Programme Details

On Nightwaves tonight Isabel Hilton talks to psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips. Having explored monogamy, children, escape, and tickling in his previous books he now adds sanity to his subject list. On Night Waves he reveals the details of his new book, Going Sane, in which he interrogates sanity and attempts to bring it out from the shadow of its opposite, madness.

For the last three hundred years in the West there have been elaborate descriptions available of what it is to be mad, but no comparable accounts of what it might be to be sane. And, he asks, how useful or real is the term, anyway?

In a programme length interview, Isabel also talks to Phillips about his life, his fascination with literature and the nature and limitations of psychoanalysis.

Join them at 9.30pm here on BBC Radio 3. 




Presenter: Isabel Hilton
Producer: Kirsty Pope





Additional Information:
Going Sane by Adam Phillips is published next week by Hamish Hamilton.
His previous ten books are still available in bookshops published by Faber.