The Cure for Psychoanalysis

‘The book’s call and response format, the supple back and forth movement between Phillips and his audience … serves as an ideal introduction to a by now forbiddingly expansive and continually expanding body of work … succeeds in reaching into the heart of his thinking to give us its fundamental questions and stakes, especially when it comes to our clinical practice: Why do we bother with psychoanalysis? How does it serve the aim of ensuring life is worth the effort?’

‘We know Adam Phillips to be a remarkable writer but in this wonderfully spirited book we discover he is also an endlessly interesting conversationalist. With his old friend, Ed Corrigan, as a talk-buddy, we are privy to dialogue as a form of performance art. There is genius here; there is good humor; there is joy. It doesn’t get better than this.’

‘As much a philosophy of life as a book about psychoanalysis… the lay person can pick up this book and grasp its content—there’s no banging your head against technical jargon or impenetrable analytic language. It’s a short book, which you can read in an afternoon, and be all the better for it… As you leaf through the pages, you are touched by someone who has been in touch with life in many forms… I could say much more, but I’ll let the magic of the book surprise you too.’

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English Department at the University of York. He is the author of several well-known volumes, all widely acclaimed, including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Going Sane, Side Effects and recently On Kindness, co-written with historian Barbara Taylor, On Balance, Missing Out and One Way and Another.