title: On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life
author:  Adam Phillips 
description: Adam Phillips...writes about magnificently light subjects (kissing, tickling and, best of all, worrying) with a great deal of insight...He writes with farsighted equanimity about everything from solitude to spiders. In this regard, he's a bit like an Oliver Sacks of psychoanalysis, both affable and unalarmed. (Gail Caldwell <i>Boston Sunday Globe</i>)<br /><br />A childlike freshness of vision informs these essays, which are at once compact, sophisticated, sharply knowing, yet almost provocatively casual, relaxed, amusing...[Phillips] is strikingly original and suggestive as a wry observer of psychoanalysis...[A] telling, engaging, brilliantly amusing and unsettling book. (Robert Coles <i>Raritan</i>)<br /><br />In three superb books, <i>On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored</i>; <i>On Flirtation</i>; and <i>Terrors and Experts</i>...[Phillips] has endorsed pleasure as a laudable goal (imagine!) and enshrined narrative as a form of soul making. In the process, he's punched lovely skylights into the gloomy Freudian edifice and in general done much to rehabilitate the psychoanalytic enterprise by honoring the idiosyncrasy of human experience and by wielding method lightly, playfully, humanely. (Will Blythe <i>Esquire</i>)<br /><br />Like Chekhov, Phillips writes as well as he doctors, and his fascination with the subtleties of human behavior makes him a good storyteller...He has a welcome openness to the essential strangeness of every person; this alone is reason enough to read him. (Jane Mendelsohn <i>Guardian</i>)<br /><br />These are extremely insightful psychoanalytic essays on things like worry and solitude, which are of much more concern to me than issues like wanting to sleep with your closest relatives (Anne Enright <i>Irish Times</i>)
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  ## About the Author
  
  
  Adam Phillips, formerly Principle 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.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### _By the same author_
  
  
  Winnicott
  
  
  On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored
  
  
  On Flirtation
  
  
  Terror and Experts
  
  
  Monogamy
  
  
  The Beast in the Nursery
  
  
  Darwin’s Worms
  
  
  Promises, Promises
  
  
  Houdini’s Box
  
  
  Equals
  
  
  Going Sane
  
  
  Intimacies (with Leo Bersani)
  
  
  Side Effects
  
  
  On Kindness (with Barbara Taylor)
  
  
  The Concise Dictionary of Dress (with Judith Clark)
  
  
  On Balance
  
  
  Missing Out
  
  
  One Way and Another
  
  
  Unforbidden Pleasures
  
  
  Becoming Freud
  
  
  The Vulgar (with Jud