Adam Phillips: I think the book is about the many ways in which forbidden pleasures have coerced our thinking and experiencing of pleasure. And one of the disarming and appealing things about unforbidden pleasures is that they are there for the taking. In a way they are pleasures without obstacles, except for or apart from the obstacle of our not having really considered their being of any major significance. So I think that part of the problem of unforbidden pleasures is their availability, their obviousness.
.. Wilde seems to intimate that our obsession with forbidden pleasure comes out of an anxiety about there being no pleasure [available to us] at all, as though we’ve got to do a lot of work to make pleasure exciting or enduring