Adam Phillips

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On Giving Up

On Getting Better

On Wanting to Change

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

Attention Seeking

In Writing

New and Selected Essays

One Way and Another

Unforbidden Pleasures

In Praise of the Unlived Life

Missing Out

On Kindness

Winnicott

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Going Sane

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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

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.

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

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.

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.

On Balance

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