We all have two lives - the life we live and the life of our fantasies. But it is the life unlived - the person we have failed to be - that can trouble and even haunt us. This title delves into the gap between who we are and who we are not, to discover whether not getting what we want may be the unlikely key to the fully lived life.

Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently In Writing, Unforbidden Pleasures, and Missing Out. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.