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1. Houdini’s Box by Adam Phillips

Though Phillips has his roots in child psychotherapy his books and essays mine the most varied of human conditions. Houdini’s Box takes a look at the stories we tell about ourselves, and asks why so many of those stories are about being trapped, or getting away. The book is built from people, from characters and stories that Philips drops and returns to at will. The effect is that it reads a bit like an Ali Smith novel, but it’s the minutiae that make this book what it is. Philips seems to write exclusively in degrees of beautifulness: one might assume he exists continually in the wake of some terrible and angelic vision. Whatever the case, the book’s worth reading.

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2. A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guitari

A Thousand Plateaus is the second of two books that make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia, an eight-year philosophical work that’s at once a psychological field-manual and a social commentary, poetry and political treatise. For its authors, twentieth century Marxist-Freudian ideologies are forever compartmentalizing their subjects (the body, society, the economy, the psyche). Deleuze and Guitari prefer waves and planes, smooth space, registers, rhizomes, becomings and continuums. There’s a stylishness to the way all this is delivered, but at it’s core the text is completely baffling. Reading Plateaus is a bit like reading a Where’s Wally? magazine with all the Wallies left out; it’s not unusual to sit and stare at the pages for an hour or more with nothing happening; eventually your eyes glaze over. It’s wacky, barely readable, and completely brilliant.

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3. If This is a Man and The Truce by Primo Levi

In If This is a Man Primo Levi describes his deportation from Turin by the Nazis, and his time imprisoned in Auschwitz during the years of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’. The Truce covers Levi’s liberation at Auschwitz, his long journey home across Europe, and his eventual return to Italy, to his home and family. It’s Levi’s drive to testify that makes the books so pertinent to our theme here; at all times Levi values description over evaluation, his interest is not in condemnation but in testimony, in creating the record. The writing retains the starkness of the world Levi survived; there is a bleakness to his prose, an persevering quietness that makes it all the more troubling. But despite its ostensive simplicity, one gets the sense of something very complex functioning underneath, the way the shiny pictures and crisp black letters on this page frazzle with code and noise below their surface. Levi not only had a story to tell, but also (that rare capacity) the ability to tell it.

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4. The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek

A combination of media-friendliness (he’s online, on film, on television) and his somewhat unusual appearance – think Freud but homeless – has lent Žižek something like cult status. His mixing of Marx, Hegel, and Lacan here serves as a base for exploring his big interest: ideology. Ideology functions at the level of the everyday, but it also structures our subjectivity at a much deeper level; by taking the most mundane artefacts from our world (in the same breath Žižek tackles Hegel and Hitchcock, defecation and the divinity) we work our way backwards to some quite dense philosophical proposals. Žižek has compared the process of his writing to telling jokes backwards: his humorousness is always setting up the anti-punchline of his theory. In Sublime we find Žižek is at his wittiest, and - perhaps - his most profound

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5. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Thomas, Tereza, Franz and Sabina are the building blocks for a nucleonic love affair that speaks between the walls. Thomas can’t bring himself to love, he fears women and fears himself around women, the relinquishing of control. Tomas marries Tereza, a young Czech who loves Thomas completely - but Thomas could never pass up his taste for infidelity; and Sabina, one of Thomas’s many mistresses, has a Tereza of her own: Franz. Set against the social backdrop of the 1968 Prague Spring, Unbearable gathers and unpicks the minds and loves of these four lives. It’s Kundera’s characterization that stands out in particular: their psychological shading and depth of soul, the richness of their landscapes.

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6. Out of the Maelstrom: Psychology and the Novel in the Twentieth Century by Keith M. May

How do we think about Proust, Mann, Joyce and Woolf in the light of Freud, Jung, or Sartre? This is a great introduction and overview of both the literary of psychological disciplines that were at the cultural forefront of the twentieth century. But the book’s real strength is the attention it gives to the discourse itself, to the space between the two disciplines. May is not concerned with pedalling plot summaries or biographical truisms: rather, if these two subjects speak the same language, then what are they talking about? What kind of language is this? May’s pages are, then, strained transcripts: he picks his way across the century with a sustained clarity, and makes a complex topic incredibly approachable.

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7. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

A real list-maker’s book. Holden Caulfield’s free-associations on the phoniness of other people is a master class in adolescent angst, sexual strife, and spiritual shipwreck— and it’s our chance to play analyst, sat with Holden in a psychiatric hospital. If you’re one for basking glorious light of other people’s problems, then this book’s a real winner. Catcher bristles with honesty and anguish: a monument to the total disaster of being alive at the same time as other people.

8. Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times by Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney (eds)

First-aid for the soul. The poems collected here come from a huge variety of poets, some well known (Larkin, Heaney, Simic…) but many of whom will be completely new. And if there’s one thing ‘strange’ about our times it’s surely that very unremitting newlessness of things. Here, then, is the sort of book you’ll want to open at a random page and have a read; it’s genuine bedside literature, a chance to dim the lights, nestle down, and come across someone you love.

9. Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown

Curveball: this is TV mind-reader Derren Brown insight into his craft. Though the books perhaps stalls shy of the ‘journey into the structure of psychology’ advertised on the blurb, it’s genuinely interesting and infinitely readable. It lands somewhere between wizard’s handbook, biography, self-help manual and cultural polemic (Brown tries his hand at the science-religion question, and even if at times the tone becomes a little too “Dawkins” for comfort, Brown’s a man easily forgiven: one neat little tip for memorizing your shopping list or hypnotizing your dad and we’re back on side. The book’s readable, but it’s also confidently and honestly written.

10. Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud

He had to be squeezed on. Psychopathology is, possibly, Freud’s best book, and far too good to go unmentioned. Imagine Brown’s Tricks of the Mind but in reverse: this is Freud’s field-manual on forgetting things, breaking stuff and getting your words mixed up. In a quite slender volume, Freud has collected story after story and stowed them all away for our reading pleasure. For Freud, our most meaningful acts are the ones we never meant, those missable little dramas that give a glimpse into what’s going on backstage in the theatre of our lives. It certainly leaves you thinking. But it’s a strangely touching book, too. This mad village of characters, their ailments and mistakes, slip-ups and missed birthdays becomes somehow real, and oddly enchanting.