On Flirtation

Adam Phillips uses the idea of flirtation to explore the virtues of being uncommitted - to people, to ideas, to methods - and the pleasures of uncertainty. These buoyant essays promote a psychoanalysis with a light touch, a psychoanalysis for pleasure and curiosity. 'In On Flirtation, he has again deployed all his erudition and perception to beguiling effect . . . Adam Phillips may well be one of our greatest contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers.' Independent on Sunday

Adam Phillips was born in Cardiff in 1954. He is the author of numerous works of psychotherapy and literary criticism, including Winnicott, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, Going Sane, Side Effects, On Kindness, co-written with Barbara Taylor, On Balance, Missing Out,One Way and Another and Becoming Freud. Adam Phillips is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, the Observer and the New York Times, and he is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations. His most recent book is Unforbidden Pleasures.