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.

Adam Phillips

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

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

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

Books by Adam Phillips

Articles featuring Adam Phillips

Books to help improve your focus and attention span

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