It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
Side Effects

Side Effects

Summary

From the author of Missing Out and On Kindness, Britain's pre-eminent psychoanalyst examines how the things we don't mean, or mean perhaps to forget, prove to be those that are often most telling about our unconscious lives.


Side effects are things we do not intend. Phillips intends for us to question our conscious pursuit of happiness, explaining that, in refusing to admit and explore life's down sides, we can only be living half lives. And through his unique and incisive exploration of literature, Phillips also demonstrates what the great novelists have to tell us about ourselves.

Both illuminating and fascinating on literature as well as life, Side Effects maps our edges as human beings, and, in doing so, goes some way to helping give shape to our lives.

Reviews

  • The best living essayist writing in English
    John Gray

About the author

Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising 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 most recently On Wanting to Change, Attention Seeking, In Writing, Unforbidden Pleasures and Missing Out. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more