On Giving Up

Adam Phillips promotes curiosity, improvisation and conflict as antidotes to the deadening effects of absolute certainty . . . Phillips sidles up to his subjects, preferring the gentle mode of suggestion to the blunt force of argument. His writing has a way of sneaking up on you, like a subterranean force * New York Times * A wise, generous book . . . There is a sense — quite a satisfying one, in fact — of circling around ideas, of each essay being ostensibly on a different theme from the others, but really treating the same concerns from a slightly different starting point . . . These essays won’t cure us, but they may make us curious * Washington Post * This short, subtle and nuanced book is a fast and stimulating read: an account of how giving up is a form of progress, and how giving up is a form of loss * The Spectator * Phillips invokes Freud, Kafka, Musil and Thomas Mann as helpmeets in illuminating knotty issues . . . This is not a book that provides answers but rather prompts the reader to question their own motivations and what different choices might mean * New Statesman * This roving collection of writings fuses the lexicon of psychotherapy with literary criticism to upend conventional ideas about common emotional experiences—among them repression, longing, and loss * The New Yorker * The prolific writings of Adam Phillips epitomise this modern day humanistic expression of psychoanalytic thinking . . . Phillips’s style throughout the book is almost effortlessly fluent and erudite . . . Invariably Phillips unearths layers of convolution that common sense overlooks. In true psychoanalytic fashion, what we think we want is unmasked as self-deception and what seems like pain has its pleasures. The stories we tell ourselves protect us from our fears and our adult preoccupations mask childish concerns * The Conversation   * An introspective look at the psychology of letting things go and aims to give readers some insight into their own lives in the process * CNN *