Adam Phillips is a London-based child psychotherapist who also happens to be a charming and casually profound essayist. His wonderful (and wonderfully-titled) books -- which include "On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored" and "On Flirtation" -- deftly scoop out the weightier meanings in light subjects. Phillips has often been referred to as the "Oliver Sacks of psychoanalysis," and in some respects the label fits. Yet Phillips is the more idiosyncratic writer; his wry, epigrammatical, dense-but-not-quite-scholarly style shines a strange, searching light on everyday events, and utterly transforms them.

"Terrors and Experts" makes a case, in six short essays, that our fears are often the very things that most ground us as human beings; they're the markers that signify "proximity to something of value, perhaps of ultimate value." What's more, he writes, we're oddly tickled by them: "the way we construct our defenses tends to suggest that we unconsciously invite, or sustain contact with, whatever we fear." "Terrors and Experts" comes most fully into its own when it critiques -- as almost all of Phillips' books do -- the analytic process. We flee into the arms of so-called experts for wildly complex reasons, he writes, not the least of them being sheer narcissism; psychoanalysis "makes fear bearable by making it interesting."

For Phillips, most of the problems with analysis lie in what he calls "the mystique of expertise" -- the mistaken idea that "because a person has done a recognizable or legitimated official training they are then qualified to claim something more than that they have done the training." Worse, too many experts have become too serious and doctrinaire: "When psychoanalysis makes too much sense, or makes sense of too much, it turns into exactly the symptom it is trying to cure: defensive knowingness." Throughout, Phillips advocates embracing human mystery and madness; there simply is no "King's English of the psyche." He makes his points while skimming along, leaving tidy punch-lines in his wake ("We may speak in words, but we don't dream in them;" "Knowing is not quite the same as getting the joke;" "Experts keep us on their best behavior.") Whether or not you're in analysis yourself, "Terrors and Experts" hits home; it's a lucid, striding, and very funny tour through the human soul.

--Dwight Garner