In Writing

First published in 2017, this collection gathers Adam Phillips's essays on the writers he returns to, among them Byron, Barthes, Shakespeare, and Sebald. Phillips reads each closely and asks a pair of questions that run through the book: what psychoanalysis has meant for writers, and what writing offers back to analysis.

His argument is that reading and analytic listening are close relations. The essay, like the consulting room, permits digression, second thoughts, and the freedom to change one's mind before reaching any conclusion. Rather than using theory to explain literature, Phillips lets the two practices think in each other's company, so that a poem or a novel becomes a form of psychoanalytic attention in its own right.

For the practising clinician, the value lies in how Phillips models a way of attending to language: patient, associative, and content to leave meaning unfinished. The essays treat interpretation as a shared and provisional act rather than a settled verdict.