Attention Seeking

A short, fascinating introduction to the concept of attention, from Britain's pre-eminent psychoanalyst'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.

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

The best living essayist writing in English
The Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis . . . brilliantly amusing and often highly unsettling The Times
One of those writers whom it is a pleasure simply to hear think Sunday Telegraph
Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored Observer
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 Daily Telegraph

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 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.

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