Has psychoanalysis failed to keep its promise? What are psychoanalysis and literature good for? And what, if anything, have they got to do with each other? Promises, Promises is a delightful new collection of essays which sets out to make and break the links between psychoanalysis and literature. It confirms Adam Phillips as a virtuoso performer able to reach far beyond the borders of psychoanalytic discourse into art, drama, poetry and history. This collection gives us insights into anorexia and cloning, the work of Tom Stoppard and A.E. Housman, the effect of the Blitz on Londoners, Nijinsky's diary and Martin Amis's Night Train, and provides a case history of clutter. In a final essay, the author turns to the question - why sign up for analysis when you could read a book?

Promoting everywhere a refreshing version of a psychoanalysis that is more committed to happiness and inspiration than to self-knowledge or some absolute truth, Promises, Promises reaffirms Adam Phillips as a writer whose work, in the words of one reviewer, 'hovers in a strange and haunting borderland between rigour and delight.'

In Promises, Promises, Adam Phillips proves once again his virtuoso talent for working profound insights around psychoanalytic theory and literature in to entertaining, accessible essays on being alive in our time.

About the Author
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. Adam 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 most recent book is Unforbidden Pleasures.

Reviews
'He writes compellingly... Because he loves literature and plainly loves writing too, Adam Phillips makes psychoanalysis plausible to the outsider. By questioning its aims and qualifying its claims, he reduces its scientific pretensions but makes it a lot more credible as therapy.' Christian Tyler, Financial Times; 'A brilliant collection of essays around the subjects in which Phillips excels.' Melvyn Bragg, Observer



Book Information
ISBN 9780571209736
Author Adam Phillips
Format Paperback
Page Count 400
Imprint Faber & Faber
Publisher Faber & Faber
Weight(grams) 315g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 126mm * 23mm