Every time I read a book by Adam Phillips I keep thinking I wish I’d read it 10 years ago, or even 20 or 30. Phillips is a psychoanalyst and scholar of English literature — to read him is, as has been said, to watch him thinking. Here he writes about frustration, missing out, revenge, phobias and escape. Have you ever thought “greed is despair about pleasure”? Or that “lives are tragic not merely when people can’t have everything they want but when their wanting mutilates them”? Phillips is a scholar of the unconscious, and his prose nudges you into thinking about how you yourself have been thinking.
