Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips/RSA Interview: Psychoanalysis: Is it Worth It?
Adam Phillips, one of Britain’s most renowned psychoanalysts and literary figures, joined RSA Chief Executive Matthew Taylor for a conversation about life, the universe, and everything (and maybe a little Freud as well).
An enormously powerful and compelling discussion on the nature and scope of psychoanalysis today and its possibilities for the future. Subjects discussed include:
Psychoanalysis as a listening cure, not a talking cure
Adam Phillips on the fascination of the everyday
Why are people so unkind to each other: “one of the good things that psychoanalysis can do is show you a) why you repress your natural kindness; b) why you’re frightened of being kind; and c) what the enemies of being kind are within oneself”
“If psychoanalysis has got nothing to contribute to politics, to group life, then it seems to me to be useless”
“Psychoanalysis doesn’t allow you to take refuge in cynicism, or in superioirty, or pessimism”
“It’s about finding what the obstacles are in enjoying each others’ company”
“ When I think about a mind it seems like a very abstract thing”
“I would be promoting psychoanalysts not contributing to coaching the masters of industry; I think they should be trying to sabotage the masters of industry”
It’s a beautifully modulated and insightful interview, and the questions from the audience at the end are equally thought-provoking and challenging, so it’s worth watching till the end.
His most recent works include Unforbidden Pleasures, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, Winnicott, Promises, Promises, Terrors and Experts, Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis, One Way and Another: New and Selected Essays, Monogamy, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life, Going Sane, On Kindness, On Balance, and Becoming Freud
Who Adam Phillips Is
Adam Phillips is a British psychoanalyst and essayist who trained as a child psychotherapist. He served as principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He is the general editor of the modern Penguin translations of Sigmund Freud and a longtime contributor to the London Review of Books. He came to psychoanalysis through literature rather than medicine, which is unusual among practising analysts. His essays treat analytic ideas as tools for understanding ordinary life. They explore boredom, kissing, kindness, and missed chances rather than treating these ideas as clinical doctrine.
Where to Start With His Writing
- On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (1993) — This is the classic entry point. It offers short psychoanalytic essays on the “unexamined life.” Here his method is at its most playful.
- Winnicott (1988) — Phillips studies the paediatrician-analyst here. The analyst wrote about play and the “good-enough” parent. These ideas run underneath much of Phillips’s own thinking.
- On Kindness (2009, written with the historian Barbara Taylor) — This is a compact history. It asks why kindness became suspect in modern culture. It directly connects to the themes of the RSA conversation above.
- Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2012) — This is about the lives we imagine we should have led. It also shows what we learn from frustration.
- Becoming Freud (2014) — This short biography covers Freud’s early years. It deliberately ends before psychoanalysis becomes an institution.
Why This Interview Still Matters
The interview’s title asks whether psychoanalysis is worth it, and this archive keeps returning to that very question. Phillips gives his usual double-edged answer: analysis is “a listening cure, not a talking cure.” It is valuable less as a treatment protocol than as a discipline of attention. Readers may weigh that against today’s structured, outcome-measured approaches. His scepticism about coaching “the masters of industry” is a useful corrective to therapy-as-productivity-tool. If the question is practical rather than philosophical for you, our guide to whether online therapy is worth it covers the evidence and costs side. This interview covers everything the evidence tables leave out.
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