Adam Phillips is an author and a psychoanalyst in private practice in London. His books and essays on literature, history, philosophy, child psychology, biography and psychoanalysis include: On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored; On Flirtation; Darwin’s Worms; Houdini’s Box;and Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, the Observer and the New York Times. He is General Editor of the new Penguin translations of the complete works of Sigmund Freud, including the recently published Penguin Freud Reader, a collection of Freud’s papers on the methodology of psychoanalysis.

(Photo credit: Toby Glanville)