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'Though Phillips' territory is complication, he reports back in the simplest of words. He is perhaps single-handedly continuing the tradition of the world's best essayists! Observer; 'A rare achievement - as remarkable a piece of work as Houdini ever performed himself; Daily Telegraph

From the five-year-old girl obsessed by hide-and-seek to the poet Emily Dickinson who spent the last 20 years of her life in almost total seclusion, psychotherapist and author Adam Phillips examines the idea of escape in all its manifold guises. Are we escaping to something or from something? What are the boundaries of our escape fantasies? Why is it that we are often drawn compulsively towards something, yet as soon as we grasp it we long to run away from it again? The core of Phillips's study is the magician Houdini, who gained worldwide fame by his extraordinary stage escapes, from handcuffs, from straitjackets or from tanks full of water. Phillips fascinatingly explores the appeal of Houdini's shows, exploring how they fulfilled audiences' desires to be mystified, to see the artist submit to confinement like a criminal or lunatic but break free with a skill that defied belief. The unspoken pull of the shows was the possibility that Houdini might fail and have to be ignominiously released from his captivity, or that he might actually die in the endeavour. Houdini hated any suggestion that he was using supernatural forces in his escapes, and denounced spiritualism for offering false comfort to its devotees; escape for him was a practical achievement deriving its success from the disjunction between his techniques and the audience's ignorance of them rather than from any mysterious external agency. In amidst his discussions of Houdini, Phillips includes case studies of his interactions with a patient who suffers from relationship problems, always craving the new and terrified of coming to terms with what he really wants. These sections are less enjoyable for the non-specialist in psychotherapy than the Houdini chapters; elusive and full of seeming non-sequiturs, they jump between remarkable insights and baffling diversions. But as a book this is well worth reading; difficult but rewarding, it offers the reader an entirely new perspective on the urge to escape and through that the whole human condition. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Adam Phillips was formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He is the author of, most recently, Darwin's Worms, Promises, Promises, Equals and Houdini's Box, and he is the Series Editor of the new Penguin Freud translations.

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