Compassionate Conversations: Adam Phillips

Compassionate Conversations is a new UCLA programmatic series that engages in challenging and topical conversations marked by compassion, kindness, and empathy. The series is co-sponsored by the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute, the UCLA Dialogue across Difference Initiative, and the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate. UCLA English Professors David Russell and Mona Simpson will join Adam Phillips in a conversation on Kindness, Hate, Missing Out, Wanting to Change, Getting Better, and Giving Up. Phillips, who has been called “the best living essayist writing in English” and “Britain’s foremost contemporary psychoanalysis thinker” (The New Yorker), is one of the world’s most celebrated and wide-ranging intellectuals. He has authored many critically acclaimed works of psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and commentary including On Kindness, Missing Out, Unforbidden Pleasures, In Writing, Becoming Freud, and On Getting Better. Formerly a principal child psychotherapist, he is currently the general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a visiting professor in the English Department at the University of York.