Adam Phillips is one of our finest contemporary writers on psychoanalysis and its vicissitudes. Ever since Winnicott , his contribution to Frank Kermode's era-defining Modern Masters series - and still the best study of Winnicott - and his advertising by example what you can say with a title in On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored , the first of many scintillating collections, he has been a prolific, dazzling and provocative essayist, inciting thought and counter-thought on every page.

His ‘Jewish life’ of Freud does just that in five chapters and an epilogue: ‘Freud's impossible life: an introduction’; ‘Freud from the beginning’; ‘Freud goes to Paris’; ‘Freud begins to dream’; ‘Psychoanalysis comes out’. These titles give a sense of the book: he begins, he travels, he dreams, he emerges. It is a Bildungsroman - the making of a hero and anti-hero. And, even though Phillips explicitly eschews writing a ‘Freudian life of the young