Penguin Books Australia

Psychoanalysis as a form of therapy works by attending to the patient's side effects, that is, 'what falls out of his pockets once he starts speaking'. Undergoing psychoanalytic treatment is in many ways like reading a powerful work of literature – a leap into the dark. It's impossible to know beforehand the effect it will have. All we can do, as the essays in this book suggest, is see where...

'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...

All of us lead two parallel lives: the life we actually live and the one that we wish for and fantasise about. And this life unlived (the one that never actually happens, the one we might be living but for some reason are not) can occupy an extraordinary part of our mental life. We share our lives, in a sense, with the people we have failed to be - and this can become itself the story of our lives:...

Building on the crucial insight that jokes use many of the same mechanisms he had already discovered in dreams, Freud developed one of the richest and most comprehensive theories of humour that has ever been produced.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life ranks among his most entertaining and accessible works. Starting with the story of how he once forgot the name of an Italian painter – and how a young acquaintance mangled a quotation from Virgil through fears that his girlfriend...

As early as 1908, he produced a powerful paper on the repressive hypocrisy of 'civilized sexual morality', and its role in 'modern nervous illness'. Deepening this analysis in Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that civilized values – and the impossible...