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.

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