Adam Phillips

born in 1954, is a British psychoanalyst and a man of letters. He has edited the complete works of Sigmund Freud in the U.K. He was head of Child Psychotherapy at London’s Charing Cross Hospital, and has authored a number of essays. An unusual intellectual of many eclectic interests (including tropical birds), Phillips never appears on tv, but partly owing to a few prominent patients, including the fiction writer Hanif Kureishi, he has become a sort of hallowed ‘psycho-star,’ so much so that The Times has dubbed him ‘the Martin Amis of psychoanalysis.’ His essays, published in Italian by Ponte alle Grazie, deal with a broad range of subjects and uncover poorly known and elusive dimensions of our psyche. They include I lombrichi di Darwin e la morte di Freud (2000), Paure ed esperti (2003), Normalmente (2005), Elogio della gentilezza (with B. Taylor, 2009), La scatola di Houdini (2010), Sull’equilibrio (2011), Sul bacio, il solletico e la noia (2011).