On Wanting to Change - by Adam Phillips (Paperback)

About the Book

First published in Great Britain by Penguin in 2021.

Book Synopsis

From the UK's foremost literary psychoanalyst, a dazzling new book on the universal urge to change our lives.

We live in a world in which we are invited to change--to become our best selves through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy. We change all the time--growing older and older--and how we think about change changes over time too.

We want to think of our lives as progress myths--as narratives of positive personal growth--at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks.

Adam Phillips's sparkling book On Wanting to Change explores the stories we tell about change, and the changes we actually make--and the fact that they don't always go, or come, together.

About the Author

Adam Phillips, formerly a principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practicing 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 Missing Out, In Writing, and Unforbidden Pleasures. A frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, he is the general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.