In a style that is writerly and audacious, Adam Phillips takes up a variety of seemingly ordinary subjects underinvestigated by psychoanalysis--kissing, worrying, risk, solitude, composure, even farting as it relates to worrying. He argues that psychoanalysis began as a virtuoso improvisation within the science of medicine, but that virtuosity has given way to the dream of science that only the examined life is worth living. Phillips goes on to show how the drive to omniscience has been unfortunate both for psychoanalysis and for life. He reveals how much one's psychic health depends on establishing a realm of life that successfully resists examination.

This is a book about the possibilities of flirtation, its risks and instructive amusements - about the spaces flirtation opens in the stories we tell ourselves, particularly within the framework of psychoanalysis.

Killing a bird with his slingshot as a boy, William Bellman grows up a wealthy family man unaware of how his act of childhood cruelty will have terrible consequences until a wrenching tragedy compels him to enter into a macabre bargain with a stranger in black.

This book is a chronicle of the all-too-human terror that drives us into the arms of experts, and of how expertise, in the form of psychoanalysis, addresses our fears - in essence, turns our terror into meaning.

A prominent psychologist known for her work on infant behavior and a science writer-photographer together provide a remarkable picture of infancy from the baby's own perspective.

Fictional portrayal of the nightmare politics of our time. Its hero is an aging revolutionary, imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. As the pressure to confess preposterous crimes increases, he re-lives a career that embodies the terrible ironies and human betrayals of a totalitarian movement masking itself as an instrument of deliverance.