We would all like to think of ourselves as freedom-loving, egalitarian and democratic. Yet Freud has taught us that everything we do and say is rich in ambiguity and ambivalence. But if it is true that our inner lives are one unflagging drama of desire and dependence and greed, then how can we ever presume to know what might be good for someone else? Does the very practice of psychoanalysis teach us that equality is impossible for human beings? With all the customary grace and deftness, the celebrated writer Adam Phillips explores these questions in a liberating new collection of essays. He looks at such topics as our fantasies of freedom and the nature of inhibition, at free association and the social role of mockery; he explains too the lives and works of such figures as Svengali and Christopher Isherwood, Bertrand Russell and Bellow’s Ravelstein. Throughout, Adam Phillips demonstrates how psychoanalysis - as a treatment and an experience and a way of reading - can, like democracy, allow people to speak and be heard.