Adam Phillips was born in Cardiff in 1954. He is the author of numerous works of psychotherapy and literary criticism, including Winnicott, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, Going Sane, Side Effects, On Kindness, co-written with Barbara Taylor, On Balance, Missing Out, One Way and Another and Becoming Freud. Adam Phillips is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, the Observer and the New York Times, and he is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations.
Adam Phillips is single-handedly continuing the tradition of the world's best essayists * Observer * There is a lot of philosophy and psychoanalysis packed into these 200 pages * Radar * [A] playfully digressive style... He is the finest living decipherer of affective life [and] the Bob Dylan of psychoanalysis * Daily Telegraph * The most interestingly subversive meditation on modern life I have read for many years... Phillips ranges over a wide field, including reflections on Hamlet and the tyrannical power of conscience. Elegant, forceful and rich in insight, this is a book that can be read again and again * New Statesman - Books of the Year 2015 * Publisher's description. Adam Phillips elegantly unfolds the concept of the 'unforbidden', from the Old Testament to Freud and beyond, exploring the philosophical, psychological and social complexities that govern human desire and shape our reality. * Penguin *