When Adam Phillips' American publishers were planning a US edition of his book Going Sane, they insisted on giving it an upbeat subtitle. The idea drove him, if not insane, then to distraction. "The woman at the publishers said to me: 'How about Maps of Happiness.' I thought she was joking, so I said: 'How about Maps Against Happiness?' And she said: "I don't think so. Against is such a negative word.'"

The proposed subtitle rankled because Phillips is against guidebooks to happiness. "A culture that is obsessed with happiness must really be in despair, mustn't it? Otherwise why would anybody be bothered about it at all?" asks the psychoanalyst, closing his eyes as he does repeatedly during the interview when he wants to clinch a thought, and then leaning forward to put his head in his hands. "It's become a preoccupation because there's so much unhappiness. The idea that if you just reiterate the word enough and we'll all cheer up is preposterous."

And yet the word happiness is reiterated constantly. I tell Phillips that at my workstation books with the word happiness in the title arrive unbidden by the hour. They include: Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, Richard Schoch's The Secrets of Happiness, Darrin McMahon's The Pursuit of Happiness, Richard Layard's Happiness: Lessons from a New Science and Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis. Do you read these books? "I've looked at them. They seem to me to be the problem rather than the solution."

The American edition of his book joins this growing library: the publisher won the battle and subtitled it Maps of Happiness. The contents, at least, take the reader away from the delusive destination of happiness. That has always been Phillips' aim as a cartographer of the human psyche. He wrote, for instance, in his marvellous book Darwin's Worms: "Tyrannical fantasies of our own perfectibility lurk in even our simplest ideals, Darwin and Freud intimate, so that any ideal can become another excuse for punishment. Lives dominated by impossible ideals, complete honesty, absolute knowledge, perfect happiness, eternal love are experienced as continuous failure."

Phillips lifts his head from his hands. Unshaven and enviably shaggy-haired, he has been compared in looks to Bob Dylan and described as the shrinking woman's crumpet. "I don't want happiness to be part of the currency," he sighs, "but by that I don't mean that I want people to be miserable, but I do think that if you have a sense of reality you are going to be really troubled. Anybody in this culture who watches the news and can be happy - there's something wrong with them.

"The cultural demand now is be happy, or enjoy yourself, or succeed. You have to sacrifice your unhappiness and your critique of the values you're supposed to be taking on. You're supposed to go: 'Happiness! Yes, that's all I want!' But what about justice or reality or ruthlessness - or whatever my preferred thing is?"

But isn't eliminating the scourge of depression a good aim? "It's very simple. The reason that there are so many depressed people is that life is so depressing for many people. It's not a mystery. There is a presumption that there is a weakness in the people who are depressed or a weakness on the part of scientific research and one of these two groups has got to pull its socks up. Scientists have got to get better and find us a drug and the depressed have got to stop malingering. The ethos is: 'Actually life is wonderful, great - get out there!' That's totally unrealistic and it's bound to fail."

We are sitting in the consulting room above a shop in Notting Hill that Phillips has occupied for the past 20 years. I'm on the couch (a leather sofa actually) unleashing questions, while he sits in an armchair doing what shrinks are supposed to do - look attentive and respond thoughtfully. The room isn't just lined with books, but booby trapped with them: volumes rise in stacks all over the place. The atmosphere is paradoxically soothingly literary.

If Phillips sounds like a miserabilist, that judgment would be unfair. Born in Cardiff in 1954 to Polish-Jewish parents, he's one of the more jaunty psychoanalysts - a shrink who was an NHS child psychotherapist for 17 years and who has subsequently found two lucrative and fulfilling careers, as a writer and as a private practitioner.

To be sure, the competition for the title of world's jauntiest analyst would not be hotly contested: "In my psychoanalytical training there was a kind of vale of tears ethos," says Phillips. "The really deep, authentic people who have engaged with what life is really like are really unhappy. I never believed that. I am not by nature a depressed person and wasn't a particularly pessimistic one when I wrote the earlier books which were written against that ethos." Hence the funtime titles of his early 1990s books such as the irresistible On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored.

"Those books had a kind of spiritedness or lightness of touch. But I think anybody who reads them reasonably attentively will see that there is no belief in fast fixes or that happiness is the best moral ideal."

Indeed, one of the vexations for readers was that Phillips would not state his credo. Frank Kermode spoke of the adjective "Phillipsian", betokening what Lisa Appignanesi called "a vivid, paradoxical style that led you to think that you had picked up an idea by the head, only to find that you were holding it by the tail". That style drove some critics to exasperation. Carmen Calil charged that he "oozes the arrogance of a man no one has contradicted for too long", while Elaine Showalter accused him of "stylish one-upmanship".

Then came last year's book Going Sane, the final part of which might be taken as being as nearer to a statement of what a good life could be than we might have expected from Phillips. He wrote: "Sanity involves learning to enjoy conflict, and giving up on all myths of harmony, consistency and redemption."

His theme is often the strangeness of human desire. We are not merely evolutionary machines. "Darwinian psychoanalysis would involve helping you to adapt, find a niche and enable you to reproduce," he says. "Freudian psychoanalysis suggests that there is something over and above this. These are parts of ourselves - that don't want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. Freud is saying there is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project. That seems to me to be persuasive." It also, you might notice, suggests humans have a design flaw. In the new essay collection, Side Effects, he offers the Phillipsian paradox that desire is unpredictable as well as insatiable. One might infer that an ironical appreciation of the mystifying human psyche is the best that sane people can manage.

Is his notion of sanity better as a goal than others' ideas of happiness or satisfaction? Phillips answers indirectly. "What lures us into the future is the renewal of appetite. Having noticed that one's appetite is what vitalises one - Freud talks about this a bit - there could easily be the desire to frustrate oneself. The project might be to keep appetite alive. The problem is that consumer capitalism exploits this because what it does by pretending to offer choice is that it pre-empts you finding out what you want. It's like the way pornography steals people's dreams. It gives you pictures of sex scenarios and so, unlike more imaginative forms of literature, stops you creating your dreams. Instead of having your own sexual fantasies the porn industry does it.

"What I want to show people is that one has a hunger to have one's imagination pre-empted like that because working out what one wants is quite difficult, quite naked."

So we connive with capitalism until we can't bear it any more and wind up seeking an appointment with Phillips.

Don't you just flatter your patients' self- obsessions? Phillips argues on the contrary that he aims to make anxious, isolated neurotics more sociable. "When I saw children my criteria about how well they were were whether they had friends that they enjoyed and whether they had found something that really interested and absorbed them.

"Most people feel much better when they're kind, but they are much less kind than they want to be. It's a paradoxical thing. Similarly a lot of people feel very strongly for other people and I don't mean in a patronising way, but in a sense of solidarity. But so much of the culture pays lip service to communal virtues but encourages people to become self-preoccupied."

Phillips' scepticism about the desirability of human happiness is not fashionable. We live, after all, in a society where the government has appointed a happiness czar and where depression has become so costly in terms of working days lost that it has been decided that so-called "happiness centres" administering courses of cognitive behavioural therapy are necessary in order to cheer us up and get Britons back to work.

"It's drivel," says Phillips. "It's totally misleading. Anybody who's been in the therapy profession for any length of time will know that there have always been crazes - there is always the next best thing. And now it's CBT. One of the things I value about psychoanalysis is that it acknowledges that there are real difficulties in living, being who one's going to be and that no one's going to be having a lobotomy." But the prevailing mood demands that you come into therapy depressed but leave if not lobotomised, then happier - and poorer. Phillips shakes his head: "There isn't going to be a radical personal change, which doesn't mean that people can't change usefully, but really that psychoanalysis is against magic. Ideally it enables you to realise why you're prone to believe in magic and why you shouldn't, because to believe in magic is to attack your own intelligence."

Is he saying suffering is necessary to the examined life? "No: suffering is not essential. It's just unavoidable. All forms of sufferings are bad but some are unavoidable. We need to come to terms with them or be able to bear them."

If Phillips is here making a sales pitch for psychoanalysis over CBT, it isn't exactly a hard sell. "This is not like buying a fridge," he agrees. "This is not an investment that is of a piece with the cultural ethos. That doesn't mean that you as a patient don't have rights and expectations and demands. But there are no guarantees."

What analysis might do is to help you adjust your expectations to a world that is not fit for (our human) purpose. "It's like [Beckett's play] Endgame: 'We're on Earth. There's no cure for that.'" Similarly, Phillips argues, analysis can show there is no cure for childhood, but may help one deal with that seemingly unbearable truth. "There may be useful reconsiderations and redescriptions, but you really did have those parents, you really did make of it what you made of it, you really did have those siblings, really did grow up in that economic climate. These are all hard difficult facts. Redescribed, they can be modified, things can evolve. But it isn't magic."

It sounds, I say, like a huge challenge. "I think it is, and that's what's good about it. Your psycho- analyst is one of the last people to whom you're allowed to show that you're unhappy. If in the public world you're supposed to be very smiley and having lots of sex and being very successful, at least with your analyst you can articulate your miseries, woes, doubts. It becomes a place where you can admit to and elaborate your doubts and vulnerabilities, which is rare in culture that encourages invulnerability."

In the introduction to Side Effects, Phillips writes that analysis can be pleasurable. Are you joking? "No! To be able to speak without censorship is very pleasurable potentially. When the labour market is so mobile that the only continuity in your adult life may be your therapy - and your friends. People are beginning to find that they have shorter work contracts, that their relationships don't hold for very long, then there are going to be fewer and fewer places and people with whom they can sustain a shared tacit knowledge over a long period of time. Analysis is one of them. I don't want to be glib - people often come to me when their suffering has become unbearable but nothing else has worked ."

Why did he want to become a psychoanalyst? "At school my real passion, apart from nature, was for what used to be called English literature. In that process I read Jung's autobiography, which I thought - wrongly - was a great book. I also thought I would like to live that kind of full life." He went to Oxford to study English. "I realised that I didn't want to be an academic. I wanted to talk to people. At the same time I was finding Freud incredibly interesting because he seemed to be about what the writers I was interested in were about. And I've always liked being with other people. I've always had friends that I've loved. And the combination of the two - Freud and being with other people in my work - seemed really appealing."

One might think of Phillips as being happy, surrounded as he is with good books, loved friends and family, a writing career he enjoys and divertingly troubled patients. He currently lives with fashion curator Judith Clark, with whom he has a two-year-old daughter, Marianne. "We are having another child in November," he says with a smile. He also has a daughter, Mia, 12, by his former relationship with the academic and author Jacqueline Rose.

One thing that makes him happy is that his trade is no longer fashionable. "Psychoanalysis has no glamour, no prestige, there's no money in it. So hopefully the people who do it will be the people who are really committed to it."

But if his discipline is unfashionable, his books about it - rightly marketed to happiness-hungry readers - need not be so. When Side Effects has an American edition, how about subtitling it Happy Thoughts For Difficult Times or How to Be Smugly Content in a Harrowing New Millennium? True, they would be lies, but that wouldn't matter. The books would fly off the shelves.

· Side Effects is published on July 27 by Hamish Hamilton, price £25. To order a copy for £23 with free UK p&p go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875. The Penguin Freud Reader, edited by Adam Phillips, is published by Penguin at £14.99. To order a copy for £13.99 with free UK p&p go to the above website or call the above number.