On Giving Up Adam Phillips in conversation with Hugh Haughton and Brian Cummings

Event details

Adam Phillips Colloquium

In this special colloquium, acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips discusses with colleagues from the University of York his latest book published on 11 January 2024 by Penguin Books. On Giving Up is a meditation on what we must give up to feel more alive. To give up or not to give up? Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable. There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment - an attempt to make a different future. 

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst as well as one of the most influential essayists and thinkers writing today. The Irish novelist John Banville has him as 'one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time'.  Adam has been Visiting Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature since 2006.  He is the General Editor of the Penguin Freud, and author of more than 16 books of essays and studies from On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (1993) to Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (2014).  His most recent books are On Giving Up (Penguin, 2024), Attention Seeking (Penguin, 2019), and In Writing (Penguin 2017).