Going Sane (Hamish Hamilton, 2005)

Contributed to:
Selected Prose by Charles Lamb (editor) (Penguin Books, 1986)
A Philosophical Enquiry by Edmund Burke (editor) (Oxford Paperbacks, 1990)
Selected Poems by Richard Howard (co-editor) (Penguin Books, 1991)
The Electrified Tightrope by Michael Eigen (editor) (Jason Aronson Inc, 1993)
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater (editor) (Oxford Paperbacks, 1998)
Intimacies (co-writer) (University of Chicago Press, 2008)
On Kindness (co-writer) (Penguin Books, 2009)
John Clare in Context (co-editor) (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Reviews:
"…the Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis...brilliantly amusing and often profoundly unsettling..."
The Times

"...one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time..."
John Banville

With respect to On Balance (Hamish Hamilton, 2010)

"...Phillips' thoughts on art and literature - collected here in a tour d'horizon that ranges from Diane
Arbus's photography to the poetry of W H Auden - are particularly astute..."
David Evans, The Independent

Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature (Basic Books, 2000)

Has psychoanalysis failed to keep its promise? What are psychoanalysis and literature good for? And what, if anything, have they got to do with each other? Promises, Promises is a new collection of essays which sets out to make and break the links between psychoanalysis and literature. Phillips reaches far beyond the borders of psychoanalytic discourse into art, drama, poetry and history. This collection gives us insights into anorexia and cloning, the work of Tom Stoppard and A.E. Housman, the effect of the Blitz on Londoners, Nijinsky's diary and Martin Amis' Night Train, and provides a case history of clutter. In a final essay, the author turns to the question - why sign up for analysis when you could read a book? This work promotes everywhere a refreshing version of a psychoanalysis that is more committed to happiness and inspiration than to self-knowledge or some absolute truth.

Side Effects (Hamish Hamilton, 2006)

Side effects are things we do not intend. In this collection of essays, Phillips 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. Phillips also 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. Through a 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.

 


On Balance (Hamish Hamilton, 2010)

In this absorbing and provocative work, 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, Phillips draws primarily on the twin worlds of literature and psychoanalysis.