ON GIVING UP
ADAM PHILLIPS
Hamish Hamilton, 160pp, £18
In The Spectator, Robert Adès found that in this ‘collection of seven new, loosely associated essays… two stand out in their brilliant use of the dialectical psychoanalytic method (otherwise known as the old switcheroo, or as Freud put it once: “Heads I win, tails you lose”).
‘A chapter titled “Dead or Alive” could have been called “How dead do we need to make ourselves in order to live?”’ One essay contends that censorship is necessary for intellectual
