Equals

Equals gathers essays and lectures in which Adam Phillips sets the practice of psychoanalysis beside the promise of democracy. Phillips argues that both rest on a wish for equality that people persistently undo, building hierarchies, deferring to experts, and finding inhibition where they hoped for freedom. He treats mockery, boredom, and the fear of being ordinary as signs of how difficult genuine equality is to sustain.

Reading analytic technique, education, and political life together, Phillips asks what it means to speak and be heard without mastery. He suggests that the consulting room, like the classroom and the polling booth, tests whether authority can be shared rather than merely obeyed. His touchstones range from Primo Levi to the everyday transferences of clinical work.

For a clinician, the essays reframe the analytic relationship as a site where hierarchy and equality are always in negotiation, and where inhibition carries meaning worth attending to.