The Life You Want

[Reading The Life You Want] is like having a deep chat with your brainiest friend … Writing like this opens things up, broadens life out - it is the antidote to scrolling through endless January wellbeing advice. Go on, I dare you: pick it up and take your brain for a spin * The Times *
Adam Phillips wages a playful war on the strictures of traditional talk therapy … Phillips has spent decades translating specialized concepts for general audiences—demystifying transference and projection, peeking under the hood of everyday occupations such as tickling and being bored, drawing on classic works of literature to illustrate the relevance of his field to ordinary experience * New Yorker *
Phillips offers a subtle but devastating critique of the notion that we 21st-century decadents can be fulfilled by things – Stuart Jeffries * Telegraph *
If psychoanalysis has a rock star, it’s Adam Phillips. The London-based shrink is the quiet confessor to the city’s artists and writers—and a cultural figure in his own right—best known for books with titles that sound suspiciously enjoyable for someone paid to dissect the psyche: Going Sane, On Giving Up, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored. His latest, The Life You Want, offers no five-step plan to happiness. Instead, it asks the irritatingly good question: Why are you so desperate for a better life in the first place? – Hermione Lee * Interview Magazine *
A sophisticated, mind-stretching argument for psychoanalysis as a way of understanding why we want a good life * Kirkus Reviews *
Phillips asks what it means to want to live at all—and what happens to wanting under conditions that increasingly dictate what a life should be * Cultured *

Adam Phillips is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including The Life You Want, On Giving Up, and On Getting Better. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

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