Joan Acocella, writing in The New Yorker, described Phillips as "Britain's foremost psychoanalytic writer",[2] an opinion echoed by historian Élisabeth Roudinesco in Le Monde.

He grew up as part of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins and describes his parents as "very consciously Jewish but not believing".

"[7] He began his training soon after leaving Oxford, underwent four years of analysis with Masud Khan and qualified to practice at the age of 27.

[1] Phillips worked in the National Health Service for seventeen years, but became disillusioned with its tightening bureaucratic demands.

He has published essays on a variety of themes, including the work of literary figures such as Charles Lamb, Walter Savage Landor and William Empson, as well as on philosophy and psychoanalysis; he has also written Winnicott in the Fontana Modern Masters series.

Adler-Bell notes that Phillips' writing reflects his psychoanalytical ideals, particularly an interest in the qualities of free association: that is, "provisionality, curiosity, promiscuity, improvisation, and play.

"[14] Phillips is deeply opposed to any attempt to defend psychoanalysis as a science or even as a field of academic study, rather than simply, as he puts it, "a set of stories about how we can nourish ourselves to keep faith with our belief in nourishment, our desire for desire"[15]—"stories [that] will sustain our appetite, which is, by definition, our appetite for life.

However, whilst this affords Phillips the opportunity to be expansive it also makes him a maverick", and others "suspicious of his work",[18] so that he has been called "ludic and elusive and intellectually slippery.