Who has not been haunted by the possibility of transforming one's life -- becoming somebody else, of having another life? "Houdini's Box" is a masterful investigation into this pervasive idea -- a notion made palpable by the endless menu of options, of celluloid constructed lives that our culture offers us. We are surrounded by personalities, celebrities, purveyors of style who we are meant to emulate, follow, identify with, to escape from our plain, uncelebrated, bland lives. Ours is a culture of entertainment whose premise is to distract, to give us opportunity to love ourselves in the spectacle of others' performance, others' lives, to call us away from ourselves, to flee from...

And there's the question at the heart of Adam Phillips' completely original inquiry -- from what are we escaping? To what are we escaping? Why do we have this need to escape? In what sense is it built into the very nature of desire or longing? And how do we find a way to escape this need to escape?