Attention seeking - Adam Phillips

A short, fascinating introduction to the concept of attention from Britain's leading psychoanalyst, author of Missing Out and On Kindness.

What we find of interest may tell us more than we think...

'Everything depends on what, if anything, we find interesting: on what we are encouraged and educated to find interesting, and what we find ourselves being interested in despite ourselves. There is our official curiosity and our unofficial curiosity (and psychoanalysis is a story about the relationship between the two) . . .'

Based on three connected talks on the subject of attention, this pocket-sized book is a quirky and memorable introduction to the concept of our attention - how we spend it, and what it might tell us about ourselves. From Britain's pre-eminent psychoanalyst, this is an essential new addition to the Adam Phillips canon.

'The best living essayist writing in English' - John Gray

Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently In Writing, Unforbidden Pleasures, and Missing Out. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

The best living essayist writing in English

The Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis . . . brilliantly amusing and often highly unsettling
The Times

One of those writers whom it is a pleasure simply to hear think
Sunday Telegraph

Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored
Observer

Adam Phillips is that rarest of phenomena, a trained clinician who is also a sublime writer

Playfully digressive style... He is the finest living decipherer of affective life [and] the Bob Dylan of psychoanalysis
Daily Telegraph