The Notting Hill psychoanalyst Adam Phillips sets aside one day a week from practice to write; Unforbidden Pleasures is his 20th book. He takes the subtle view that self-knowledge is a form of self-denial (to know oneself is to limit one’s possibilities) and calls his profession “an experiment in what your life might be like if you speak freely”. These ideas guide his approach to writing, which he claims to let flow without sweat. The eel-like essays that result aren’t a vehicle for preordained argument so much as a way for him to discover what he thinks. You might say his readers need the patience of an analyst – except we’re the ones paying for the session.

The central idea in his new book is fairly simple. Rules, and the temptation to break them, confuse our sense of pleasure with notions of self-control. What Phillips would like us to do about this is harder to grasp, and his terms are far from obvious. Forbidden pleasures, seldom defined, include running a red light. Among Phillips’s “unforbidden” pleasures – the ones he says we might want to reconsider if we’re to escape the clutches of taboo – are “morning coffee” but also “self-criticism” and “obedience”.

There are no case histories or life hacks here. Phillips develops his abstruse theme over five chapters, the bulk of the text taking the form of an on-the-hoof gloss on 19th-century writers interested in ideas of secular morality (Wilde, Nietzsche and Freud are paraphrased and riffed on at special length). A few eye-catching assertions float on the sea of quotation: Phillips says addiction “is always the ongoing attempt to survive what was experienced as malign mothering” and that “all tragedies are tragedies of obedience”.

The first statement isn’t explained; the second comes in a Freudian discussion of how, as children, we swap liberty for safety by doing as Mum and Dad say. In adulthood, this bargain leaves us with the uncomfortable sense of harbouring a latent criminality itching to burst out; the feeling mutates into an internal monologue of self-criticism that Phillips thinks we should ignore.

Phillips’s suspicion of clarity and definition – they’re forms of control, too – leaves you wondering what liberty and pleasure might mean in the context of childhood: perhaps there are practical aspects involved in telling a two-year-old what not to do. By the time he cites research on the counterintuitive effects of removing traffic lights from cities – it seems to be safer – his terms are multivalent to the point of meaninglessness: “What is the catastrophe the red light assumes it is wanting to avert? Something, after all, has to be done to desiring, to pleasure… The forbidders have their reasons.”

Earlier this year Phillips’s editor tweeted a photo of the manuscript of Unforbidden Pleasures with the caption “Editor heaven”. Phillips acknowledges his “crucial” support, but does he need tougher love? One essay here was notably sleeker in the London Review of Books, whose first-line cut – “Lacan said” for “Lacan famously remarked” – indicates how gently they let air out of Phillips’s style.

That “famously” (restored in the book) seeks to give us a little rhetorical pat on the back. We’re all on the same page: “Freud, of course, would write… of societies as profoundly and necessarily compromising.” But the technique can hide aching vacuity: “The whole notion of the forbidden, of course, prescribes the individual’s legitimate pleasures.” This is a nothing line, pointlessly repeated: “The whole idea of the forbidden, of course, gives us… a set of rules and prohibitions”.

There are lots of rhetorical questions: “If God is dead… who is doing the forbidding, and who is consenting, and what kind of pleasure does it give them? What is the making forbidden a way of doing? What are we making when we make something forbidden, when we lay down the law in no uncertain terms?”

It’s hard not to think: you tell me, it’s your book. And while Phillips’s procedures can be flashy – his tracing of Freud’s reading of Hamlet and Don Quixote is a particular standout – the feeling is that for the most part this is a performance of erudition. If there’s a message amid the verbiage, it’s a tame one – take it easy – and Phillips risks reinventing the wheel with his solemn and repeated advice that “the forbidden coerces desire”.

Ultimately the tantalising sense of a good book lost somewhere in here means that Unforbidden Pleasures embodies its own counter-argument to its doubts about the value of discipline.

Unforbidden Pleasures is pubished by Hamish Hamilton (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £11.99