Escape, like all travel, is defined by departure points and destinations, inextricably bound yet with a flux between. Adam Phillips is concerned with that transitory...

Escape, like all travel, is defined by departure points and destinations, inextricably bound yet with a flux between. Adam Phillips is concerned with that transitory space in Houdini's Box , a marvellous, beguiling treatise on our seemingly innate desire for flight. It opens with a short introductory chapter describing a young girl who sees Phillips, a psychotherapist, and plays a strange game of hide-and-seek that opens up complicated notions involving fear and desire of being "found". This leads into two parallel, interwoven narratives. One concerns the incomparable escapologist Houdini (though he preferred "mystifier"), and comprises a biographical footprint of this assimilated Jew, the immigrant "escapee". On the face of it, his performances were absurd, escaping from self-imposed bondage, leaving nothing changed. Yet, at the same time, everything was different, and the effect was akin to social hypnotism. The flip side was an equal passion for debunking and exposing self-styled spiritualists for the charlatans, or at least bad practitioners, they were. From some things there is no escape, as Houdini understood very well. The second narrative follows Phillips' sessions with a middle-aged man who comes to him after badgering from his (ex-) girlfriend, who said she wanted to help "his next ex". He had no regard whatever for the things that mattered most to him, and chased women relentlessly so that he could run away from them. In Phillips' words, "the woman as object of desire had been replaced by flight from woman as an object of desire". Erudite, allusive and elusive, only when Phillips suggests, tellingly, that he is avoiding risk-taking by busying himself with choices, does he do what comes naturally, and take flight. It is escapism itself which is the most hypnotic, wielding the infinite freedom of potential, and which proves the hardest to escape from. The final piece is a paper on Emily Dickinson, which, though brief, illuminatingly contrasts two poems wri