"Elegantly contentious. . . . There is no one writing better than [Phillips] about desire in all of its complexity, with all of its dark secrets and dark possbility, its necessity and compulsion and satiability. The Beast in the Nursery is a difficult, cerebral and beautiful book." --New York Observer
"[Phillips is] a writer with a unique voice, a gadfly permissive to his own curiosity. His stylistic feints startle us into sympathy with the unexpected." --The Washington Post
"[The] Oliver Sacks of Psychoanalysis. . . . Adam Phillips writes with far-sighted equanimity. " --The Boston Globe