A selection of colourful illustrated eyes gazing in different directions, with the word "FOCUS" in the centre of the immage

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Reading lists

Books to help improve your focus and attention span

On Giving Up

'A wise, generous book' Washington Post 
 
From acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, a meditation on what we must give up to feel more alive. 
 
To give up or not to give up? 
 
The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple. 
 
Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable. 
 
There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment - an attempt to make a different future. 
 
In On Giving Up, acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up, and helps us to address the central question: what must we give up in order to feel more alive? 
 
'One of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time' John Banville 
 
'The best living essayist writing in English' John Gray

Adam Phillips promotes curiosity, improvisation and conflict as antidotes to the deadening effects of absolute certainty . . . Phillips sidles up to his subjects, preferring the gentle mode of suggestion to the blunt force of argument. His writing has a way of sneaking up on you, like a subterranean force

A wise, generous book . . . There is a sense — quite a satisfying one, in fact — of circling around ideas, of each essay being ostensibly on a different theme from the others, but really treating the same concerns from a slightly different starting point . . . These essays won’t cure us, but they may make us curious

This short, subtle and nuanced book is a fast and stimulating read: an account of how giving up is a form of progress, and how giving up is a form of loss

Phillips invokes Freud, Kafka, Musil and Thomas Mann as helpmeets in illuminating knotty issues . . . This is not a book that provides answers but rather prompts the reader to question their own motivations and what different choices might mean

This roving collection of writings fuses the lexicon of psychotherapy with literary criticism to upend conventional ideas about common emotional experiences—among them repression, longing, and loss

The prolific writings of Adam Phillips epitomise this modern day humanistic expression of psychoanalytic thinking . . . Phillips’s style throughout the book is almost effortlessly fluent and erudite . . . Invariably Phillips unearths layers of convolution that common sense overlooks. In true psychoanalytic fashion, what we think we want is unmasked as self-deception and what seems like pain has its pleasures. The stories we tell ourselves protect us from our fears and our adult preoccupations mask childish concerns

An introspective look at the psychology of letting things go and aims to give readers some insight into their own lives in the process

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.

To give up or not to give up? 
 
The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple. 
 
Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable. 
 
There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment - an attempt to make a different future. 
 
In On Giving Up, acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up, and helps us to address the central question: what must we give up in order to feel more alive?

On Getting Better

To talk about getting better - about wanting to change in ways that we might choose and prefer - is to talk about pursuing the life we want; in the full knowledge that our pictures of the life we want, of our version of a good life, come from or come out of what we have already experienced. (We write the sentences we write because of the sentences we have read.) 
 
How can we talk differently about how we might want to change, knowing that all change precipitates us into an uncertain future? 
 
In this companion book to On Wanting to Change, Adam Phillips explores how we might get better at talking about what it is to get better.

Improvisatory and energetic, buoyed by thought-enacting questions and self-qualifications . . . His writing is as much literary-critical as psychoanalytic, as likely to invoke Shakespeare or Emerson as Freud or Lacan . . . What one goes to his writing for - and what it often delivers - are arresting, renewing paraphrases that divert you from your overfamiliar tracks

On Wanting to Change

From the UK's foremost literary psychoanalyst, a dazzling new book on the universal urge to change our lives. 
 
We live in a world in which we are invited to change - to become our best selves, through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy. 
 
We change all the time - growing older and older - and how we think about change changes over time too. 
 
We want to think of our lives as progress myths - as narratives of positive personal growth - at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks. 
 
So there are the stories we tell about change, and there are the changes we actually make - and they don't always go, or come, together . . . 
 
This sparkling book is about that fact.

One moment, the ideas are clear and thrilling; the next, multi-clause, ludic sentences snare the reader in a web of complexity . . . [Phillips] draws nimbly on a wide hinterland of authors - from the poetry of Wallace Stevens to the philosophy of Wittgenstein, from Howard's End to Moby Dick

A mediation on the powerful fantasy of change

A response to the times we live in . . . an urgent invitation for a different kind of conversation

His style of psychoanalytic writing refreshingly lacks the usual heaviness and homage to the master

We live in a world in which we are invited to change - to become our best selves, through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy. 
 
We change all the time - growing older and older - and how we think about change changes over time too. 
 
We want to think of our lives as progress myths - as narratives of positive personal growth - at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks. 
 
So there are the stories we tell about change, and there are the changes we actually make - and they don't always go, or come, together . . . 
 
This sparkling book is about that fact.

Attention Seeking

A short, fascinating introduction to the concept of attention from Britain's leading psychoanalyst, author of Missing Out and On Kindness. 
 
What we find of interest may tell us more than we think... 
 
'Everything depends on what, if anything, we find interesting: on what we are encouraged and educated to find interesting, and what we find ourselves being interested in despite ourselves. There is our official curiosity and our unofficial curiosity (and psychoanalysis is a story about the relationship between the two) . . .' 
 
Based on three connected talks on the subject of attention, this pocket-sized book is a quirky and memorable introduction to the concept of our attention - how we spend it, and what it might tell us about ourselves. From Britain's pre-eminent psychoanalyst, this is an essential new addition to the Adam Phillips canon. 
 
'The best living essayist writing in English' - John Gray

The best living essayist writing in English

The Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis . . . brilliantly amusing and often highly unsettling

One of those writers whom it is a pleasure simply to hear think

Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored

Adam Phillips is that rarest of phenomena, a trained clinician who is also a sublime writer

Playfully digressive style... He is the finest living decipherer of affective life [and] the Bob Dylan of psychoanalysis

'Everything depends on what, if anything, we find interesting: on what we are encouraged and educated to find interesting, and what we find ourselves being interested in despite ourselves. There is our official curiosity and our unofficial curiosity (and psychoanalysis is a story about the relationship between the two) . . .' 
 
Based on three connected talks on the subject of attention, this pocket-sized book from Adam Phillips is a fascinating and memorable introduction to the nature and the uses of our attention.

In Writing

Acclaimed author of On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored and On Kindness 
 
A collection of literary essays like no other - exploring the deep connections between literature and psychoanalysis - from Britain's leading psychoanalyst. 
 
For Adam Phillips - as for Freud and many of his followers - poetry and poets have always held an essential place, as both precursors and unofficial collaborators in the psychoanalytic project. But the same has never held true in reverse. What, Phillips wonders, at the start of this deeply engaging book, has psychoanalysis meant for writers? And what can writing do for psychoanalysis? 
 
Phillips explores these questions through an exhilarating series of encounters with - and vivid readings of - writers he has loved, from Byron and Barthes to Shakespeare and Sebald. And in the process he demonstrates, through his own unique style, how literature and psychoanalysis can speak to and of each other. 
 
'Adam Phillips is that rarest of phenomena, a trained clinician who is also a sublime writer' - John Banville, author of The Sea 
 
'Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored' Observer 
 
'One of those writers whom it is a pleasure simply to hear think' Sunday Telegraph

Publisher's description.  Adam Phillips explores the relationship between psychoanalysis and writing in a thrillingly erudite sequence of essays. From Byron to Barthes and Shakespeare to Sebald, Phillips demonstrates how literature and psychoanalysis are closely interlinked, sharing many ideas, theories and narratives.

For Adam Phillips - as for Freud and many of his followers - poetry and poets have always held an essential place, as both precursors and unofficial collaborators in the psychoanalytic project. But the same has never held true in reverse. What, Phillips wonders, at the start of this deeply engaging book, has psychoanalysis meant for writers? And what can writing do for psychoanalysis? 
 
Phillips explores these questions through an exhilarating series of encounters with - and vivid readings of - writers he has loved, from Byron and Barthes to Shakespeare and Sebald. And in the process he demonstrates, through his own unique style, how literature and psychoanalysis can speak to and of each other.

New and Selected Essays

One Way and Another

A selection of the most popular and relevant essays from Adam Phillips, the man New Yorker called 'Britain's foremost psychoanalytic writer' 
 
'Phillips's prose is poetic in the best sense: it is muscular, resonant, and thrums with a dark music that is all its own' John Banville 
 
In the twenty essays gathered here, ranging across his entire oeuvre, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips offers a vivid introduction to his discipline as well as his own unique thinking. Investigating subjects as diverse as desire, family, happiness, tickling, forgetting and even boredom, Phillips proves himself to be not only one of our most engaging writers but also a fascinating and provocative guide to our obsessions as human beings.

Phillips is one of the finest prose stylists at work in the language, an Emerson for our time

Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored

"Phillipsian" would evoke a vivid, paradoxical style that led you to think that you had picked up an idea by the head, only to find you were holding it by the tail

He is perhaps single-handedly continuing the tradition of the world's best essayists

Phillips radiates infectious charm. The brew of gaiety, compassion, exuberance and idealism is heady and disarming

Throughout his brilliant career, Adam Phillips has lent a new and incisive dimension to the art of creative non-fiction, and in so doing revived the form for audiences of the new millennium. Collected here are nineteen pieces that have best defined his thinking - including 'On Tickling', 'On Being Bored' and 'Clutter: A Case History' - along with a selection of new writings and an introduction by Booker prize-winner John Banville. One Way and Another is an affirmation of Phillips's position as one of the most important, imaginative and accessible literary essayists today.

Unforbidden Pleasures

So much has been written about forbidden pleasures. What about pleasures that are unforbidden? 
 
Society is fascinated by taboo - we spend our lives chasing illicit pleasures - but nobody pays much attention to all the unforbidden pleasures freely available to us every day. Could we be gaining just as much reward from these unnoticed, unforbidden indulgences as from the much-glorified forbidden - or even more? 
 
Starting with Oscar Wilde, Adam Phillips elegantly unfolds all the meanings and significances of the Unforbidden, from Genesis to Freud and his 20th century colleagues. Unforbidden Pleasures explores the philosophical, psychological and social complexities that govern human desire and shape our reality.

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

The best living essayist writing in English

[A] playfully digressive style... He is the finest living decipherer of affective life [and] the Bob Dylan of psychoanalysis

There is a lot of philosophy and psychoanalysis packed into these 200 pages

Adam Phillips is single-handedly continuing the tradition of the world's best essayists

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.

Society is fascinated by taboo - we spend our lives chasing illicit pleasures - but nobody pays much attention to all the unforbidden pleasures freely available to us every day. Could we be gaining just as much reward from these unnoticed, unforbidden indulgences as from the much-glorified forbidden - or even more? 
 
Starting with Oscar Wilde, Adam Phillips elegantly unfolds all the meanings and significances of the Unforbidden, from Genesis to Freud and his 20th century colleagues. Unforbidden Pleasures explores the philosophical, psychological and social complexities that govern human desire and shape our reality.

In Praise of the Unlived Life

Missing Out

Missing Out is a meditation on reality and opportunity by Adam Phillips, Britain's pre-eminent psychoanalyst. 
 
We all have two lives - the life we live and the life of our fantasies. But it is the life unlived - the person we have failed to be - that can trouble and even haunt us. In Missing Out acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips delves into the gap between who we are and who we are not, to discover whether not getting what we want may be the unlikely key to the fully lived life. 
 
With his trademark combination of open-minded enquiry and exhilarating argument, drawing primarily on the twin worlds of literature and psychoanalysis, Phillips will delight readers old and new in this much-anticipated book.

Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored

Playfully digressive style... He is the finest living decipherer of affective life [and] the Bob Dylan of psychoanalysis

'Phillipsian' would evoke a vivid, paradoxical style that led you to think that you had picked up an idea by the head, only to find you were holding it by the tail.

Phillips is a wonderful writer, his prose limpid and exact

His prose is always elegant... such lively intelligence wins over the reader and makes Phillips's work addictive

His writing is a lively source of provocation, repetition, self-renewal

In this superb 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.

On Balance

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.

Phillips is a wonderful writer, his prose limpid and exact, and this is a deep and stimulating book

Intriguing and radical questions about the vital information strong responses and desires provide, and how we might use this to identify what we want

His writing is a lively source of provocation, repetition, self-renewal.

Are we too obsessed with excess? 
What can childhood teach us about bad behaviour? 
And should we be happy, or is there something better we might be? 
 
In On Balance, acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips explores a variety of urgent concerns related to how we attempt to manage our conflicting desires, needs and motives. 
 
In essays on excess, childhood development, fairy tales and the pursuit of happiness, Phillips provides exhilarating arguments, witty wordplay and much intellectual and emotional food for thought on literature and life.

On Kindness

What is kindness? Does it make us happier? And does it have a place in a selfish world? 
 
Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor present an elegant, thoughtful and concise analysis of kindness in history, in life and in the modern world. Suggesting that acts of kindness occur when we are at our most open and honest, they ask why it is that our faith in kindness has been shaken - and why we are all too ready to believe that antagonism has taken its place.

Winnicott

A much requested reissue of Adam Phillips' famous first book

D.W. Winnicott's remarkable books, including The Piggle, Home Is Where We Start From and The Child, Family and the Outside World (all published by Penguin) are still read, valued and argued with over thirty years after his death. Adam Phillips's short book, now issued with a new preface, is an elegant, thoughtful attempt to get to grips with a writer, paediatrician and psychiatrist whose work with children and mothers (and the wider implications their relationship has for all of us) continues to be profoundly relevant and fascinating.

Side Effects

A dazzling collection of essays from our most brilliant psychoanalyst

From the author of Missing Out and On Kindness, Britain's pre-eminent psychoanalyst 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. 
 
 
Side effects are things we do not intend. Phillips 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. And through his 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.

Though Phillips's territory is complication, he reports back from his travels in the simplest of words. He is perhaps single-handedly continuing the tradition of the world's best essayists

Phillipsian' would evoke a vivid, paradoxical style that led you to think that you had picked up an idea by the head, only to find you were holding it by the tail.

Side effects are things we do not intend. And, in this collection of essays, Adam 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. And through his 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.

Going Sane

Adam Phillips is the Alain de Botton of psychoanalysis - here he explains what it means to be a sane person in an insane world.

From Britain's leading psychoanalyst, author of On Kindness and Missing Out, Adam Phillips explains what it means to be a sane person in an insane world. 
 
Volumes have been dedicated to madness, but sanity is rarely mentioned. We can define the mad, but how do we classify the sane? In Going Sane, psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips delves deep into history, philosophy, literature and his own experiences to address questions that we rarely ask about ourselves, taking us on an engrossing journey in which we learn many things - including some of what it takes to be happy in the modern world.

The best living essayist writing in English

Hanif Kureishi, Observer Books of the Year

Elegant and lucid... This erudite and absorbing book oozes intelligence and charm

Brave, idiosyncratic and refreshing... Innovative and eclectic... Profound... It is heartening to read anyone, let alone a psychoanalyst, who writes so well

Exceptional... Irresistable, both as a guide to living and an exploration of the links between behaviour and mortality

Volumes have been dedicated to madness, but sanity is rarely mentioned. We can define the mad, but how do we classify the sane? In Going Sane, psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips delves deep into history, philosophy, literature and his own experiences to address questions that we rarely ask about ourselves, taking us on an engrossing journey in which we learn many things - including some of what it takes to be happy in the modern world.

Adam Phillips

[Reading The Life You Want] is like having a deep chat with your brainiest friend . . . The title may sound like classic January self-help, but let's be clear: Phillips is not actually going to teach you how to get the Life You Want. Rather than giving us a list of improving life hacks he sets off interesting trains of thought about what a good life might look like, and leaves us to do with them what we will . . . Writing like this opens things up, broadens life out - it is the antidote to scrolling through endless January wellbeing advice. Go on, I dare you: pick it up and take your brain for a spin

If psychoanalysis has a rock star, it’s Adam Phillips. The London-based shrink is the quiet confessor to the city’s artists and writers—and a cultural figure in his own right—best known for books with titles that sound suspiciously enjoyable for someone paid to dissect the psyche: Going Sane, On Giving Up, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored. His latest, The Life You Want, offers no five-step plan to happiness. Instead, it asks the irritatingly good question: Why are you so desperate for a better life in the first place?

Where do we get ideas about the lives we want? And, what do we do – and fail to do – about actually getting them? 
 
In The Life You Want Adam Phillips uses psychoanalytic and literary approaches to show that we are obsessed by the idea of our lives being ones we want and enjoy rather than merely endure, tolerate or make the most of. 
 
Through a series of interlinked essays, Phillips explores the difficulties we have around the whole idea of enjoying – and fashioning – our lives in cultures that insistently promote enjoyment while making it very difficult for so many people. Exploring the personal and political overlap in the issue of our lives, The Life You Want is a profound examination of our ambivalence about enjoyment, and indeed, wanting.

Adam Phillips

Praise for The Life You Want

[Reading The Life You Want] is like having a deep chat with your brainiest friend . . . The title may sound like classic January self-help, but let's be clear: Phillips is not actually going to teach you how ...

If psychoanalysis has a rock star, it’s Adam Phillips. The London-based shrink is the quiet confessor to the city’s artists and writers—and a cultural figure in his own right—best known for books with titles that so ...

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