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 The Life You Want, On Giving Up and On Getting Better. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

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