Adam Phillips: 'Against Self-Criticism' (with Q&A)

Adam Phillips, psychotherapist and writer, reflects on self-hatred. The lecture was part of the London Review of Books Winter Lectures series 2015, held at the British Museum.

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Phillips touches upon Freud, Hamlet and Lacan in his examination of the ways in which we hate ourselves.

Video: Anthony Wilks

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Since 1979, the London Review of Books has stood up for the tradition of the literary and intellectual essay in English. Each issue contains up to 15 long reviews and essays by academics, writers and journalists. There are also shorter art and film reviews, as well as poems and a lively letters page.

A typical issue moves through political commentary to science or ancient history by way of literary criticism and social anthropology. So, for example, an issue can open with a piece on the rhetoric of war, move on to reassessing the reputation of Pythagoras, follow that with articles on the situation in Iraq, the 19th-century super-rich, Nabokov’s unpublished novel, how saints got to be saints, the life and work of William Empson, and an assessment of the poetry of Alice Oswald.