The psychoanalyst and writer talks about the painful inevitability of change, and why religious conversion can be liberating – or suffocating

In a street off Portobello Road in London, a battered grey door leads into a hallway adrift with junk mail – so much of it that you might imagine the owner of the house had moved away, or died. But up three flights of stairs, in a book-infested eyrie, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips is very much alive. Once described as “the Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis” for his razor-sharp intellect and often unsettling work, he is smallish, tousled-looking, faintly vulpine. He might seem alarming, but for the fact that he is quick to smile and (unsurprisingly) a gifted listener.

These impressions I gathered pre-Covid, when I went to talk to Phillips while researching a piece on loneliness. Now, an interview prompted by his new book, On Wanting to Change, has to be conducted by phone – just as Phillips has treated his patients by phone for the past year (he doesn’t favour Zoom, and dislikes email). “Some people are freed by the telephone,” he says. “It’s less immediate. But most feel pretty frustrated to be denied the nuances of body-to-body communication: it’s estranging. It’s incomparably better face to face.”