On Balance

'Wise, witty and playful essays, taking in the nature of fundamentalism, excess, authenticity and much else. Radiates the rarest type of questioning intelligence'
John Gray, Prospect

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.

'Intriguing and radical questions about the vital information strong responses and desires provide, and how we might use this to identify what we want'
Guardian

'Phillips' writing is a lively source of provocation'
Scotsman

'A volume of elegant wisdom'
New Statesman

“The best living essayist writing in English”

Phillips radiates infectious charm Sunday Times He's brilliant Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored His writing is a lively source of provocation, repetition, self-renewal. Scotsman Intriguing and radical questions about the vital information strong responses and desires provide, and how we might use this to identify what we want Guardian Phillips is a wonderful writer, his prose limpid and exact, and this is a deep and stimulating book Sunday Times

Adam Phillips was born in Cardiff in 1954. He is the author of numerous works of psychotherapy and literary criticism, including Winnicott, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, Going Sane, Side Effects, On Kindness, co-written with Barbara Taylor, On Balance, Missing Out, One Way and Another and Becoming Freud. Phillips is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, the Observer and the New York Times, and he is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations. His new book, Unforbidden Pleasures, comes out in November 2015 and is published by Hamish Hamilton.

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