On Giving Up

”[Phillips’s] therapeutic thesis is that each of us carries a story of the life we should have lived, the life we missed out on, and, according to Phillips, the life we’ve already lived, to a degree, psychically… Phillips’s way to perform these sleights of compositional magic is via style … I’m drawn to this aphoristic disentanglement of idioms in the language as it lets loose the playfulness sentence-making allows us.” –Thomas Larson, The Rumpus

“A wise, generous book. Phillips has a mild, expansive way of explaining the insights that psychoanalysis offers into our everyday drama, its glimpses of differently shaped problems behind the ones we thought we had.”–Dennis Duncan, The Washington Post”[Phillips is] like a flashlight in that his illuminating beam heightens my awareness of the dark … I drank [his] words like a tonic.” –Dan Piepenbring, Harper’s Magazine“Phillips has rendered the term ‘giving up’ spacious and flexible, having woven together psychology and literature to reveal suggestive points of contact … Phillips makes an ambitious case: that giving up is as important to our psychological well-being as hope and love are … The best form of giving up, it seems, may just be to take up a book.”–Sarah Moorhouse, Los Angeles Review of Books

“One of the most arresting things about Adam Phillips’s work is how it resists easy summary, dissolving into a trace memory the moment you try to describe it… . Phillips doesn’t try to prevent us from thinking whatever it is that we want to think; what he does is repeatedly coax us to ask if that’s what we really believe, and how we can be sure.”–Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times (An Editors’ Choice)

“Phillips continues to find inspiration in Freud–not only the provocative concepts, but the allowances for speculation in Freud’s language … The connectivity between his observations carries a certain charge, an impetus to be curious rather than strictly determined about and by our wants.” –Ron Slate, On the Seawall

“If this collection marks the beginning of Phillips’ late style, we have a lot to look forward to.” –Booklist

“A thought-provokingly cerebral meditation.” –Kirkus Reviews

Adam Phillips, formerly a principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practicing 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 Missing Out, Unforbidden Pleasures, In Writing, Attention Seeking, On Wanting to Change, and On Getting Better. He is also the general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.