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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator, and this week my guest is the psychoanalyst and writer,

Adam Phillips, whose new book, which Mace Tracker called, with many of us still cruelling to the

end of dry January, is called On Giving Up. Now, Adam, to start with, can you give a, a read,

a bit of a sense of what the book is, your Aglow Attack, because it sort of feels to me

like a sort of series of linked essays that sort of circle around the theme. Is that how to read it?

Yes, I think it is. I mean, the essays were not originally conceived of as a coherent book,

but preoccupations clearly recur as one writes. I mean, the basic idea, which is discussed a bit in the beginning of the book,

is the ambiguity of this phrase giving up, which on the one hand, you know,

when we give things up, we believe we can change.

When we give up, we believe we can't change.

And so the relationship between actually all these internal resolutions about things that we should give up in order to get the lives we want, which of course is a very powerful continual demand, so to be internally and externally, coupled with, I think, something which is around always, I think, which is the fear and the wish to actually

give up.

And that it's as though, it seems to me, and again, I don't know who the we is that I'm talking

about, but I think in the kind of culture that we live in, we are encouraged to believe

almost as a tentet of religious faith,

that life is intrinsically in all ways and fundamentally worth living.

And it would seem to me there are situations or predicaments

where people actually find its torture to go on living.

...