On Balance

On Balance gathers essays in which the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips sets the modern preference for moderation against the human tendency toward excess. Ranging across love, politics and psychoanalysis, Phillips asks how anyone decides what is enough, and treats being too much for ourselves not as a disorder to be corrected but as a condition of wanting and feeling. He reads fairy tales, tragedy and psychoanalytic writing alongside each other, questioning whether happiness, restraint or cure are the right things to aim for.

For the clinician, the collection reopens a familiar assumption: that the work is to help someone recover balance. Phillips holds that assumption up to scrutiny, weighing what is lost when appetite and intensity are read mainly as symptoms. The essays offer no technique. They give a way of thinking about desire, sufficiency and the ends of treatment. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published the collection in 2010, the same year as the British edition from Hamish Hamilton.